Hell Without You (11 page)

Donovan,

I hope this letter finds you well – or as well as one can be, at war.

I’ve heard little more from Clementine than you have since she left for college three years ago. I do have her address though, and have enclosed it. I can’t imagine that she wouldn’t like to hear from you.

Wishing you a safe return from Afghanistan,

Viola

The sound of a slamming door jarred Clementine from her stupor, causing her to jerk. The letter slipped through her fingers, fluttering to the bedspread.

“Clementine?” Donovan’s voice radiated throughout the large, mostly-empty house.

She didn’t put away the letter, didn’t hide what she’d been doing.

“You’re back.” He appeared in the doorway, clad in jeans and a jacket over a thermal tee. After days away, his appearance was impressed upon her all over again – the sheer size and shape of him, the dark sheen of his hair and the way even his utilitarian work jacket couldn’t hide his muscles. Most of all, she noticed his eyes – they cut right through her, leaving her feeling as transparent as glass.

“I told you I would be.”

“I didn’t believe you.” He entered the room, still looking at her instead of the box open in front of her or the letter she’d picked up again.

“Is that why you moved back into this room?”

“I moved back in two days before you left for DC.” His voice was somehow both softer and rougher as he reminded her.

“Right.” Her own voice came out weak as she raised the sheet of paper she held. “You wrote to my grandmother – you had my address?”

She had no right to hurt because he’d never written her, but she did anyway.

“I wrote her. I never had your address.”

“But she wrote that she’d enclosed it.”

“She wrote that letter a couple weeks before she died. I guess her mind – her memory – wasn’t what it had been. She enclosed something, but it wasn’t an address.” He reached into the box, sifting through paper before he pulled out a photo. “This.”

Clementine blinked. “My third grade school photo?”

“The guys laughed when they saw it. You know, they were all getting these sexy photos of their girlfriends, wives or whatever, and the only picture anyone ever sent me was this. Had to tell them you were my kid sister. There was a recipe cut off the back of a turkey stuffing box and a grocery list with the photo, too – I think your grandmother raided the junk drawer.”

He stared at the photo for a few seconds before carefully replacing it in the box. “I wrote her back, but there was no reply. She’d already—” He looked away, a crease forming between his eyes. “I found out later she’d died. I never knew she was sick.”

Clementine’s heart clenched as she pictured him waiting – again – for a letter. For her grandmother to write back with the address he’d been anticipating instead of a stuffing box recipe and an ancient photo. “Her illness came on quick. I didn’t know either, at first. Of course, that was my fault – I didn’t stay in touch with her like I should have. I regret it now and Donovan… I’m sorry I didn’t write.”

“To your grandmother or to me?”

“To you. Both really, but I’m talking about you.”

His gaze was locked with hers, his mouth a full, unreadable line. “This the first time you’ve come back to Willow Heights?”

“I came one other time before – just for a couple hours – for my grandmother’s funeral.”

“Then I guess you didn’t know where to write to, did you?”

“No, but you tried to figure out where to write me. I could’ve done the same.” No one would ever have known. She could’ve written – in secret, safely. And he’d been in Afghanistan … what could her step-father have done to him there? Her heart buried in regret, she tucked her grandmother’s letter to Donovan back into its envelope and dropped it into the ammo box.

“I never heard anything from you, Clementine. After you left for college, I mean. Not a phone call. Not a letter. And you never showed up, never came home. I left a few months after you did. Got tired of waiting. Tired of living in fucking Shady Side. Guess I didn’t mind it so much when I had you – never spent much time at home then. But after you were gone it was all rust and smoke and watching my mom shoot up and rot in front of the soaps on the local channels because that was all there was to watch – the cable kept getting shut off.

“I’d be lying if I said I never thought of jumping into the quarry, but who’d want to die a nobody from Shady Side? Figured there was no reason I couldn’t go away and make something of myself too. The Ivy League wasn’t an option, but there are choices, even for people like me. I knew if I survived my enlistment period, I’d be somebody different – not that piece of trash from Shady Side anymore.”

“You’re not trash!” Her pulse spiked as anger heated her from the inside out. “Nobody can help what they’re born into, Donovan. You were never like the rest of your family and you know it.”

“You’re the only one who’s ever thought that. Used to think that meant something, but then you ran away and left me in the dust just like your family wanted. Not even a letter.” He frowned.

“I didn’t want to.” Her heart plummeted to her toes, and she could practically feel it cracking, just like the jam jar Donovan had knocked off the counter the first night she’d seen him sleepwalk. “I
hate
my family. I hate that I did what they wanted.”

“You stuck with their plan for seven years – made it all the way to the finish line. Doesn’t seem like you hated it that much.”

“I had to. Do you know what it’s like to have to do something? To hate it and not have a choice because there’s just no other option?”

He raised a dark brow. “You’re asking me that when you know I’ve been to Afghanistan? Jesus, you think I liked being over there? I read your grandmother’s turkey stuffing recipe a dozen times over because fuck, it was better than thinking about where I was. What I’d done that day. What I’d do the next. You think you know about obligation? I guarantee you wouldn’t have been shot or jailed if you’d tried to walk away from Columbia.”

“No, but
you
would have if I had, and that would’ve been worse!” She jumped up from the bed, stood and looked up, past his rigid jaw and into his eyes. “Maybe you’d still be in jail, or prison – or wherever they would’ve sent you – if I hadn’t gone!”

Her gaze was drawn irresistibly to his hands. Now, instead of imagining stripes of grease against his knuckles, she saw red. Blood. The mental image made her stomach draw up tight as her heart raced. “I’m sorry I didn’t write, but I’m not sorry I left – I can’t be. It was better than the alternative. Better than letting you be—”

“I’m not sorry for what I did, either.” His voice hardened. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I’d do it all over again.”

“I’m not saying you were wrong. I’m saying the second you touched Trevor, we were both fucked. That was it, Donovan – it! There was no way we could’ve both stayed after that. Either I had to leave for college, or you had to leave in handcuffs. What could I have done differently?”

She’d asked herself that same question thousands of times and had never been able to come up with an answer.

“My step-father would’ve had Trevor press charges in a heartbeat. The only way they’d let it go was if I agreed to leave immediately for college and stay there. No visits home. No contact with you. They got what they’d always wanted, and I – I had to give it to them.”

“
You
were the one who was hurt!” Donovan’s mouth twisted in an expression of pain and rage that shook her to her core. “
You
were the one who should’ve been pressing charges! Fuck your step-dad! There’s a special circle in hell for people like him, and if I thought I could get away with it, I’d send him there right away.”

“Life isn’t fair.” She held his hard gaze. “I couldn’t prove what Trevor did – he even deleted the photos. And nobody gives a shit what an eighteen year old girl has to say when her step-father is the chair of the County Commissioners’ Board, especially in a town as small as Willow Heights. And then there’s his money – the truth is irrelevant when you have the means to buy lies.”

Saying it all out loud left a bitter taste in her mouth and brought back memories of the months – the years – she’d spent simmering over the injustice, the betrayal her own mother had enabled.

“Your step-dad knew what that fuck Trevor did, and so did your bitch of a mother,” Donovan snarled. “I don’t give a damn what they pretended – they knew.”

“Yeah.” Ice stole through her veins. “I know. I know and I hate them for it. But don’t … don’t hate
me
for it. I did what I had to to keep you out of prison.”

Silent moments slipped by, the air so thick she could’ve cut it with Donovan’s knife, which rested below the mattress, where she’d hidden it. The only sound was of his breathing, and it made her pulse quicken as her gaze strayed to his chest.

“Can you honestly say you think I should’ve stayed just to watch you be hauled away and locked up?”

“Maybe you had to leave,” he said, his voice lower than before, “but you didn’t have to stay away. Seven years? Even if they’d locked me up, I probably would’ve been out sooner than that. You deserted me. You put something worse than bars between us.”

“I was afraid.” With her pulse fluttering in her throat, she suddenly felt more like she was pleading than arguing. Here it was – the moment she’d imagined so many times before. Imploring him to understand – to see that she’d only ever wanted to protect him.

“When I left for college, I was stuck in New York City without a car. It’s not like I could just hit the road on weekends. I guess I could’ve taken a bus, but I’d lived my whole life in Willow Heights – when I first arrived in the city, I was terrified to even hail a cab. I was eighteen and I was naive.  

“My mom and step-father even monitored my phone records until I found a job and bought a new wireless plan for myself. And they swore up and down that if I had any contact with you, they’d have you locked away. I believed them, and I couldn’t stand the idea. I was … trapped. And I was so afraid. I wondered constantly if they’d gone back on their word, if they’d pressed charges against you anyway.

“Every day, I scoured the local news online. I was obsessed. I thought I had to check – to make sure you hadn’t been arrested, to make sure they hadn’t done anything to you. For my entire first semester, the only news I had was the news I didn’t have – until a cousin of mine mentioned that she’d heard you’d joined the military.

“So then I knew – you were out of Willow Heights and my step-father’s reach. But you were out of mine, too.”

“I left a note—”

“Behind the brick. I know. I found it today.”

She breathed a sigh, doing her best not to shudder. “I didn’t know where you were. Turns out I didn’t even know which branch of the military you’d joined. I felt so lost – so cut off from you. I couldn’t even check the local news for your name anymore. And I wondered if you were sent to war – if you were hurt, or worse. I wondered every day, and I never forgot about you, even though I figured you’d forgotten about me.”

“You lied to yourself, then. I could just as soon forget how to breathe as forget about you. You know that.”

She shrugged. “I was in a new city, but I was still just a student. You had this whole new life – this adult life, this dangerous life. And I figured you’d end up on the other side of the world. It didn’t seem to me like anyone could carry old memories that far.”

“Memories are all you’ve got over there,” he said. “You have to fight them all the time – to be present, to have a chance at not getting blown up. Let them eat you alive, and you’ll end up dead.”

She couldn’t stop rambling, couldn’t stop verbalizing all the feelings she’d kept bottled inside for so long. “You’d gone off to be this new person – left Willow Heights behind. So I thought I had to do the same thing. I really threw myself at my studies after that. I wanted to be someone new, someone better – because I hated who I’d been, what Trevor did to me and what I did to you. I just … didn’t want to be that person
anymore. Do you see what I mean?”

Yeah, she was definitely pleading now, and her eyes stung. Because if he didn’t understand, then no one ever would.

“I didn’t want to be who I’d been, either. Being one half of a whole was fine when I hardly ever had to be on my own, but after you were gone, it didn’t suit me much – hurt too bad.”