He could say he was sorry. He could...what? Promise her forever? To stay on in this town that had him tangled into emotional knots? The place where his life had been severed in two? Where he’d found Sheila so horrifically dead? Where he’d lost his family, the brother he loved, all faith in the forever he couldn’t promise Tess?
However much I love her?
Where he’d been turned into a pathetic, sobbing bundle of uncontrollable emotion?
The sobs kept ripping through his chest, shaking his whole body. He couldn’t seem to stop. He was breaking down, with no idea what would be left when he was done.
It was a long time before, dazed, he found himself lying flat on the grass he’d mowed just today with Tess’s lawn mower.
His fingers gripped the grass and earth beneath it as if they were all that held him from falling into an abyss.
He kept breathing and finally made a head-to-toe assessment. Face wet, eyes swollen and burning hot. Fingertips and the fleshy pads at the base of his thumbs stinging.
Slivers from the garage wall, he decided.
His stomach muscles felt as though he’d done a few hundred sit-ups. Legs...weak. Feet...okay. Zach was vaguely surprised to find any part of him was okay.
He lay there for what had to be another ten minutes before he managed to push himself to his hands and knees then stagger to his feet. Pure willpower kept him going, had him stooping to grab his bag. He made it up the porch steps, the pungent scent of lumber and fresh stain in his nostrils. No surprise his hand shook when he struggled to put the key in the lock, but he managed that, too.
Inside, he didn’t stop until he reached the bedroom, where he dropped the bag on the floor and collapsed onto his bed.
He rolled over and stared up at the ceiling, what little he could see of it with only diffused light from neighbors’ homes and the distant streetlamp.
This what you wanted?
No. God help him, no.
Tess’s house was home now. No, she was home.
This town could be, he realized, as long as he had her.
Took care of that chance, didn’t you?
Yes. He thought of himself as a decent man, one who felt compassion, who was capable of kindness. The need to protect dominated his personality, for obvious reasons. And yet he was a man who hadn’t felt much that was really personal in so many years he’d forgotten what it was like. He’d come back to Clear Creek to find Sheila’s killer. Everything he’d found instead was unexpected.
His brother and all the tangled emotions that had come with the reunion .
Tess. Yeah, she’d blindsided him. Because he’d sensed from the beginning he could feel too much for her, he would have avoided her if it weren’t for that overdeveloped need to protect. And now, it was too late.
He thought about that for a few minutes, feeling something ease inside him. No, he wouldn’t travel back in time so that he wouldn’t meet Tess, even if he could. She was everything to him.
Blew that, didn’t you?
Sheila.
He’d been so damned sure of himself, he thought. Mighty detective who could find answers where no one else had been able to. What he’d never let himself examine were his reasons for needing those answers. Tess had called it an obsession, and he guessed his plan to come back someday and hunt down a murderer had been that.
But what he let himself understand for the first time was that he’d been trying to accomplish something else. Had he thought he could undo everything that had gone wrong? Prove the flaws in his family hadn’t been to blame?
Or was Bran right? That what Zach had really wanted was to prove Dad was responsible, and therefore he’d made the right choice himself despite what he’d learned about his mother? And, hey, that would have meant Bran had made the wrong choice, not Zach.
So I could blame him for my pain?
Nobility in action.
He reached the point where he could sit up, feet on the floor, although he groaned getting there. Man, what he’d give for a hot shower, or even to be able to immerse himself in a bath.
A thought floated into his mind. Jacuzzi? Might be worth the extra bucks.
He dragged his fingers through his hair, imagining what it would look like when he went into work tomorrow morning. What he’d look like.
I have to fix things with Tess, he thought. That was central. He had to believe she would understand and forgive him.