Page 71 of Memories with Fire

Hailey.

The air in my lungs expels, relief taking the space of all my oxygen. My shoulders, which have been sitting near my ears since yesterday, relax to where they’re supposed to sit, and my jaw loosens. She’s okay. She’s here. She’s going to let me explain.

Pulling into the driveway, I don’t even shut the Jeep off before I’m jumping out, leaving the door wide open as I come around it. Hailey is right there, jacket on, hands clasped in front of her. Her hair looks a bit disheveled, and though her eyes aren’t puffy from crying, they look exhausted, like she hasn’t had a wink of sleep. I can relate.

“That woman is not my fiancée and that isn’t my kid. She’s?—”

“I know.”

Hailey’s knowledge of the situation freezes the next thing coming out of my mouth, and I stumble back a step, blinking in confusion. “You do?”

“Well, you just confirmed it for me,” she nods, her face neutral, not giving me a sense of how she’s feeling or what she’s thinking. “I realized sometime yesterday it couldn’t be true.”

“Okay,” I say slowly, then glance at the house behind her.

Something isn’t right. Hailey knows the code to get into the house. She could have been waiting for me inside, but instead she was sitting on the steps. I half turn to look over my shoulder at the car on the street. Not in the driveway, where I could have blocked it with my Jeep.

“It’s a rental,” she explains quietly. “I needed something to get myself around.”

Something that wasn’t me.

Stuffing the fear growing inside me back into the pits of darkness in my heart, I face Hailey again and gesture towards the house. “Let’s go inside. I can tell you all about?—”

“Luke—”

“—how this woman has been a pain in my butt for the last?—”

“Luke—”

“—year and how she was never supposed to find out where I went?—”

“Luke,” Hailey shouts, throwing her hands up in the air.

It’s the first real emotion she’s shown since I pulled up, and it does what I think she intended; shuts me up.

Swallowing thickly, I take a step towards her. “Hailey, please. Let me explain.”

She takes a step backwards, keeping the distance between us. “You had every opportunity to explain.”

“I know,” I breathe, taking another step forward because I can’t stand the distance between us. Physically or emotionally. Every wall that I worked so hard to break down feels like it’s been rebuilt, and I want nothing more than to smash them all back down. “I’m sorry. I should have told you everything, but no one ever believed me, and I couldn’t stand the thought of you not believing me either.”

Another step back, then another, and my heart thrashes in my chest, agony ripping through me as Hailey puts more space between us.

“You didn’t even give me the chance,” she whispers, her eyes shining with unshed tears. “I can’t be with someone who can’t be honest with me.”

“I was going to tell you,” I say in a rush, forcing myself to stay rooted in place. “I planned on it, I swear. But you’d been through so much, and everything with your mom?—”

“Exactly why you should have told me,” she exclaims, tossing her arms in the air again. “You saw what finding out about that secret did to me. The one person in my life who I thought always had my back, who had always supposedly been there for me, turns out to be the biggest secret keeper in my life. And then you follow in her fucking footsteps?—”

“That’s not fair,” I explode, waving a hand around because I need to expel some of the pent up energy building inside of me. “I was going through shit too. It wasn’t just your life those secrets destroyed. It was mine too. You wanna know about secrets, Hailey? Fine, I’ll give them all to you.”

“Luke—”

“There was never anyone but you. I told you I fucked my way through college and then half of Waco, but what I didn’t explicitly tell you is that no one ever lived up to you, either,” I confess. “You set the bar so damn high that the day I got home from Santa Rosé is the day I bought you a ring.”

Hailey inhales sharply. “What?”

“It wasn’t a real engagement ring, it couldn’t be—I was eighteen, I didn’t have that much money after the necklace, but it was going to be a promise to you. Because you were it for me, Hailey. I knew almost instantly that you were all I was ever going to want in my life?—”

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