Total pages in book: 100
Estimated words: 97364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 487(@200wpm)___ 389(@250wpm)___ 325(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 97364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 487(@200wpm)___ 389(@250wpm)___ 325(@300wpm)
He ignores me. I keep banging my fists against the glass.
“Stop it. He’s going to run you over, Scarlet.” Daniel wraps his arms around my waist and pulls me away from the truck.
“No. No. No …” I try to wriggle free.
“Come on. Let’s go home.”
My eyes leave the taillights fading into the distance and land on Daniel’s face. I’m stunned into complete silence, tears still clinging to my eyelashes. London? He can’t be serious.
“Eventually, I’ll forgive you. What we had can’t be destroyed in a day,” he mutters in defeat as he pulls me back into the house.
I wasn’t cheating on Daniel. We were over. I was supposed to be dead to him. But now I feel like a cheater—a cheater who needs forgiveness.
“Where is your stuff?” He looks around, anywhere but directly at me.
My tears have stopped. My jaw is slack. My vocabulary—nonexistent.
“Here it is.” He heads toward my suitcase in the corner of the room. I’ve been living out of it since we moved our stuff to the main level. I do nothing. He does everything, including grabbing all of my personal items from the bathroom. “Anything else?”
Blink. Blink. Blink.
“Scarlet? Is this everything?”
I nod.
*
I matter.
I love myself.
The world is a better place with me in it.
Who has to think those words? Me. That’s who. I’m not sure how many more times I can get jerked around, knocked down, and kicked in the stomach before I tap out.
Daniel drives us to his hotel in Savannah. I remind myself that the hole in my soul the size of Theodore Reed will not remain forever. This is my journey. No matter who I meet on the way, it’s mine and only mine.
I found out I was going to die and I wanted to live.
I found out I was going to live and now I want to die.
It’s time to count breaths and give thanks for every single one. Eventually, I won’t have to remind myself to take them.
“How did you find me?” I whisper as we enter the hotel room.
We haven’t said a word since we left the house.
Daniel plops my bags down and sits on the edge of the bed. “Oscar.”
I close my eyes and shake my head. “What have you done? I told you never to tell him.”
He pulls his shoulders up and drops them with a heavy sigh. I’ve drained him. “It felt like a life-or-death situation. I knew he’d know how to find you.”
“He’s going to break out.”
Daniel shakes his head. “Why do you say that?”
“Because you told him his baby girl is dying!”
Daniel winces.
I pace the room. “You have to go back and tell him I’m fine. If he breaks out, he will be a fugitive forever, but if he serves his time, then he can be free again. You have to go back. You have to—”
“We.”
I stop and narrow my eyes at him. “Sorry?”
“We. We will go back and tell him you’re fine, even though you’re not completely fine. Stage one cancer is still cancer.”
“Daniel … I’m not going back.” It feels like I’m giving a five-year-old instructions—soft and slow.
He shakes his head and reaches for my hand, pulling me to stand between his legs. “Scarlet …” He presses my hand to his chest. I feel his scar beneath his shirt. “You’re my heart. I lived for you. It’s a miracle that I’m even alive, but I am. And so are you. We are two miracles. Don’t you see that? In spite of everything, we’re meant to be together. The cheating doesn’t—”
“Whoa.” I step back. “I didn’t cheat on you. We weren’t together.”
“We were engaged.” He jumps to his feet. I take another step back.
“Were. I left you—I left us. I grieved you and what we had.”
“By jumping into bed with another man?”
I turn and look out the window. “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to apologize for. Having cancer? Choosing to live my last days on my own terms? Finding comfort in the touch of another man when I thought I was going to die? Or not actually dying?”
“Tell me it was just sex, Scarlet. Tell me you didn’t really mean what you said to him. Tell me—”
“It was nothing.” I face him again, emotions burning my eyes. “It was a lie. But at some point that lie became my greatest truth. And that ‘nothing’ turned into something that right now feels like everything. Now I’m left with the cold reality that we were the lie, Daniel.”
His face contorts into a mask of confusion. “What are you talking about?”
I forgave myself for this when my death seemed imminent. Now I need to let go of it in order to live.
“When you were in the hospital…” I draw in a shaky breath as the past slams into me again “…and the doctors said you needed a heart transplant soon or you were going to die, I panicked.”