Catch Me When I Fall (Falling Stars 2)

I blinked through the inner chaos, through the searing heat that I could feel burning me alive from the inside out.

A blistering torment that I wasn’t sure I would ever escape.

A knot grew thick in my throat, emotion racing up from where I’d been trying to keep it buried for weeks.

Pretending as if I was goin’ to be just fine.

My mama settled beside me on the lawn. The two of us stared off into the sagging heatwaves that glimmered across the rolling planes.

“I’m so sorry, Emily, about what happened to you. I . . . I still can’t fathom it. The horror of it. There is no worse feeling for a mother than to know one of your children has been hurt and you weren’t there to stop it. That there’s nothing I can say or do now to fix it. Erase it. And God, that is the only thing I want to do. I want to take that pain from you.”

I let my attention drift over to my mama, who was wearing her own heartbreak. “You know that it’s not your fault. I’m a grown woman.”

“But you’ll always be my baby,” she told me, her brow twisting, trying to get me to see.

I got it.

I got it so much.

“The only thing that matters is he can’t hurt anyone anymore,” I whispered.

“Is it? Is it the only thing that matters?” she asked, angling her head to the side in a bid to take in my response, to watch for my truth, because we both knew this was so much more than the trauma from Cory.

I sucked a heaving breath into my aching lungs. It trembled back out in an undulating wave of misery. “I couldn’t sing, Mama. I couldn’t write. All the songs that had burned inside of me dried up.”

Gathering my fingertips to a pinpoint, I pressed them to the vacant spot in the middle of my chest. “It’d been that way since I was assaulted . . . a part of me that got locked up. Lost.”

I let my gaze drift out over the property, to the branches of the trees that rustled in the hot summer breeze.

A tremor ripped across my chest. “And then he found me, Mama . . . this man who I knew so much better than to fall for found me, and for the first time in my life, I felt like I truly belonged. Like someone got me for me. Like a part of me that hadn’t been there before had come alive. But I was wrong. So wrong. The only thing he did was leave me wandering. Adrift. Falling.”

I struggled for air. “Now, I’m lost. So lost, and I don’t know if I’m ever goin’ to find my way back.”

She reached over and threaded her fingers in mine.

Silent support.

Quiet encouragement.

Rocked with a spear of pain, I dropped my head, squeezed my eyes about as tightly as I squeezed her hand. “I’m pregnant, Mama.”

She squeezed back. “I know, sweet girl. I know.”

I lifted my gaze to hers. She sent me a secret, sorrowful smile. “You think I haven’t noticed you running to the bathroom every morning the last week?”

My lips trembled in something between a smile and devastation. “You know when you wish for something so badly, with all of your might for so many years, and then it’s given to you but it looks so much different than you ever imagined? You’ve got to wonder if you’re being taunted. Given a curse.”

A frown tipped her mouth down at the side. “Is that what you really think?”

A bluster of wind blew through, whipping my hair into disorder and rushing across my heated flesh. That cavern in the middle of me throbbed, suffering intense. But I welcomed it. Let myself feel. Maybe fully for the first time in weeks.

I shifted my gaze to my mother. This woman who had stood by me in every season of my life. Through tiny hurdles and the biggest obstacles.

Huge victories and the smallest wins.

“No, I don’t. Maybe I’m not sure how to hold this blessing. Not when it scares me so much.”

A soft smile pulled to her lips, and she reached out and tucked a wayward lock of my hair behind my ear. “The things that are the most important are what scare us the most.”

“No wonder I’d been terrified of Royce the first time I saw him,” I said.

“He sure looked plenty scared of you, too.”

My head shook. “No, Mama. I was a means to an end. Insurance.”

“Are you sure about that?”

My spirit screamed, thrashing and toiling, my mind etched with his expression from that night. “He admitted it himself.”

“Love makes us do drastic things, Emily.” She stood, dusted off the back of her shorts, and stretched out a hand to help me to standing. “Makes me wonder about the lengths he would go to for you.”