Page 83 of Free to Live
“Crap, I really need to learn to control that inside voice,” I mutter.
“As Grace is getting older, it might help,” she murmurs. “Otherwise you’re going to be answering a whole host of…wait. Where is she, Joe?” Holly becomes agitated. “The things I need to tell you, she shouldn’t overhear.”
And just like that, my heart knows it’s taken the fall into love for the second time in my life. “I dropped her off at school before I met up with you. I hoped, prayed actually, that you’d come to see me after looking at your camera,” I admit.
Even though I showed a hell of a lot of my own vulnerability on that camera, Holly’s face crumbles further. “Joe, last night you seemed so appalled…” Her voice trails off.
I surge to my feet. “I was—am—appalled,” I correct myself. Grabbing her close, I don’t let go when she half-heartedly tries to push me away. “I’m shocked at what you had to live through, and at the level of desperation you reached. I never saw it from the victim’s side before,” I admit painfully. She sags in my arms in relief. “What kind of pain did you live with day after day to reach that point?” I run one hand through her thick, burnished hair. I feel her body shudder against mine. I feel a desperate need to lay my lips upon hers, to seal what’s building between us.
Her next words drive all thoughts of that out of my mind when I fully absorb the load she’s been carrying.
“We all had some level of horror to that degree, Joe.” She pulls back and her face is blank. “All of us. We’re not a family through blood or through legal adoption. We’re a family because we found one another through pain, through agony, and through a twisted fate that intersected our lives at just the right moment. And we fought to hold on when life wanted to tear us apart.”
My head is spinning with what her words imply. “All…”
She pulls out of my arms and holds up her wrist. Her amaryllis tattoo is glorious in the rich red color against her pale skin. “All of us who bear this mark,” she informs me quietly. “Every. Single. Freeman.”
My head spins, and I’m nauseated at the implications. “How did a system fail so many children for so long?”
Her smile is sad. “Not everyone is a hero. Not everyone is even a human. Some people are just so horrific, they should be categorized as monsters and thrown into a cage.” And with that extraordinarily sage statement, Holly launches into the Freeman family history.
Learning about Phil and Cassidy’s history of abuse before they managed to escape only to be found by Em and her aunt in a park, bleeding and clinging to one another as the anchor in each other’s world when Cassidy was just a few years older than Grace is soul crushing. I’m astounded to hear about how Emily’s aunt raised all of them only to die suddenly and how the three of them fought to remain together before the older sisters declared themselves as emancipated minors. My knees lock so I can stay standing when I hear about Ali’s father, the perpetrator of the most massive human trafficking ring in US history. Then Holly tells me about how she, Corinna, and Ali were each sold by their families for drug money, how they were locked into a shipping container for months before they were rescued.
I want to go to her, but Holly’s wrapped her arms tight around herself as she talks about the days the three girls huddled together after their rescue and the additional worry she endured as she waited to find out whether she would be serving time for involuntary manslaughter. Her voice breaks as she tells me how she got her name—from a woman who finally fought for her in a world that never took a stand for her. For any of them.
My heart pounding hard in my chest, I realize Phil Freeman is more than just a brother; he’s a goddamned miracle. He could have quickly fallen into the darkness of his own violent brutality, and what would have happened to any of them then? And as her voice begins to go hoarse, I realize the only reason she’d ever share this is because she’s doing exactly what I did last night through the camera lens.
She’s baring it all to me because her heart is in just as deep as mine. My own rolls over in my chest in reaction.
“Why?” I rasp after her voice finally goes quiet.
“Why what?” she responds.
“Why do you think it would matter?” I lift her wrist, covered in beautiful, glorious red ink more binding than any legal document, to my lips. Since the story of the amaryllis legend was part of her explanation, I completely agree with Phil’s assessment of his family. Strength, beauty, and pride—each member of the Freeman family has it in spades.
None more so than my Holly.
She blinks up at me. “How could it not?”
I lay my thumb upon her lips. “Hols, what you just told me infuriates me.” She stiffens in my arms. I shake her. “For you. For all of you. But there isn’t a person alive who would blame any of you for what you had to endure to survive. Did you think I was going to turn you away?”
Her eyes slide away, giving me my answer. And not so slowly, my anger builds.
“For God’s sake!” I explode, letting her go to begin pacing. Holly leans back against the arm of the chair as I let loose my temper. I barely take notice. “Not everyone who cares about you is going to let you down. Not everyone is going to hurt you.”
“I know.” Her voice is calm as the lake outside the Freeman farm.
“Then what kind of reaction were you expecting? For me to denounce you? To walk away?”
“Not after Cassidy and Ali talked some sense into me,” she admits. “After they calmed my fears and reminded me I have the strength to stand on my own. It took me a bit, but I realized that a man who was willing to expose his own vulnerability needed to know I trusted him with my own.” She pushes up from the arm of my couch to stand right in front of me. Her hand reaches up to touch my jaw. “I saw what was in your eyes, Joe,” she whispers. “I saw the tenderness, the…”
“Fear that I fucked everything up after I was trying to fix it,” I whisper, slowly sliding my hands around her back. “I think I’d rather face a fire burning out of control than ever see you walk out on me like that ever again.”
A smile dances around her mouth. “Let’s hope you don’t have to do that anytime soon, okay? Even though I had Grace to distract me, it’s still going to take a while to get used to you being called out and the worry.”
I bow my head to rest on hers in reverence. A whoosh of breath leaves me. This woman will bring me to my knees by her fiery strength and devastating valor. If more men and women on this planet had it, then I’d worry less about the world I’m raising Grace in.
Slowly, I skim my hands up over her back, my hands large enough that my thumbs ripple over each of her ribs. As they graze the underside of her breasts, Holly’s eyelids flutter at the sensation. Her reaction tells me this is going to be exquisitely beautiful. The fire we have growing between us isn’t going to flicker out; it’s going to dance and flash. But if I have the choice, I might never put it out.
