Page 127 of Never Quiet

Let me love you, please let me love you.

Don’t do this. You don’t have to do this!

I can’t breathe without you.

Sitting up, careful not to wake her sister, she responded while her hands shook as much as her heart.

Give Isabella six months, Hayden. Help her, meet your daughter, be open and honest about everything that’s happened. If you swear to me that you’ve done all you can but the love isn’t the same, I’ll come back. But if you realize that your love for her – and hers for you – has never wavered, then you owe it to both of you to leave me in your past.

Instantly, he responded.

I don’t want this. I don’t want any of this. Why are you protecting someone you don’t even know? Amanda, I love you and I know you’re hurting as much as I am. Please come back.

Amanda stood and paced the room, sobbing quietly. She loved him, wanted him.

Her Hayden.

I am hurting but I knew it would hurt. I’m protecting her because I know how it feels to love you, Hayden. Someone has to protect her. She’s been at the mercy of a monster for two decades. Every day, you protect strangers all over the world. Isabella is not a stranger. She needs you, truly needs you. Please give it six months. Both of you deserve to know, to resolve the past, to see if you have a future.

Several minutes later, he wrote again.

I hate being separated from you. I hate how selfless you’re being. I don’t know how to do this, any of this. Harper keeps trying to talk to me, Harrison asks questions none of us want to answer, and Brie hasn’t stopped crying. I love you, Amanda. I’ll text you every day. Don’t ignore me or I show up at your door.

Sitting on the bed Callileah always used, Amanda struggled to contain her tears, her selfish desire to take him for herself.

I won’t ignore you, Hayden. I need you to try. Open your heart to the other person who made the machine go quiet. Just be the beautiful, loving, whole man you are. I love you. No more today.

She turned off her phone and returned to stretch out beside her little sister. Stroking her fingers through soft brown hair, she cried herself to sleep.

* * *

The first month was the hardest. Hayden texted her every day and ended each message with how much he loved her, missed her, needed her.

During the second month, he shared information. He told her about initial efforts to reach out to Isabella, her refusal, and that it took everything inside him not to get on a plane to Amanda in Colorado.

In December, he sent her gifts and each one was symbolic to something they’d shared or done together. Amanda wept for hours and began to worry the pain would never stop.

January, the New Year, was when everything started to change. After a lot of screaming at each other, accusations, and blame, Hayden and Isabella agreed to meet their daughter together.

Callileah did not go easy on either of them.

According to Morgan, who called her immediately after, Callie called them both selfish, immature assholes who didn’t know how normal goddamn emotions worked.

She told Isabella, “I get that you were young and scared but you weren’t stupid. I know for a fact that Hope Delkin would have helped you and you know that, too. Keep your fucking self-pity to yourself about how disappointed your family would have been and how they’d have disowned you. I am broken because you were a coward.”

Hayden received his share. “Addiction is a disease, it should be treated like one, and you were abused in ways I cannot imagine but I lay the same thing at your door. You didn’t want to go to your older brother. You didn’t know how to talk to your dad. Fucking fine. Hope would have demolished the world to save you and you never gave her a chance. Taking advantage of a young girl’s love for you was also a dick move.”

Morgan relayed to Amanda that her parting words were, “Amanda carved her heart out of her chest for you two idiots? She’s a way bigger person than I would have been. It’s nice to meet you. A bio-mom who snuck around taking care of me for fourteen years but never claimed me and a bio-dad who’s one of the smartest people in the fucking world but somehow didn’t realize I was his kid while acting uncomfortable around me forever. Sincerely, fuck off.”

Hayden’s texts in February were confused, upset. He needed help processing the emotions from everyone around him and Amanda did what she could carefully and from a distance.

His messages started ending with I miss you instead of I love you and she felt the difference. The realization was not without substantial pain.

Through it all, she stayed busy with her family, distracted herself with work that could be completed without leaving Colorado, and reestablished the bond with her little sister.

In March, Morgan and Harrison brought Callileah to Boulder and the two young women locked themselves in Nate’s apartment alone to rant about how much the world sucked.

There was screaming and a lot of tears as they each purged the knot of sadness inside them.

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