Page 98 of Whenever You Call

I nudged her chin up with my knuckle until all she saw was me.

“I promised I’d always be there for you, and I was. That wasn’t a dream.”

“But why were you there? Out of guilt? Shame? Opportunity.”

“Guilt and shame, yes. I’m going to ignore that last option and hope you know the answer to that already.”

She flinched, showing me how much she hated that she’d even had to ask.

“But the guilt and shame were only tools to get me to you, Hannah. I see that now. It took nothing but a minute for me to figure out what an incredible woman you are—one who deserved more. You deserved better. Someone to love you for you.”

The wordlovelingered between us, and I knew she’d mentally tripped over it as much as I had, but instead of asking me what I meant or trying to dig deeper, she pushed a hand against my beating chest, trying to create distance I wouldn’t give.

“You’ve been drinking,” she groaned.

“So?”

“I never trust a word that comes out of a man’s mouth when he’s drunk.”

“I’m not drunk. I’ve had a drink. There’s a difference. I know exactly what I’m saying and doing.”

Her hand fell away, giving in. “Just like you knew what you were doing the day weaccidentallymet in that drive-thru?” She arched her brow before it creased into a scowl again. “What did you want from me, Logan? Did you know how broken I’d be and decide to take advantage of a woman whose husband had just died by your hands.”

It was my turn to flinch, and I dropped my hand from her face, taking the hit she’d delivered straight to the stomach.

“Cole died by his own hands, Hannah.Heput those drugs in his body, not me.”

“But you—”

“Didn’t save him. You don’t need to remind me. I know the mistakes I made that night.”

Her scowl turned into a deep frown as new pain tore into her. “So, he could have lived?” she whispered.

“No, that’s not—”

“Could my daughter still have a father? Is that what you’re telling me?”

I stared back at her for only a second before I pushed my hands through the length of my hair and held them at the back of my head, my elbows pointed out as I spun away from her and growled. “Jesus, Hannah, I don’t know! What kind of fucked-up question is that?”

Memories of Cole’s face as I hovered over him flashed before me. Dale’s ghost, too.

Every look Jerry and I passed between us.

Every thought I’d had in the back of that ambulance.

Every nightmare I’d had since, wondering if I could have done more. If I should have acted faster.

“I need to know, Logan. You owe me the truth.”

“The truth,” I huffed.

“Yes,” she said, her voice growing stronger. “I deserve to know what happened that night. I deserve to know what went wrong. I deserve to know—”

“Goddamn it, Hannah!” I spun back around to face her, my hands dropping against my thighs before I turned my palms up and shrugged. “I froze, okay. I fucking froze. There. That’s it. For the first time in my life as a paramedic, I had a dying man in my hands, and I didn’t know what the hell to do with it.”

She froze, too, opening her mouth to say something before thinking better of it, her silence lingering between us.

“Something about Cole that night reminded me of losing Dale all those years ago, and for just a split second, I couldn’t think straight. Couldn’t even fucking move if you want the truth. I’ve dealt with a lot of ODs and junkies in my time, believe me. I’ve seen it all. But those people… they were always strangers. Nothing more than anonymous faces I’d never known. I had no clue if those people had families, wives, husbands, children, fucking cats. I didn’t know anything about them, so while their hearts started failing in my hands, I saw them as nothing more than something to fix. Like a mechanic working on a goddamn car or a guy with a toolkit in an old garage, trying to repair a bike. Those people were machines, and I was the guy that knew all their wiring and how to keep them going a bit longer until they no doubt went back out on the streets, shoved more shit into their veins, and OD-ed again.

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