Page 95 of Coff

I sit on the edge of the bed. “If you called, then you were ready to leave?”

She nods.

“Why didn’t you?”

When she turns back, her eyes are full of tears. “I was too scared to leave my best friend, family—everything I knew. I didn’t have any money saved up.”

“Why not?”

She swings her legs off the bed, putting her back to me. “My dad didn’t pay me to work at the business. He said my payment was living rent-free and he’d buy me any food or clothing I wanted. He gave me an allowance, but I used most of that on gas. I could never save much. Now I see it was my dad’s way of controlling me. A few years later, Duke told me he’d opened a bank account for me. By then, I knew where the money came from, and I refused to touch it.”

No, this doesn’t make sense. This is not the Delaney I knew. “Did you really know about your dad? You know, back when I asked you to leave?”

She turns back to me. “No. I told you I didn’t.”

I nod.

“You don’t believe me?”

“None of this makes sense, Delaney.”

She stands up and faces me, keeping the bed between us. “What do you mean?”

Well, I guess we are really going to get into this. I take a deep breath. “The girl I met was a ‘take charge, I’m doing things my way’ kind of girl. But the woman I see today just let her dad tell her what to do and she never fought to get her own way. Was the Delaney I knew a lie?”

Her brow shoots up. “A lie? Are you kidding me?”

I shrug. “Explain it to me then.”

She grabs a pillow and holds it up to her face, then screams into it. After she tosses the pillow, she turns to me, eyes ablaze with anger. “No, it wasn’t a lie. That was me. It is me, dammit! But there is another part of me that, like I said before, was scared to leave my family and friends. And unfortunately, that is the part that got me into this mess. I placed my loyalties with the wrong man.”

I’ve been on my own since I turned eighteen and enlisted. Maybe that skews my judgment a little. But nothing about this woman seemed scared when I met her.

“What were you scared of?” I ask.

She laughs. “Seriously? You, of all people, have to ask?”

I don’t respond, and she walks around the bed until she’s in front of me. Then she pokes me in the chest rather hard.

“When you left, it hurt. I mean, it hurt like hell. You wanted me to give up everyone I knew and move to Virginia, where I knew no one. Then what? You’d ship out and I would be there all alone. Did you think about that?”

I close my eyes. I hadn’t, actually. All I could think about was getting her away from her family.

“I couldn’t do that. And you left. I was falling for you. Hard. And you just left like it was nothing. I couldn’t lose anyone else like that, so yes, I held on tightly to my family and my friend, Samantha. Did it blind me to my dad? It did.”

Tears fall down her cheeks, and I itch to wipe them away for her, but I don’t.

“I swore off relationships after you left. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to swear off the only people I had left in this world.”

“Then why did you call me? You said you called a year later?”

She sniffles. “I missed you so much. I thought maybe we could try again. But when I discovered your phone number didn’t work, I knew you really had forgotten about me.”

My hands go to her shoulders. “Delaney, I never forgot about you. I have thought about you so much. I tried to date again, but nothing compared to what we had. You ruined me for all women. And I cannot tell you how often I dreamed of finding you again and trying harder to convince you to come with me.”

Using her sleeve, she wipes at her eyes. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

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