Page 35 of Breathless

She leaned back, her mind obviously racing, and Wyatt tensed. Had he said the wrong thing again? Put his foot in it?

“I had a little sister,” she finally said, sounding more subdued than he liked. “I was thirteen when she died. Elaine was ten.”

Well shit. “I’m so sorry,” he said, his voice thick with regret. “I didn’t—”

“Know?” Her laugh sounded tinny. Unnatural. “That’s what we’re doing here, Wyatt. And it’s good. A little dark for a party but…” She shook her head. “I still have issues with where I come from, who I come from, but I’m proud of who I am now. I do my best to help people. Help kids like Elaine, so I think she’d be proud, too, but I’m not sure. I don’t remember as much about her as I should.”

“What happened?” Thoreau asked quietly.

“Neglect.” Her voice was flat but her gray-green eyes flashed with restrained anger. “My parents had a few issues. That’s the nicest way for me to say it. My mother didn’t believe in divorce or medicine. My father had been fine for years, but then he started hearing voices and getting paranoid. It wasn’t until I was in college that I realized he had been suffering from schizophrenia, but back then, he was just frightening. I took care of my sister when we weren’t at school, but—”

She’d wrapped her arms around herself so tightly that her fingers were turning white, so Wyatt took one and rubbed the blood back into it while Thoreau did the same with the other. She barely seemed to notice.

“We never had a lot, but eventually, because of those issues of theirs, we lost our house. We lost our car. Every time I came home from school another piece of my life was gone. We walked the streets at night, more than once, looking for my father because my mother had no one to leave us with. In the end, we were at a very cheap motel, and she was working at a restaurant across the street to sneak food home for us while I washed our clothes in a dirty bathtub. And I was a teenager, so of course I was angry about it all the time. Ashamed.” She took a breath and squeezed their hands.

“Jesus, Fi,” Wyatt swore, pulling her into his lap and pressing his lips to her temple. “Who wouldn’t be?”

“Elaine,” Fiona answered with a wobbly smile. “She was never angry. She still believed it was temporary. That we’d have a home soon. I sent emails to my mother’s sister from the school library, asking if she’d take us in, but she never did anything but promise to pray for us. Who says that to a kid begging for help?”

Thoreau reached out to rub her shoulder and his eyes met Wyatt’s. He looked about as shell-shocked as Wyatt felt. To go from nothing for years to this? It was more than either of them had expected.

Fiona gave a shuddering sigh. “I was so angry I didn’t notice that Elaine had stopped talking. Stopped smiling. That she had a fever. By the time I did, it was too late. My mother wouldn’t let me take her to the hospital, and my father was too busy talking to himself in the corner to listen. She died that night. I still don’t know exactly why.”

“God,” Thoreau whispered. “God, Fi.”

“After that I walked out with the clothes I had on my back. I kept going until I ran into the only person who had any idea about what I was going through.” She wiped her cheeks and laughed. “The school librarian, Aisha. She had a full-time job and she was going to college. But even with all that on her plate, she made the time to take care of me. She let me stay with her until I could be emancipated, and after that I never saw my parents again.”

Wyatt held her tighter. Jesus. All this time, he’d imagined her as a happy, giggling girl in pigtails, her hands, face and most of her bedroom wall covered in finger paint. Basically, his cousin’s daughter Penny with darker hair. He’d had no idea things had been that bad, or that she’d been out in the world alone for so long.

He knew a lot about the life she’d experienced since she left that motel room. That she’d hiked through Europe. Spent one summer in a yurt full of people for a friend’s social experiment. She’d been to the Grand Canyon and snorkeled around the Great Barrier Reef. Fiona had managed to get her degrees and fill every break between semesters with more adventures than most people had in a lifetime.

And now she was here. With Thoreau and a guy who’d never gone much farther than Spring Break in Cancun.

It was a physical ache in his chest, thinking about everything that could have happened, all the things that could have stopped her from finding her way to him.

To them.

Her sigh sounded more like a sob. “Aren’t you glad you wanted to hear my story?”

“Yes,” Thoreau answered fiercely. “And we want more, when you’re ready, Fiona. We want all of it. Nothing you could say will change the way we feel about you.”

“You think so?” There was a bitter tinge to her voice and Thoreau didn’t like it either.

“Don’t think we don’t know exactly who you are now, Fi. We do. The details of how you came to be the amazing woman you are won’t change that.”

“He’s right.” Wyatt’s voice was even more raspy than usual from the emotion coursing through him. “I’m not saying I don’t want to find your parents and knock their heads together for what they did to you and your sister, but I’m proud of you for getting away from that. For taking care of yourself.”

“I didn’t tell you before because it’s not who I am anymore. I went through years of therapy and got a master’s in the subject just to make sure I wasn’t like them. That I’d never be like them.”

Wyatt shook his head against her neck. “You don’t feel sorry for Owen’s husband Jeremy, do you?”

“Of course not. But he’s famous and wealthy and married to his best friend. He seems pretty happy.”

“His parents were a fucking mess. They kicked him out for being gay when he was a kid, but he had Owen and Aunt Ellen to come to.”

“I never knew that,” Thoreau said.

Fiona shook her head. “Neither did I.”

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