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All she’d wanted was a cookie.
Miss Becky had said once that he was only six months older than her six years, but he always seemed so much bigger, older than her, because in her eyes, he took up her entire world.
Don’t make a sound.
A lot could change in four years. The question was, had I?
Use your words.
That mantra contradicted everything I’d been taught for nearly thirteen years, because words equaled noise, and noise was rewarded with fear and violence.
They weren’t powerful enough, because how could they be when Carl and Rosa had saved my life? Literally and figuratively.
Real daughter. Dr. Taft had always corrected me when I referred to Marquette that way, because he believed it somehow lessened what I was to Carl and Rosa.
They saved so many lives, but couldn’t save the one that meant the most.
But becoming a surgeon required assertiveness, confidence and a damn near fearless personality, which were three adjectives literally no one would ever use to describe me.
I can do this. I will do this.
which was okay in a way, because I was used to being nothing more than a ghost.
the one who’d promised forever.
He had been the sole reason I survived the house we’d grown up in.
“My sister had him two years ago. She warned me that he basically thinks you need a dick to produce anything of literary value.”
Words were totally my bitch.
Toward me.
Now the reason why he’d popped in my head this morning made sense, because I’d seen him, but hadn’t realized it was him.
Eyes I’d never forgotten.
He recognized me; I had changed a lot since then, but still, recognition dawned in his features.
there were so many of him coming to my rescue for some reason or another until he couldn’t, until the promise of forever had been shattered, and everything…everything had fallen apart.
A mixture of hope and desperation swirled inside me, mixing with bitter and sweet memories I’d both clung to and longed to forget.
but as Ainsley would say, he was stupid-hot.
The trigger was sitting right beside me. This panic was real, because he was real, and the past he symbolized wasn’t a product of my brain.
He had… He had taken a lot of crap for me, because of me.
Most important, was he safe now?
We had been yin and yang. My cowardice to his bravery. His strength to my weakness.
“Rider Stark.”
Everything that had happened to Rider mattered, even when it had felt like the world couldn’t have cared less.
“Holy crap,” I whispered as I stared out the windshield. “Holy crap.”
Everything except for Rider, because he’d deserved not to be forgotten. But he was the past—the good part of my past, but still a past I didn’t want to remember.
Walking to me, she wrapped her arms around me and squeezed tight.
Rosa might not have been my mother by blood, but she was everything a mother should be, and I was so damn lucky.