Page 6 of It's Always Been You
I text. I call. Over and over. Every day and every night.
He never responds. I send food and letters and emails, and I would send a carrier pigeon and a goddamn singing telegram if I thought it would make him talk to me.
But nothing does.
I don’t know how to be what he needs me to be, and he sure as hell doesn’t seem to want what I have to offer.
My heart slowly crumples to dust as the hard truth of it settles deep in my bones, over and over again, during days and months and years of silence.
My Gabe is gone, and he isn’t coming back.
And I don’t have any other choice but to let him go.
Chapter One
Gabe
Istare up at the brick house, my fists clenching and unclenching in time with the rapid beat of my heart and my stomach in knots.
I’ve never been an anxious person, but right now, I’m considering the possibility that my anxiety might just end me right here on the sidewalk before I even have a chance to go inside.
For the first time in a decade, I’m about to breathe the same air as the one person who has always been my reason for breathing. And fine, maybe I’m being a little dramatic, but I’m meeting the moment, okay?
The sign in front tells me I’m in the right place.Evans, Parker, Langley, and Jenkins, P.C.
She’s a lawyer. A very successful one if everything I’ve seen and read is true. And I know it is. I don’t know how her life brought her here, to a partnership in a small law firm in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but I do know that she always went after what she wanted with her full chest, and she didn’t stop until she got it. Her tenacity was one of the things I loved most about her. Her tenacity…and basically everything else.
I just really fucking loved her.
Love her? Can you love someone you haven’t seen in ten years? I think I’m about to find out.
The house is a pretty red brick, the small front yard well maintained with flower beds in a riot of colors. Planters flank the wide front door overflowing with more colorful blooms.
I bet Molly planted the flowers or at least directed the person who did. The organized chaos of the design looks like something she would conjure up in that gorgeous, brilliant brain of hers.
Or maybe not. I don’t know her anymore.
The thought has my stomach sinking and my fight or flight instinct kicking into high gear.
“Get your shit together, Gabriel. You’ve come this far,” I mutter.
The ding of my phone stops me before I can take a step up the front walk.
I smile when I see the message is in the group chat with my sisters. Amelia created the group chat with the phone I gave her for her fourteenth birthday. I’ll never forget her hugging me that day and telling me we made a good team. It was the first time in the two years since our parents died that I felt like maybe I wasn’t completely fucking everything up, so the Team Sullivan group chat was born.
Team Sullivan
Ames
So did you do it yet?
Me
I’m standing in front of her office.
Liv
Why are you standing in front of the office and not inside the office telling her you never stopped loving her and begging her for a second chance?
