Things We Never Said (Hart's Boardwalk 3)

I saw my sister in her room before the accident. Sitting at her vanity table putting on her makeup, laughing with me about everything and nothing. Sliding the rose brooch I’d made onto the lapel of her blazer, and throwing me a sweet smile. So young and alive. Her whole life ahead of her. One stupid phone call changed that forever.

“You are everything that makes me happy,” I confessed.

“Dahlia …” He moved as if to come to me, and I warded him off with a wave of my hand.

“If I let myself be happy like that, then I’m afraid that everything my mom thinks, everything Dillon thought about me, was true. She cared about you, and I knew that, and I didn’t care back then, Michael. I wanted you so much, nothing else mattered. I convinced myself that she’d forgive and forget and it would all be okay. Even as she lay in that hospital bed, I resented her for hating me for being with you. She made my mom hate me too. And I blamed her for that. That night in your car when we were about to make love, and I thought she was calling to interrupt, there was a moment, just a flash, when I selfishly wished she didn’t exist.”

“God, Dahlia—”

“She’s dead. Gone. And I’m still here. But maybe if I live half a life instead of a full one, then she’ll know, wherever she is, that I love her more than I love myself. Because she died never knowing that and I have to show her now somehow …”

He stared at me, lost, as my broken words echoed around us.

Michael rubbed a hand over his beard and hung his head.

He got it now.

He understood.

“I have never”—his head jerked up, his eyes flashing irately—“heard anything so fucked up in my entire life.”

I jerked back like he’d hit me.

Michael stood, his whole body bristling. “You loved Dillon. Everybody knows you loved your sister. You were never away from her bedside. So you resented her a little? So fuckin’ what? She was a great girl, she was, but Dillon had your mother’s nature, and she was spoiled. She didn’t love me.” He pointed to himself in exasperation. “Dillon was pissed because she thought you’d stolen one of her toys, and she was angry at the world because a fuckin’ asshole tore through a red light and smashed into her. No one can blame her for being angry about that, but she decided to take that anger out on you. And you took it. You took it better than most people would because you loved her. And it’s okay to have felt resentment about that. It’s called being human, Dahlia.

“But this,” he said, gesturing between us, “giving up your chance at happiness to even some fuckin’ cosmic score with Dillon is beyond screwed up!”

Anger seethed within me, and I launched to my feet. “Do you know how hard it was for me to tell you that?” I pressed a fist to my chest. “I’ve never told anyone that!”

“Yeah, because it’s messed up!” He crossed the room and grabbed my shoulders, bending his head to mine. His voice lowered, his words desperate. “You’re not only forcing yourself to live half a life here, Dahlia. You’re asking me to as well.”

Just like that, my anger deflated.

More guilt filled me.

Great.

“That’s not fair.”

“No. But it’s the truth. You loved your sister, but how much do you love me?”

I was afraid of how much—that was how much I loved Michael Sullivan.

Lifting my hand in his, he placed it over his heart where I could feel it thudding wildly. “I can exist without you, Dahlia. But I can’t live without you. Don’t make me.”

Fury hummed in my veins as I switched off the TV. Ian Devlin had given a grief-stricken statement to the news about how he believed the sheriff’s department and a certain detective were not only failing in their pursuit of the criminal who had murdered his son but were daring to blame the corruption inside the sheriff’s department on him.

Bastard.

It was on national news.

Deep concern for Michael suffused me. After I’d left his house that morning, unable to answer his plea to love him, I hadn’t been able to get the look on his face out of my head.

For once, instead of locking that shit up tight, I’d gone to Bailey. She no longer slept at the inn but had shacked up with Vaughn in his stunning, multimillion-dollar beach house.

Vaughn had answered the door in his pajamas, the scowl of annoyance he wore disappearing at the sight of me disheveled and tearstained on his doorstep. Ushering me in as Bailey hurried downstairs in her robe, Vaughn had made us tea and then discreetly disappeared back upstairs so I could spill my guts to my best friend.

Afterward, I fell asleep on their couch.