Page 38 of The Life We Left Behind

My cheeks flushed in the best way as I remembered how it had felt to be with him again, and I opened the fridge and stared inside, more for something to do while the coffee brewed than for anything else. It was still as empty as it had been the last time I looked. The fact that I kept failing to make it to the grocery store should have been far more concerning than my nighttime activities.

I should probably be blaming myself more for ending up in bed with him. He was the last man most people would encourage me to sleep with, especially considering our history. But that was the problem. We had so much history, and it had ended in an epically heartbreaking fashion, but there was a part of me that just couldn’t be angry with him for it anymore. Not because he’d made it up to me or hypnotized me with his admittedly many talents in the bedrooms.

I cringed at that, though. Obviously, Trace wasn’t the teenager I remembered him to be, but the reality was he’d gotten better in bed through experience, and it hadn’t been with me. Even knowing that he’d been married, it was still a bitter pill to swallow, thinking of him with another woman.

I hadn’t really been angry with Trace for years. It was hard to fault him for acting like a scared teenager, and when you thought about it objectively, did the fault actually lie with the adults he’d gone to for help who had arranged the whole thing on his behalf? This was what his family did—Farringtons before all others. Of course, they closed ranks and saw a teenage pregnancy as aproblem that needed to be dealt with. They weren’t the only family to have reacted that way, and they wouldn’t be the last.

Cade and I hadn’t had a terrible life. I’d been fortunate to have the support of my family and the friends I made along the way. Yes, there had been times when being a single teenage mother had been hard, and there were nights when I would have given anything to have someone at my side going through it all with me.

But I’d survived. In fact, I’d not only survived, I’d flourished. I had an amazing kid. I finished school, and I even went to college. Yes, the job I’d ended up in hadn’t been the career I’d thought it was, but that was only because the reality didn’t live up to the naïve dream I had of it. I could have survived working in marketing for the rest of my working life if I’d had to. Yet again, though, I was fortunate enough to be able to step away. I had the means to do whatever I wanted when I received my inheritance from Adelaide. There was even enough set aside for Cade to go to college and more. The world really was open to whatever we wanted to do next, and as I closed the empty fridge door and stared out of the kitchen window, there was a part of me that wondered if maybe that future should be in Willowbrook.

“That has got to be the saddest refrigerator I’ve ever seen.”

I turned to see Trace leaning against the kitchen doorframe, hands in his pockets, looking like a vision from some romance novel. His hair was still wet from the shower, and he’d obviously raked his fingers through it to push it back from his face. He had the same slacks on from yesterday and one of my father’s old flannel shirts on. Weirdly, though, it was him standing barefoot in the kitchen that was making me wonder how much time we had free this morning and if that idea of one last time to say goodbye could be extended to this morning as well. Again.

“I haven’t had time to go to the store.”

It didn’t sound right as it came out of my mouth, and judging by the smirk on Trace’s face, he knew exactly why that was.

Damn, falling and drooling at his feet wasn’t exactly how this should be going.

I might not be angry with him, I might even be starting to feel a glimmer of those old feelings again, but that didn’t mean he didn’t still owe me at least an apology for how things had turned out.

“I need to run home before I hit the office for the morning.” He looked around at the boxes that seemed to fill at least a corner of every room. “I can’t get used to seeing this place packed away. It looks so different.”

“Yeah, it was a shock for me when I walked in, too. I didn’t even know he was sick. It hurts that he had enough time to do all this without me finding out. That he didn’t feel like he could ask for my help with any of this.”

Trace crossed the kitchen in four steps, wrapping me in his arms and pulling me against his chest.

The sadness that had started to well to life inside of me again settled at his touch. It all felt so much more manageable with him at my side.

“What happened?” he asked quietly. “You don’t have to talk to me about it if you don’t want to, but I think it might help you to say it aloud.”

I sighed. I hadn’t told anyone all of this. Even Blake, I’d just stumbled through the barest of details with. Trace was right. I needed to say it aloud. I needed to tell someone how hurt I was about what my father had done and not have them judge me for it.

“He had a stage five liver disease with some other complications, and being the stubborn man that he was, he didn’t seek treatment when he first noticed problems. By the time he went to the doctor, there wasn’t much that could reallybe done. Even a transplant wouldn’t have worked. But, there was a specialist at one of the hospitals in the city who was trialing a new technique that they thought had a small chance of succeeding. And it was a fraction. So, instead of booking himself for the surgery straight away, he waited. He spent nearly a month making all these fucking arrangements and packing away his life rather than taking the chance he had. By the time they got him in, it was too late. They opened him up, and the damage was so much worse than they thought it would be. They nearly lost him on the table. Once they got the bleeding under control, they had no choice but to close him up and send him back to a ward to die. He wasn’t even strong enough to wake up from the anesthesia. Andthenthey called me. Because he told them not to call me before then. He was on the other side of the city, fighting for his life, and I didn’t even know. I got ten minutes with him, Trace. That’s it.Ten minutesto say goodbye. Did he…did he hate me or something? Why didn’t he think I’d want to be a part of this? I’m so fucking angry with him that he did all this. That he didn’t take the chance that was given to him. That he waitedso fucking long.”

I was panting by the time I finished. It was the first time I’d even admitted it to myself. Because I was angry. And I felt so guilty for feeling that way.

Trace pulled away, and for a moment, I thought he was about to tell me exactly what I deserved. That I was being selfish, that I was thinking too much about my own feelings and not my father’s.

Except he didn’t.

He steered me through the kitchen and into the lounge, where he sat down on the couch and then pulled me down into his lap.

“You should be angry,” he simply said. Hearing it from his lips, I heard how awful it sounded, and for a moment, I wantedto take it all back. But Trace shook his head and continued. “Let me finish. You can be angry for the time you lost with him. You can be angry that you didn’t get to fight for him. But don’t be angrywith him. He did what he thought was best, Delaney. He was trying to save you from the pain of losing him. You said he only had a small chance with the surgery, right?” I nodded because talking now would only lead to crying, and I didn’t want to start the day like that. “So maybe he decided that if there wasn’t much chance, then he was going to do what he could to protect you from having to deal with his death as much as he could. Maybe he decided that he’d rather spend the time he had left looking after you in whatever way he could rather than leaving everything in your lap to deal with alone.”

My shoulders slumped as his words registered with me. I didn’t want to admit that he was right. It was easier to be angry than sad.

“I just wish we’d had more time,” I admitted sadly. “I keep thinking back to last Christmas and how he hadn’t looked well. He told me that he’d just not been sleeping well. Too much caffeine and too many early mornings was what he said. I shouldn’t have believed him. I should have checked in with him and followed up.”

“Oh, I can already see how that would have gone.” Trace laughed, and I couldn’t help but smile because he was right. If there was one thing my father hated, it was people fussing over him. He was too used to living on his own.

“Yeah, not well.”

“You know you didn’t do anything wrong, right?”

I shrugged. Deep down, I probably did know. Yes, I should have been more present in my father’s life, but even if I had, he wouldn’t have told me about this. I could admit that much to myself, at least. He wouldn’t have wanted to burden me with his problems, even if I’d have tried to force him to do otherwise.That was just who Barrett James was. He was always the one to step up for everyone else and never the person who would accept any help for himself. It was endearing in an infuriating type of way.

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