Page 93 of Quietly Falling
“I love you,” I murmur, the sentiment somehow not enough to encompass all I’m feeling in this moment.
“I love you always.”
I wait as she walks away, both needing the space and craving her closeness. It’s a dynamic I know I’ll never escape because she’s everything I’ve ever wanted and had been too scared to believe could be mine.
Clearing my throat, I look up at the sky again, the blue bright and cheerful.
Happy.
Like she’d been.
“You’ve met Ella,” I start, the words like gravel as I force them out. “She’s amazing and it’s crazy how much I love her.”How much I love all of them.
Gratitude.
The word knocks the air from my lungs, forcing me to my knees, my hands sinking into the soft grass as I bow my head. I don’t stop the tears from coming, years of hurt and fear and doubt dripping onto the grass.
And I let them, not just thankful for this moment to tell her that we’d done it—we put Daryl away for good. But gratitude for the space to be free to love and be loved, a dark angel trying to weather the storm when the people he’d sworn to protect had been offering him shelter.
Safety.
“I love them,” I manage. “They never gave up on me, Audrey. Through all the bullshit, when I fought to keep them away, to never let them get close. God, and you should see Mason. He’s got a great girl and two kids who adore him. I’m so fucking proud of him and I thought—” I swallow harder. “I thought he didn’t need me—that I could throw myself into your case and disappear but—” I laugh, the sound strangled and alsofree.“They fought for me. Fought to keep me.”
I’d lost so much in my life, begged the wrong people to love me—to stay—and ignored those I knew deep down had the ability to destroy the last piece ofme. The version of me long since buried beneath the rubble.
The little boy who’d had the two most important people ripped from his grasp—a horror I hadn’t been able to put to rest.
Gratitude.
I found safety in Ella’s arms.
In her spirit.
And in her unwavering need to settle mine when I felt like I was drowning in an ocean of regret.
I deserve to be loved.
Mason loved me since the day we landed in the same house. The Thayers fought like hell to love me, to show me what I wasn’t ready to see. And then the guys in Blackstone Falls and Holland and Beck—all of them.
A family not built by blood but by somethingmore—something bigger than myself and the demons I tried to outrun.
They’d healed me, healed pieces of me I didn’t know were broken, the ones I’d learned to live with. But they’d never given up.
And just like I hadn’t given up on ensuring justice for Audrey, they hadn’t given up on showing me just how fiercely I am loved.
And that I belong.
“I love you,” I whisper, pushing up onto one knee and laying my hand on her headstone. “Thank you for loving me because I never would have found all of this.” Squeezing my eyes shut for only a second, I force them open and read her name, her short life a reminder of what I’m doing here. “I promise to live for both of us. To love for both of us. We deserve it, Audrey, and I’m so grateful?—”
The words are cut off as an orange-and-black butterfly lands mere inches from my hand, its wings slowly rising and falling.
A hello.
“Wouldn’t it be fun to be a butterfly? To float on the wind, the breeze sending you soaring and diving. Wouldn’t that be fun, Bodhi?”
“It sounds scary.”
She laughs, the sound like bells, cheerful and happy as a smile pulls at my lips. “But what if you fly, Bodhi? Imagine all the things you’d see. The freedom.” She sighs wistfully. “Well, just know if you see one, that will be me.”
