Written with Regret (Regret #1)

by Aly Martinez

She didn’t have a mother, but I could give her something worth remembering. I could give her a father she wanted to pass on parts of to her children—DNA she could be proud of.

Not everything was black and white. It was often in the gray areas where the hardest decisions were made.

“Because life isn’t lived as a whole. You aren’t given a hundred years all at once. Time is doled out one very manageable second at a time. Stop looking at the big picture and find happiness in the seconds.”

We were two people who had experienced the inside of Hell and lived to see the other side. Every once in a while, the flames would still devour me. The least I could do was try to extinguish hers.

These tears were different though. They were formed in a place so dark that only a few people knew it existed. They were born in urgency and filled with fear, torn from your soul, leaving a gaping hole behind until it eventually felt like you were going to disappear altogether.

But you didn’t disappear, no matter how much you wished you could. And that made them the most terrorizing emotion of all because there was no escaping those tears. The only thing you could do was hope there were enough pieces of you left to pick up when it finally passed.