It was no one’s fault.
Noah had wanted to get married and I didn’t; it was something we couldn’t compromise on and it was the end of our relationship. When said like that, it seemed easy to understand and to accept, but the reality of it was very different. It had been very hard for me to accept it was the end for us because I was still so deeply in love with her. So in love that, years later when she needed me, I still came running without a second thought or a moment of hesitation. I loved Noah Ainsley, and I always would.
She was my woman.
My person that was alone in the company of her husband who she planned to divorce. It eased my nerves, mind and racing heart to know that she had chosen me over him. It was even more comforting knowing that even if I wasn’t around, she would still be leaving him. He wasn’t the person for her, especially in the frame of mind she was in. He was a smooth-talking son of a bitch – I had heard him spin tales so easily the night I confronted him, and I’d learned that he was very good at making people believe what he wanted them to believe when he wanted them to believe it.
Present-day Noah wasn’t falling for his bullshit.
When he’d met her, she’d been in a low, dark place over our break-up; I didn’t need all the brains in the world to know that. He arrived in her life when she was at her lowest point, and the scumbag had sunk his claws into her before I ever got the chance to speak to her. It always made me tense when I wondered if things would have turned out differently if I’d spoken to Noah before Anderson entered her life. I had no way of knowing, but I believed that we could have talked at length about what was bothering us both, and we could have come to an understanding.
I would have rather been scared of marriage ruining us than losing her . . . The pain of that hurt more than I could ever describe. My mindset on marriage had drastically changed from the night Noah and I broke up. It was stupid to me that I’d been scared that marriage would change us, when in reality, the only thing that would change was Noah’s surname. Our daily lives would still continue, we would still have the future we’d planned together, and we would still love and be the person the other one kissed each night before bed.
I wondered if Noah believed me when I told her I wanted a life that involved everything with her. I wanted to stand in front of our friends and family and declare before them, before God, that Noah was the one I’d chosen to spend the rest of my life with. After bringing it up in the cemetery, I would leave her to think about it until she was ready to talk about it. Noah wasn’t one to keep things bottled up, especially when she needed an answer to whatever was bothering her.
That was exactly why she was in Anderson’s flat right now: she needed answers to the questions that plagued her mind.
“Me poor sasanach,” I mumbled to myself. “How can I make this better for ye?”
I already knew the answer. I couldn’t make any of this better for her. She had just found out Bailey had died – but what was worse, she now knew that the crash she was in was the same crash that killed my sister. I still believe that the decision to keep Noah in the dark was a sound one. If we had told her the truth weeks ago, then she would have reacted differently – and by that I mean she would have likely collapsed and maybe even died.
I could have lost her too.
Her brain was stronger now than it had been a few weeks ago, but I wasn’t fool enough to think she was healed. I saw the physical pain she’d been suffering in the cemetery. I understood that the emotional pain of Bailey’s death hitting her had overshadowed the pain in her head and body. I knew that later, once I had her home and alone, everything would hit her all at once. Her pain, Bailey’s death, the confusion of it all. It would slam into her when she had a moment to stop and realise the weight, and truth, of it, and I would be there to shoulder the burden with her.
I closed my eyes and heard her scream in my head as I remembered running up to her on the ground by Bailey’s grave. It was a wail of disbelief and raw pain, and a desperate plea for what she was seeing to not be true. I knew it because Noah had been voicing the scream that I’d been keeping inside since the night my little sister died. Noah couldn’t hold her emotions in, and I couldn’t let them out. Not because I didn’t want to – I just had a wall built up inside me to keep everything in check. It was the only way I could function.