Page 62 of Don't Regret Me
Something else crashed inside seconds before a window shattered and flames burst through.
One of the firemen tried to run in, but his lieutenant held him back. “It’s too dangerous now.”
No, this wasn’t happening.
Voices shouted after Nick as he took off, barreling right for the front door. The flames were everywhere, scorching everything in their path. The house Stephen had loved. The place Nick lost him. There was no time to think about the house or what any of this meant, not when he had to find Liz.
“Liz!” he yelled, blinking back tears from the stinging smoke.
And then, suddenly it was gone. Just for a second, the house was untouched, just as he’d left it. He shook his head, and the flames returned. In them, he saw Liz, but not as she was today. Her hair was longer, her body frailer, skinnier. It was a version of her he hadn’t seen, yet one he knew.
The images knocked him back until he shook them off enough to push forward, bending down to try to avoid the worst of the smoke as it rose to the remaining exposed beams Stephen had loved so much.
He wasn’t the only one.
Nick wasn’t sure where the thought came from or how he knew, but he pictured Liz staring up at them before making her way around the house. She hadn’t approved of all the additions, all the improvements. It took the charm out of the place, she’d said. Charm that existed when. She. Owned. It.
The memory was hard and fierce. Everywhere he searched for her in the crumbling house, another flash of a life he hadn’t lived assaulted him. Sitting in the living room, now engulfed in flames, playing UpWords. Cooking in the kitchen that was now nothing but ash, twisted metal, and charred marble.
Pancakes. He remembered pancakes.
The faint sound of coughing made its way through the smoke, and Nick covered his mouth and nose before he waded into the gap between flames.
When he saw her, she didn’t look up. She couldn’t. She lay on her side, knees curled up, as if to protect whatever it was that she held to her chest.
Nick dropped to his knees and touched her face. Relief flooded him when her eyes slid open with the sluggishness of a door on rusted hinges. “Nick,” she said, her voice hoarse. “I got the script.Don’t Forget Me. I got it.”
That was when he realized what it was she held. Stephen’s script. The last thing Nick had left of him. But a story didn’t matter, not nearly as much as Liz did.
He pulled her into his lap, the only action he could make with smoke choking his lungs, weakening his limbs. “I didn’t forget.” He pressed his forehead to hers. “I just needed help to remember.”
Her eyes met his, an awareness in them, but this time, it wasn’t one of pain. “I knew you’d come back.” She closed her eyes. “Do you regret it?”
He knew what she was asking. After all the trouble they caused each other, she wanted to know if he regretted her. In answer, he pressed a kiss to the corner of her mouth. Her lips were dry and cracked, her eyelashes crusted with tears and soot.
And memories.
He hated himself for ever forgetting this woman, for thinking a single word out of her mouth was a lie. They met through the impossible, but he knew now that didn’t mean anything.
Another presence knelt down beside him, and he knew who it was without looking.
“Are you still just in my head?” Nick asked.
“Maybe.” Stephen sighed. It was a sad sigh, one born of grief. “She deserved better than you.”
“I know.”
“She never gave up on you.”
“I know that too.” At the lake house, he’d seen Stephen whenever he needed him most, but it wasn’t his brother’s ghost. It was an imagined presence, one that told him what the real man would have.
“Get up, Nick.”
“I can’t.” Nick clutched Liz’s limp body.
“You can.”
For once, his brother was wrong.
