Page 107 of The Weight Of Falling
I have to take a second to collect myself. “Why do you go to her?”
“I see her to make sense of my past and to help me handle my present.”
My eyes sting. “You don’t have to be finished with your past for me to want to be part of your future.”
Joel levels a look at me. “There’s another reason,” he says, his voice going husky.
I swallow. “What reason?”
Tenderness sweeps into his expression. “I see her because I’m done being a mess. And because I need to be the man who can look you in the eye and say, without flinching, I love you.”
I stand without thinking, and he’s on his feet a heartbeat later. Then I launch myself at him, wrapping my arms around his neck and my legs around his waist. He catches me easily, and I kiss him while tears pour down my cheeks.
“You love me?” I ask.
“I love you,” he confirms. “I love the way you rescue dogs and cry at movies. I love how you laugh with your whole body, how you talk with your hands when you’re excited, the way you hum when you draw.”
My throat tightens. In all the time I’ve known him, he’s a man who weighs his words carefully before speaking. But not in this moment.
“I love the way you tilt your head when you’re thinking, the way you care even when caring costs you sleep. I love how you can make a room feel like home the second you walk into it.”
My eyes blur. He leans his forehead to mine and keeps going, gentle and relentless.
“I love that you make me want to be the version of myself I didn’t believe I could be. When something good happens, you’re who I want to tell. When something hard hits, you’re where I want to land.”
I fall into the raw emotion in his eyes, and this time the falling doesn’t feel like a weight. It feels like floating.
A laugh breaks out of me, shaky and bright. “You’re really doing this.”
“I am.” He brushes a tear from my cheek with his knuckle. “You’re it for me. You’ve been it for me since you grabbed me in that storeroom and kissed me senseless.”
I close my eyes, memorizing the rough warmth of his hands, the quiet certainty in his voice, the way his strong, solid presence wraps around me.
“I love you so much,” I whisper, opening my eyes. “I love your strength, your steadiness, even your shadows. But, Joel...I need to know what those shadows are.”
Something passes over his face. I glimpse the battle brewing behind those dark eyes.
He sets me down, then gently pulls me to sit beside him on the couch.
And then he says, his voice rough and broken, “I think it’s time I tell you about my father.”
44
“My father is Roy Bellings.”
The name niggles at the back of my mind. Why does it sound familiar?
“He’s a serial killer who murdered six women before he was caught and jailed. The media called himThe Checkmate Killerbecause he left a chess piece with each victim.”
My entire body stiffens in shock.
It’s a moment I’ll always remember. The warm sunlight streaming through the living room window. The carefree laughter of children racing their bikes down the street. The low rumble of cars finding their way home.
Ordinary life against the backdrop of an extraordinary, terrible revelation.
“He copied Ted Bundy’s tactics,” he tells me, his voice gone distant, as though he can only speak by stepping outside the horror. “He’d choose someone and learn her routine. Then he’d stage an injury—a limp, a sling, bags he couldn’t carry—and ask for help. Their kindness cost them their lives.”
Disbelief tears through me with grief in its wake, a rising swell I can’t seem to ride out. I sit in stunned silence, trying to gather all the pieces of what he’s said and hold them in one place long enough to understand.
