Page 45 of Unbreak Me
“He did this to us, not you. You fought like hell to come back here and gave me a daughter. You’ve given me the greatest gift of all, and I love you even more for it. You’re my evening sun…my forever.”
“You’re my forever, too,” she smiles, and the light that’s been missing finally comes back to those blues.
I closethe children’s book I’m reading and smile at Eve, who is snuggled by my side.
“She’s out like a light,” I whisper softly, glancing down at our daughter sleeping against me on the other side. I gently run my fingers through her baby curls. I’m so glad she has Eve’s hair. We always talked about what our kids would look like, and I always knew I wanted a daughter with her sunset hair.
I carefully pick her up off the couch, not wanting to wake her. Walking over to her bed, I tuck her in and kiss her forehead. She has the bear she loves so much tucked in her arms, and I can’t help but smile at the bear’s t-shirt. Eve told me she got it when she was pregnant, and it’s been with her since birth…a little piece of me that could be with her.
Eve stands up and holds out her hand to me.
“I have something I want to show you.” She leads us to the bedroom and shuts the door so we don’t wake Ryland. She’s wearing the shirt she stole from me. I was secretly pleased when she told me she wore something of mine while she was gone. I watch her open her suitcase and pull out some books and small boxes. She lays them on the bed and sits against the headboard, patting the spot next to her.
I walk over and see several scrapbooks and baby items in the boxes. I sit down beside her and pick up a pink beanie hat smaller than my palm. “Is this..?” I look at all the stuff, and my heart is lodged in my throat.
“I didn’t want you to feel like you missed a thing, so I made all these scrapbooks and photo albums for you. I kept everything that I thought was important. Let’s start from the beginning.” She picks up one of the albums and hands it to me. I lean back against the headboard, and she gets comfortable by my side. “This is before Ryland was born.”
I open it up and see pictures of Eve with a small baby bump. She did several in each month she was pregnant. Her handwriting fills the pages. I start to read some but stop when tears blur my eyes.
“I wrote to you almost every day. Everything is in there, Ryder. I wanted you to be able to feel like you were there with us, so I put my last three years down on paper.”
I blink back the tears and skim through it, knowing I’m going to read every single thing when I’m ready. I get to the last photos and see Eve’s big round belly. My finger skims over the picture. She’s beautiful pregnant…just like I knew she would be. Her eyes hold a sadness, though, that breaks me to the core. This should have been the happiest time of her life, and instead, she’s fighting through the pain to survive. I close the book, not being able to handle the thought of her going through this alone.
“I’m here now, Ryder. That’s all that matters,” she says, reading my thoughts.
“I should have been there protecting you from them. You were all alone, Eve. At least I had my family. I shouldn’t have given up looking for you. I should have known you would never have left me like that unless you were forced to.”
“Even if you had found me, my parents would have done everything in their power to destroy us and your family. We have no clue how far they would have gone to hurt us.”
“I had all these scenarios in my head about why you left, but none of them made sense. I ruled out kidnapping because you packed a suitcase, and the cops saw no signs of foul play. Theybasically gave me a pity look and told me you were probably seeing someone behind my back and left to be with him, but I refused to believe it. I knew what we had, so I hired a private investigator and even went to pay your parents a visit. No one was home, so I went to the next-door neighbor, and they told me your parents had moved a while back because of work. They obviously were paid off because if they had told me they left the same day as you, I would have known something was up. It never crossed my mind that they could be lying, especially when the PI didn’t come up with anything.”
“Miles and I think my father paid him off.”
“Yeah, I’m beginning to think that too,” I sigh. “In the end, I just accepted that the cops were right and I wasn’t good enough for you, just like your parents said. All along, though, you were fighting like hell to get back to me,” I say quietly.
“I had something worth fighting for.” She picks up another album and hands it to me. “Wehave something worth fighting for. All our daughter is going to remember is how much her parents love her. We have a lot more blank albums to fill, but this time, we will do it together.”
I take the album and open it up, seeing our beautiful smiling daughter staring into the camera.
“She has so much joy in her eyes. She felt both our love even when we couldn’t be together. She’s a part of us, and no one can take that away. Now,” she says, flipping to the beginning of the album where she’s in the hospital, “just wait for the next birth because I’m so going to take advantage of you being there. I had no one but that poor nurse. I squeezed her hand so hard I thought I was going to break it,” she laughs trying to lighten the mood.
“Your parents weren’t there?” I ask, surprised.
“Hell no. I didn’t even tell them I went into labor. I knew they would try and control everything down to the name onthe birth certificate. There was no way she was going to be named anything other than Ryland Savannah Montgomery. I just wanted to be able to sit there with my baby girl and tell her all about her daddy.” I feel some satisfaction that they weren’t a part of it. They didn’t deserve to be there over me.
“My sister was over the moon that you named Ryland after her.”
“She’s always been a sister to me. It was an easy decision to name her after two people I love most in the world.”
I look at the pictures of Ryland. There are so many at every stage, and we sit there for hours as I listen to Eve telling me about our daughter’s first years. It feels good to laugh together at Ryland’s cute stories without the pain being there.
“Thank you,” I say softly when I close the last book. “You gave me these moments back that I thought I would never have. All your letters and every detail you wrote made me feel like I was there.”
“You were with us, Ryder, in here,” she says, laying a hand on her heart.
I pick up the albums and lay them on my nightstand, wanting them close to me. She puts the memory boxes on the dresser before climbing back in bed.
She has her hair in a messy bun again with those sexy glasses I love so much. Her face is free of any makeup from her shower earlier, and she’s never looked more beautiful to me.
