Page 40 of The Promises We Broke
My shoulder started to scream in pain after twenty minutes, but I pushed through it. My leg throbbed where the cast ended, but I ignored it. This felt too good, too necessary, to stop for something as trivial as pain.
With each piece of fake wood that hit the floor, I felt something loosening in my chest. Eleven years of guilt and self-punishment and carefully maintained isolation. Eleven years of running from everything that mattered because I'd been too afraid to believe I deserved it.
And I'd hurt everyone by doing it. All those nights of aching loneliness when I'd told myself that I was saving the people I'd loved and now I realized it was nothing but lies. There was no saving people when you were the one torturing them. When you were the one leaving them with questions, and doubts, and guilt.
No one won in this family. No one except her. And Regina would continue to win. Because even now, even after all these years, we were still trying to fix the fractured pieces of our lives and some things were so broken that there was no possible way they could ever be whole again.
I was so lost in the work, so focused on destruction and revelation, that I didn't hear the car pull up outside. Didn't hear footsteps on the porch or the front door opening.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?"
Billie's voice cut through my demolition haze like a blade, and I spun toward the doorway so fast I nearly lost my balance. She stood there with her hands on her hips, her face flushed with what looked like equal parts fury and panic.
"Billie? What are you...?"
"You missed your appointment," she said, her voice tight with control that was clearly costing her effort. "I waited at the ranch for thirty minutes before Booker told me where you'd gone."
I looked down at myself, taking in the destruction I'd wreaked on the living room, the sweat soaking my shirt, the way I was swaying slightly on my feet. And then I felt it. The wetness on my cheeks that I hadn't even realized was there.
I was crying.
"Gage," Billie said, her voice immediately softening. "Are you okay?"
"I don't know," I said honestly, sinking onto the pile of debris I'd created. "I talked to my father yesterday. About Regina, about why she was the way she was. About things I didn't know."
Billie moved carefully into the room, stepping over broken paneling to settle on the floor beside me. Close enough to touch, but not quite touching.
"What did he tell you?"
"That he had an affair. That Regina's cruelty was revenge for something he did. That everything we went through as kids was collateral damage in their war." The words came out broken, fractured like the wood around us. "That none of us deserved what happened to us."
"Oh, Gage."
"And I don't know why I'm crying about it," I continued, wiping roughly at my face. "It's over. It's done. Regina's gone, we're all adults, we've all moved on. But hearing him say that what happened to us wasn't our fault, that we were just kids caught in something we couldn't control..."
"It changes how you see yourself," Billie said quietly.
"It changes everything." I looked around at the destruction I'd created, at the beauty emerging from underneath years of poor decisions. "I've been punishing myself for eleven years forsomething that was never entirely my fault. And I don't know what to do with that knowledge."
We sat in silence for a moment, surrounded by the debris of my emotional breakdown and the promise of what this place could become.
"Billie," I said finally, the words I'd been carrying for eleven years forcing their way out of my chest. "I need to apologize to you. Really apologize, not just for leaving, but for how I left. For disappearing without explanation, for letting you wonder what you'd done wrong when you'd never done anything but love me."
She went very still beside me, and I forced myself to continue.
"I was wrong. I was eighteen and scared and I thought I was protecting you by leaving, but I was really just being a coward. I'd lived with the truth of what I'd done to Trace for months and every time I looked at him I thought the guilt would kill me. And I gave up. I just... I couldn't do it anymore. I should have trusted you with the truth. I should have fought for us instead of running. I should have believed that what we had was strong enough to survive whatever Regina tried to do to us."
"Gage..."
"I broke promises I'd made to you. I shattered dreams we'd built together. I left you to pick up the pieces of a love story I'd convinced you was forever, and I did it in the cruelest possible way." The tears were coming faster now, eleven years of suppressed grief and regret pouring out of me. "And I'm sorry. I'm so fucking sorry, Billie."
She was crying too now, silent tears that broke my heart all over again.
"I used to come here," she whispered, looking around the room. "After you left. I'd sit on the porch and try to understand what had happened, why you'd changed your mind about us."
"I never changed my mind about us. I just convinced myself I didn't deserve us."
"I know that now. But then... then I thought I hadn't been enough. That teenage love was just fantasy and you'd grown up and realized it. That what I'd felt for you wasn't the same, wasn't enough."
