I scoffed. “Right, okay. Lost in the mail, that’s a great excuse. All of them? You really expect me to believe that out of the hundreds and hundreds of letters I sent you, none of them managed to reach you?”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
“You’re a damn liar.”
“That’s a dumb thing to lie about.”
“I never said you were smart.” I jerked my chin up against the flash of guilt which followed the hasty words. He didn’t react. I wished he would. I wanted him to scream at me, to give me a reason to unleash all the poison that had built up in my heart over the years. It was putrid, sickening, and so very heavy.
He ran a hand through his hair and chuckled softly. “I mean, that’s fair. Not the sharpest bulb in the box.”
“Tool in the shed.”
“Whatever in the wherever. You’ve always been smarter than me, Daisy. But that don’t mean you can’t be wrong sometimes. First three years I wrote you a letter every day. After that—well, a man can only take so much rejection, you know? But I kept writing. Every week, every month, whenever my thoughts got too big and I needed you to filter them for me—you were always good at that.”
I dropped my head so he wouldn’t see my face. “I thought about that. I figured you would have had some pretty big thoughts and feelings after everything.”
“Sure did. Only reason it took me so long to get free was because I didn’t have you around to talk sense into me. I’m sorry, Daisy.”
I curled tighter around the ball in my chest. “Don’t say that. Don’t you dare say that. Sorry isn’t good enough, nothing’s good enough. God, Kash, why did you have to come back?”
My words trailed into a wail and before I knew it his arms were around me. I sobbed into his chest, beating my fists against it, screaming words I can’t even remember. And Kash only held me, like the words I was throwing at him weren’t filled with insults. Like it wasn’t him I was cursing and hitting and fighting against. Holding me like he should have held me the moment we found out Hunter died.
When I was all out of steam, he started talking. Sweet, quiet, gentle murmurs, like a brook at the end of a hot summer. “I’m so sorry, Daisy. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
“Nothing is okay.” I sniffed and scrubbed my face with my sleeve, then leaned away from him. “Nothing will ever be okay again.”
“Yeah,” he sighed. “But that’s okay too.”
I stared at him, then a broken laugh scratched its way out of my throat. “What’s wrong with you?”
He shrugged. “I lost everything. Then I lost hope. Lost my mind for a while. Can’t come back from all that without changing.”
I looked up at him, wondering if I even knew him anymore. “And what did you change?”
“My attitude, believe it or not. See, for a while there, I didn’t think I could get out of that without you. Didn’t think I could make it through without you, either. I wasted a whole lot of time waiting for your big beautiful brain to show me something I wasn’t seeing, but you weren’t talking.” He shuffled around a little bit, the way he used to when he was proud of something and knew he shouldn’t be.
“So I stopped waiting. I accepted my fate. I was going to be in there forever, alone, without you to help me, without Hunter to goad me into anything. I made alliances. Did the work I was given. Kept my head down.”
“Sounds awful for you.”
“Eh—it wasn’t ideal.” His mild tone hid a world of pain. I knew him too well. It made me wince.
“So what then?”
“Then I got bored. I started thinking. I started looking at my real options, got out of my feelings, and started thinking about you. Your silence specifically.”
A burst of fury shot through me again and I opened my mouth indignantly. He held up a hand before I could say anything, which only made me angrier. Too angry to speak, which meant he won anyway. Damn it.
“And I figured there were two options. Either you’d swallowed the story that I’d killed Hunter—”
“I didn’t! I made every excuse for you, Kash. I argued for you. I got in fights over you. I told everybody who would listen that you didn’t do that, you would never do that. I told them that you’d send me a letter the second you could that would explain everything. I was so sure! I was cocky! And I made a goddamn fool of myself when you never wrote.”
Relief flooded his eyes and his arrogant mouth softened.
“I knew I could—”
“But then! Then!” He couldn’t shut me up now. The dam had burst. “You never wrote. People started pitying me, Kash. Pity! They called me a poor, stupid girl, talked about how I was going to end up a crazy cat lady wearing a tinfoil hat and living in my parents’ dilapidated trailer forever, how I was living in denial—they told me I needed therapy! I almost didn’t get the job at the library because the hiring manager was convinced that I was only there to research laws and loopholes to get you out.”
“But you did get it—”
“And you want to know the worst part? He was right. My very first lunch break, I started reading every law book I could get my hands on, every forensic textbook, everything!” My throat tightened, but I refused to cry. My voice sounded hoarse and alien. “After a while I had to face the facts. Even if you were innocent—which I still believed, somehow—you weren’t interested in telling me so. You were content to leave me in the dark.”
“That wasn’t—”
“I’m not finished! So I stopped looking up laws and codes and started in on psychology. Borderline personality disorder. Codependency. Trauma. Anything to explain why, in
