Page 84 of The Backtrack
“You are not just walking away from me. Not again.” And then he walked toward her, as if to prove his point, with powerful strides that shook the ground beneath her. “Do you really think I would just let you leave? After everything we’ve been through then and now, do you actually think that you’re just going to leave?”
And Sam didn’t really know what to say to any of that. Her mouth fell open, as if to say something, but she couldn’t. She’d never seen Damon this forceful with anything, certainly not with her.
He cleared his throat and their eyes met, and she finally felt her body relax under the weight of his gaze. He was annoyingly calming that way. “All those years ago, I thought we’d be together. I really loved you. You broke me when you left. Maybe you don’t know that, but you did. I thought what we had was going to be forever. And you left, like I was nothing. Like we were nothing.
“I hoped that you would come back. But then months passed, and years, and I gave up. I gave up on ever seeing you again. But then you did come back. You’re here. And when I saw you, I realized that I’ve been waiting for you all this time. Just standing in this same spot and waiting. I can’t just let you go and pretend like there’s nothing between us.”
Sam realized she hadn’t blinked in quite some time, and when she did, the tears she’d been holding back fell quickly down her cheeks. She bowed her head and wiped them away with her fingertips.
“Sam?” Damon closed the space between them, and his index finger gently lifted her chin. “I can take it. I lost you once, and I can do it again. But you can’t just run. You need to tell me you don’t want to try.”
And he looked like he was bracing himself for the inevitable letdown that Sam always brought with her wherever she went. She’d always, without fail, manage to disappoint Damon. Because while Damon was perfect in every possible way—thoughtful, caring and he loved her—Sam’s default was to run. And while she may not want to run from Damon in this exact moment, eventually she would. And she wasn’t going to let that happen. She couldn’t say yes to him when she knew that she’d inevitably need to leave.
“I don’t want to hurt you.” She grabbed his wrist and held him there. “You saw what happened in those visions. If we can’t work then, why would we work now? I think that’s why we’re being shown these—a warning that we’d never work out.” Sam hated how harsh it sounded; it made her sad, too. But she didn’t see any other meaning to the visions. She was always destined to leave Tybee, and Damon was meant to stay.
His gaze fell to the ground and the finger that had lifted her chin fell, too. “If you really think you’re going to leave here and never come back, like you did before, then maybe you’re right,” he said.
She didn’t know how to answer him then. Damon loved her. She loved him. It was that simple, and also that complicated. She knew that whatever answer she gave would have to be her final answer. There was no middle road with them, not when both of their hearts were on the line.
Her phone rang and snapped her out of her trance. She pulled it out of her pocket. “That’s Pearl,” she said.
“Take it,” he said.
Sam answered the call. “Grandma?”
“Sam.” Her grandma’s voice was tight and high.
“What’s wrong?” Sam asked.
“I need you to come home,” Pearl said. “Hurry.”
36
Grandma Pearl was not a woman who asked for help often. Even with trying to sell the house, she hadn’t officially asked Sam to come back home. Sam had come because she knew Pearl needed her there.
So when Pearl told Sam to come home in a hurry, Sam did exactly that. And even though Damon had implied he was worried Sam might run again, he didn’t stop her. She knew they still needed to talk, but it would have to wait.
When Sam got out of her rental car, Bonnie was on the front porch waiting for her. “What’s all this about?” Sam sidestepped a palm frond that had yet to be moved to the street for pickup.
“Pearl wants to tell you herself.” Bonnie nodded for Sam to follow. They walked around the side of the house until their feet sank into the flour-like sand and gulls hovered in the sky above them. When they got to the back, Pearl sat in the middle Adirondack chair and patted Sam’s chair as a signal for her to sit.
“Are you okay?” Sam quickly asked as she took a seat. “You’ve got me worried now.”
Bonnie sat in the chair on the other side of Pearl. It was the first time the three generations had been in this spot together in years.
Bonnie reached for Pearl’s hand and held it. “Your grandma and I had a heart-to-heart this morning.”
Pearl tipped the brim of her sunhat lower to shield her eyes from the revealing light. “It’s time for the truth.”
Sam straightened. She was still emotionally raw from her morning with Damon, and while she didn’t know where this conversation was leading, the truth didn’t sound light.
Pearl continued, “I made a mistake. Well, I made a few mistakes. And one of them was discouraging your mama from coming back to see you. She wanted to, a few times, but I was worried she’d do more harm than good. So I asked her not to.”
Sam’s mouth went completely dry. While she’d heard Bonnie tell her this, she didn’t actually believe her grandma would do something so cruel. And she was more than a little shocked that Bonnie was the one who’d been telling the truth, in the end. “You kept my mom from me,” Sam said. “How could you do that?”
“She was an alcoholic who abandoned you, and I was worried she’d do it all over again. That’s how,” Pearl said and sat back in her chair.
It was a fair point. But it didn’t make what she’d done right. “Grandma, you understand how wrong that was, don’t you? You saw how upset I was. How angry I got at my mom. Any of those times you could’ve told me that she’d tried to reach out. You made me believe she didn’t want anything to do with me. Do you know how much that traumatized me?”
