Total pages in book: 200
Estimated words: 189898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 949(@200wpm)___ 760(@250wpm)___ 633(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 189898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 949(@200wpm)___ 760(@250wpm)___ 633(@300wpm)
No, you won’t.
Loren’s claim that I was no better than his father was a blow I hadn’t been expecting. I still hadn’t recovered. This insatiable need to control my universe and everyone in it was rooted deep.
All I had left of the source was a newspaper clipping and my grandmother’s memories of Susan and Jake Morrow. I’d been left behind to survive on my own in a world too cruel and chaotic to endure. I’d spent the last fifteen years since their deaths trying not to repeat the cycle, so whenever my world began to spiral, I grabbed the reins, and I held on tight. I never paid attention to who I was hurting or stifling. I only cared about my survival.
But what if I had looked beyond myself just once?
Would Rich have trusted me when I warned him not to marry Emily? Would I have convinced my friends to take Savant’s deal? Would Loren have pushed aside his pride and come to me rather than ruining our best friend’s marriage?
If I hadn’t indirectly caused all of the above because of my obsession with control, would Calvin have been able to turn them against me? Besides fucking Emily, all Everill had done was force to light resentment already brewing in the dark. Tearing Loren, Rich, and I apart was how he’d punished us for keeping him out.
Our past was four runaway trains heading to four destinations, only to crash and burn at one intersection.
As much as I was struggling with our turbulent present, my persistent thoughts wouldn’t allow me to push away the most important question of all. If our past had played out differently, would we have ever met Braxton?
I hated that the answer wouldn’t allow me to regret my actions fully. I wasn’t convinced the universe I fought so hard to rule would have found another way to place her in our path.
The love of our life would have slipped us by, and that would have been my fault too.
Fuck.
Ringing the front doorbell, I crossed my arms as I leaned against the pillar and waited. Here’s to hoping Loren still cared enough to come back on his own.
I didn’t have to wait long since Orson James insisted on round-the-clock staff. Loren, Rich, and I hired a cleaning service twice a week and someone to handle the landscaping, but other than that, we fended for ourselves.
Out there in the woods, we were able to pretend that we’d carved out a world only the three of us inhabited.
Braxton, when we got her back, would know what that felt like too.
“What do you want?” Loren asked.
He’d taken me by surprise answering the door himself, but it was the beard adorning the lower half of his face and the blond hair covering his forehead and eyes, making him look like a wet dog, that caught me off guard. He wore stained gray sweatpants, a white T-shirt, one sock, and smelled like he hadn’t showered in three or four days.
“Loren?”
He didn’t bother answering my stupid question. He turned around and shuffled away, leaving the door open, so I followed him inside. The house was mostly quiet since it was mid-morning on a Monday. I was sure Orson was busy running the empire he’d lorded over his son for years. It just showed how little he knew him.
Loren belonged on a stage, not inside a boardroom.
He sure as fuck didn’t care about metal fabrication or whatever made his father rich enough to believe his ambitions mattered more than his son’s.
“Why are you here?” Loren muttered when I followed him into his childhood bedroom. Unlike my grandmother, his parents hadn’t left it alone. They’d converted it into a guest room, completely wiping away everything that helped shape Loren into the man he was today. It was only unusual or unnecessary when you had nine other available bedrooms for guests.
He took a seat on the foot of the queen bed before planting his back on the mattress and closing his eyes.
“You know why,” I said as I watched him from the doorway. “Come home.”
“I am home.”
It took everything I hoped to be one day not to storm across the room and wring his goddamn neck.
He didn’t get to say that shit to me.
When Loren’s father threw him out for finally getting his mother to leave him, he had no one else but us. We were his family, and it had been that way ever since. Loren thought it had all been in vain when his mother crawled back like a thoroughly whipped dog, but it hadn’t. We made sure of it.
I then took that shitty deal with Savant and convinced my friends to do the same.
I couldn’t let Loren back under his father’s thumb. He’d been close to giving in and ready to accept whatever scraps his father threw for a price much too high when that deal came to the table.