Page 28 of Disappearance at Angel's Landing
But a flood of emotion still lightninged from her forehead to her toes as she realized what he was really asking for. He wanted everything under the sarcasm and self-deprecating humor. Under the pink kerchiefs and sweet perfume. Past the hot pink jewels on her belt and the boot laces she’d special ordered. He wanted the real her, and that right there was more terrifying than facing off with the killer’s gun. “You’ll see how broken I really am.”
Hesitation interrupted his path along her jaw, but to his credit, he recovered quickly. “Show me.”
Had he earned the right to know? Branch had searched for her after the landslide, he’d pushed himself to his limits with a head injury to save her from Sarah Lantos’s killer. He’d risked his life for hers.
It would be better to finally break the fantasy of them being something more than coworkers once and for all. She owed herself that much. Lila forced her attention back to the night skyand how the tops of the cliffs met that endless velvet, grounded by his touch. “I didn’t lie to you before. This scar… I did it myself. I used a knife from my collection. That’s why it’s so messy. The blade was dull. It took a few tries to do any damage.”
“Why on earth would you do this, Lila?” His voice sounded pained, as though she’d physically stabbed him in the chest with the very same knife she’d taken to her own skin.
Her heartbeat thudded too hard at her throat, and she was sure he could feel it in his palm. “Because I deserved it.”
Chapter Twenty
There was no way he’d heard her right. She’d deserved it? No one as sweet and innocent as Lila Jordan could deserve this kind of damage. Especially delivered at her own hand.
Branch swept his thumb along the ridge of her scar, memorizing every pucker, every dip. But it was the anguish in her expression that held him captive. “I can’t imagine that’s true.”
“You’re wrong.” Her tongue darted across her mouth again. A nervous habit he’d noticed in the past few minutes. A coping mechanism meant to distract her brain from oncoming pain, and Branch could do nothing but hold her here in the present. “When I was seventeen, my sister and brother-in-law lost their house. He’d been fired from his job and couldn’t seem to get his foot in the door anywhere else. They had to move into my parents’ house, but they didn’t want to be down in the basement away from everyone, so I volunteered to move into the room downstairs.”
Branch had to make a conscious effort not to tighten his hold around her neck as her voice turned disconnected. His breath became rougher, jagged shards of air cutting into the soft tissues in his chest. She was standing right in front of him, and yet she felt a million miles away.
“I’d always been on good terms with my brother-in-law. We joked around, you know. Like brothers and sisters weresupposed to. We hit the movies and watched soccer. I’d never had a brother before. It was fun. At first.” Her voice wavered, and he couldn’t help but hold his breath at the change. Usual permanent smile lines smoothed over, and right then, Branch didn’t recognize the woman in front of him. “My sister worked full-time to try to get them back on their feet. She mostly worked nights as an ER nurse. Her schedule was all over the place, so my brother-in-law was around a lot while he was applying to jobs, and I just had school, so I was home most nights. It was just him and me a lot of times while my parents lived their own lives, but after a couple weeks, something changed.”
An edge of concern singed his nerves. As much as he craved to learn all the little things that made Lila tick rather than the perceptions of what everyone else believed, he had no intention of retraumatizing her, of making her live through what was obviously a topic she hadn’t shared with anyone. His mouth dried as quickly as the desert around them. “Lila, you don’t have to—”
Her eyes raised to his. “He started sending me texts.”
His intuition kicked in, but he wouldn’t jump to conclusions with her again. He wouldn’t let anyone or anything tarnish the free spirit digging her nails into his forearms. It took more effort than it should have to ask his next question. “What kind of texts?”
“The kind a brother-in-law shouldn’t be sending his sister-in-law, or a minor.” Lila sucked her lips into her mouth. Her jaw clenched, meaning she was biting down. Hard. “I never responded. I thought he was just playing some kind of sick joke on me that I didn’t get, but the longer I ignored him, the worse it got. There were demands. Pictures he’d taken of himself shirtless, sometimes pants-less. Videos while he…” She shook her head as though she could burn the images from her mind. “One night, I woke up with a hand pressed over my mouth andhis weight on top of me. I was so sure I’d locked the door, but he somehow got into my room. And he…forced himself on me. Multiple times.”
Removing his hand from her throat altogether, Branch put some much needed space between them as the rage he’d kindled since his divorce took hold. And he couldn’t take it out on her, would never forgive himself for hurting her. Devastation contorted her features, and his still-healing heart cracked all over again. The muscles in his jaw ached under the pressure of his back teeth, and all he could see was red. “Then what?”
Tears glittered in her eyes, and he felt like such an asshole right then for not being able to hold her the way she deserved. But it was too much. The violence that he wanted to inflict was on the brink of taking control, and he had no business coming within a foot of her.
“He threatened to hurt my sister if I told anyone, but the bruises… My mom noticed them. She walked in on me changing after one of my soccer games. I told her everything.” Lila wrapped her arms around herself, like it took everything in her not to fall into a million pieces right here in the middle of the desert, and Branch couldn’t keep his distance. Adding his strength to hers. Tremors wracked her upper body, and he only wanted to hold her tighter. Setting his forehead against hers, he took an exaggerated deep breath in an attempt to help her remain grounded.
Closing her eyes, Lila rolled her lips between her teeth. “She didn’t believe me. Thought I’d made it all up to get the attention they’d been paying to my sister. Of course, my dad found out. Then my sister. My brother-in-law denied everything. I showed them the texts he’d sent, but it didn’t matter. I was a seventeen-year-old girl who’d played pranks on my family from the time I could talk.”
He…hadn’t expected that, and a visceral red coated his vision. The only thing keeping him from marching back to headquarters and getting his hands on the name of the man who’d done this to her was the near-death grip she kept by fisting his shirt in her hands.
“I got kicked out of my house. I came home from school and found all my stuff on the front lawn.” Lila stared past his shoulder to the great expanse of sky above, but her voice had lost some of its strength. “I pounded on the front door for hours, trying to get them to listen to me. Begged them to believe me. My mother answered after a while, and I thought she’d finally see the truth.”
Branch’s gut tightened. And then his heart broke all over again. Only it wasn’t for himself this time. It was entirely for her, for the betrayal and the loss and the hurt she’d endured to get this far. “But she hadn’t.”
“She told me I wasn’t her daughter anymore. That I needed to leave and never come back and that I was destroying our family.” Her gaze slid back to his, but Lila wasn’t really there. This was a ghost. Not the Ranger Barbie persona she’d created. Not the woman he’d glimpsed at Angel’s Landing. He didn’t know this person. She was a disassociated stranger. “I didn’t find out until a few months later that my father started drinking after that. The alcohol… He took it out on my mom. My sister and brother-in-law had to move in with his parents, but she filed for divorce a few weeks later. I’d get text messages from her. Nasty things I never thought my sister would say to me.”
She looked at him as though he could fight these demons for her, and Branch wanted nothing more than to drive them back, but that wasn’t how reality worked. “My dad died in a drunk driving accident. He didn’t have any savings or retirement after spending it all on booze, so my mom lost the house. She had tostay with one of her sisters. In the end, I think she was right. I destroyed our family.”
“No, you didn’t.” Branch bent at the knees, putting her in his line of sight. The rage kindling under his skin took a back seat to the blatant pain in her expression. “None of what happened was your fault, Lila. The fault lies with your brother-in-law. He put you in that position. He put his hands on you. He hurt you. No one else.”
“It doesn’t matter, though, does it? My family wants nothing to do with me, even to this day.” She shook her head, a little more awareness coming back into her blue eyes the longer he held onto her. “One of my friend’s parents took me in. They made sure I had food and a roof over my head until I graduated high school, but it was never the same. There was always this…hole in my chest where my family was supposed to be. It’s still there. Making it hard to breathe.”
Tilting her head, Lila nonverbally begged him to ease that emptiness, and he could do nothing but trace her jaw with as much understanding as he could manage. Because he knew this pain, too. “My mom was supposed to help me shop for a prom dress. My parents were supposed to cheer for me as I crossed the stage to get my diploma. They were going to help me with college applications, and I’d planned on throwing my sister a baby shower once she got pregnant, but all of it was suddenly gone. Just gone.”
Branch had never felt more connected to her than right in that moment. He felt that same hole resonate in his chest as she brought hers into the light. One soul, two bodies. Hadn’t Plato or Socrates been one of the first ones to describe soulmates that way? Once whole before being rent in two by Zeus, leaving humankind to wander in loneliness and longing, searching for their other half. The way his body had tuned to hers so quickly, the way he hadn’t been able to ignore her or keep his distancefrom the beginning despite his best efforts, how her voice and her smile resonated with him on a cellular level. No one had affected him the way she had, not even the woman he’d spent his entire adult life with up until the divorce.
He skimmed his thumb across her bottom lip, loving the way his calluses caught against the soft skin. “I’m sorry. For all of it, Lila.” But none of this explained how she’d come to the point where her only option was a way out of this life at her own hand. “You blame yourself for your dad’s death. Your mom’s problems. Your sister’s marriage. Is that why you tried to end your life?”
