“Yes, ma’am.”
I turned, pulled the door closed behind me.
Time to get to work.
Chapter 6
Kate
I didn’t like to think I was prone to temper tantrums anymore. But I felt like screaming into my pillow and flaying my legs a little, like I might have done when I was a toddler. I didn’t want him here. Just looking at him brought back so many memories that I had finally come to terms with, that I had finally left behind me. Maybe if he didn’t look so good, if he didn’t look so much like he had back then…but better. Buffer. More masculine.
I’d thought Ash was good looking, but he really had nothing on Donovan.
When I knew him, his dirty blond hair was long, inclined to curl at the bottom. And those blue eyes? There was so much depth to them that you could never really know what he was thinking. I remember watching him from across a classroom, from across my own living room, wondering what it was that went on in that funny head of his. He was always the class clown, seeking attention where it wasn’t necessarily a positive thing. Polite as all hell around my dad, but wild and crazy at school, always pulling pranks on people, always the bad boy all the girls drooled over. And I mean literally drool. I remember the way the girls on the cheerleading squad used to talk about him. Half of them wanted to sleep with him. The other half wanted to marry him.
But that was high school.
Now he was quieter. More cautious. I could see it in the way his eyes moved around a room. Just like Ash, he was constantly looking for an exit, a threat. What would that be like, always watching for the next fight? It couldn’t be very conducive to relaxation.
Not that I cared. He was the one who ran away to join the Army. He was the one who disappeared when everyone was still reeling from losing Joshua. He was the one who was a coward and couldn’t face what it was he’d done.
My head was pounding. I sat up and the movement made the room spin a little. But when it settled down, I got up and made my way to the bathroom. I needed a shower. I needed to get the smell of that damn hospital off my skin.
It reminded me too much of that day. It reminded me of the last time I spoke to Donovan.
“He’s dead!” I screamed as I approached him in the hallway of the hospital, just outside the ICU where my brother had spent the last twenty-four hours fighting for his life. I kissed my brother’s lifeless cheek goodbye and left the room, stepped out into the waiting room, and his was the first face I saw.
“He’s dead.”
I saw the grief in Donovan’s eyes, saw the pain slice his expression in half. But it didn’t really register through the shock that held me prisoner.
“Katie,” he said, reaching for me, “I’m so sorry.”
“You should be,” I said, allowing him to pull me close for a minute. “If you had been there, if we hadn’t…”
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled again.
“He’s dead. They did this to him.” I shuttered, as my imagination showed me a picture that was probably not far from the truth. Those boys, the same boys who’d confronted Donovan on the last day of school just after they found out that they wouldn’t be able to walk the stage at graduation because of a prank on the football coach that had gone wrong. Those boys who told Donovan they’d come for him, that he better watch his back. The same boys who wanted to hurt Donovan but killed my brother instead.
“It’s your fault.”
I felt every muscle in his body stiffen. I pulled back and looked up at him; I saw the guilt and the pain in his eyes.
“It’s your fault. If you hadn’t pulled that prank, if you hadn’t made it look like they did it—”
“Katie, that’s not—”
“You did this. You gave them reason to go after Joshua. And you weren’t there to protect him. You left him to this.”
“No, Kate.”
“You did. You’re the reason he’s on his way to the morgue, why my Daddy has to bury a child, why I have to live the rest of my life without my twin. It’s your fault.”
And then I hit him because I needed to hit something. I buried my fist in his chest over and over again. He never once tried to stop me, never made an attempt to grab my wrists. He just stood there, the most pain a human being is capable of feeling rushing through me, mirrored in his eyes. And when exhaustion caused me to fall to the floor, he knelt beside me and tried to help me to my feet.
“Don’t touch me!” I turned and looked at him. “I never want to see you again. Stay away from me, stay away from my dad. Disappear, Donovan.”
My last words to him were to order him to disappear. And he did. Not immediately. I saw him at the funeral; I saw my dad stop and talk to him. He didn’t even try to talk to me. And then he was gone. I didn’t even know where he’d gone until a mutual friend told me months later that he’d joined the Army, went off to be G.I. Joe. And that pissed me off. He didn’t even try. He just ran away, escaped the nightmare that I had to live every second of every day. It wasn’t bad enough that I lost my mom and then my brother. I also had to lose…