Hard to Handle (Love in the Balance 2)

“I didn’t congratulate her, you know.” Sadie ran her fingertip along the edge of her glass. “I didn’t hop out of my chair or throw my arms around her. I just sat there and felt sorry for myself.” The tears were back, and finally a few spilled over when she confessed, “I didn’t even see the ultrasound.”

Whoa.

No wonder. Aiden imagined the scene unfolding. A table full of flowers and gifts, family members surrounding the guest of honor, and Celeste announcing she was pregnant. With Sadie’s ex-fiancé’s baby.

“Sadie,” was all he said. Her mouth pulled at the sides as she choked back what he guessed was going to be a sob. Aiden lifted her chin. “Sadie,” he repeated.

She blinked at him, stunned to have shown her real and raw emotions, and swiped her hands over her eyes to erase the evidence. She hopped off her chair so fast, Aiden had to catch it to keep it from falling over. He could almost hear her regrouping, the iron gates sliding down, the moat encircling her, the snapping alligators sliding into its depths…Sadie could shut down her feelings faster than he could say Batten down the hatches.

No one in her family cared to dig any deeper than the false surface she projected. It was easier for her mother and Celeste and Trey to write Sadie off as shallow and selfish and continue living their lives. They were the selfish ones, not Sadie.

Telling her that wouldn’t crack her defenses and Aiden was running out of time. The first night he met her he’d accidentally lured her out from behind her stone walls. All it had taken was a confession of his own.

He happened to have a doozy.

“I feel like I could have done more to save my mom’s life.” Wow. Saying that out loud hurt more than he’d thought. It worked, though. Sadie stopped fidgeting with the belt on her dress and watched him instead. “When my brothers and sister found out I’d moved her to Oregon,” he continued, “they were pissed.”

Sadie gripped the back of her empty chair.

“Mom was convinced the center we moved her into would save her life. Angel, Landon, and Evan tried to convince me to get her back into chemo.” He shook his head, remembering arguing with them in private, or via text, fighting with them as hard as he fought to keep their arguing a secret from Mom. “Mom didn’t want to have chemo. I refused to hound her about it. I figured she was where she wanted to be, and she seemed a little stronger, definitely more hopeful. “And seeing the hope in her eyes…” He blinked back tears of his own. “I just…I couldn’t take it away from her, you know?”

Sadie rested a hand on Aiden’s shoulder, her attention completely on him. Selfish, my ass. If she could see her face, she’d never for a second see herself as anything less than the radiant, supportive woman comforting him right now.

“When it was obvious she wasn’t going to recover…” He swallowed, felt like a bowling ball was lodged in his esophagus. “I brought her home.” And then his mother, his beautiful, strong, amazing mother, lost her fight.

“She lived ten more days,” Aiden said, feeling the pain of losing her spread across his chest like wildfire. “Landon, Angel, and Evan had barely had time to come home and visit before she passed.” They still held it against him.

“I should have made her get chemo,” Aiden said. He’d thought it a thousand times—a million times—since the funeral, but this was the first time he admitted it aloud. And hearing it now…God. He could hear the truth in his words.

He’d been thinking lately how he hadn’t really fought for her. Sure, he’d sat in waiting rooms for acupuncturists, nutritionists, and even a hypnotist. He’d scheduled her appointments, pushed her thinning body around in a wheelchair; he’d filled out her paperwork and written checks and reported back to Dad. But he hadn’t fought. Not for her.

“I thought I was doing the right thing,” he told Sadie. “But all I did was sit around…and wait for her die.”

He was suddenly seeing things so clearly from his siblings’ points of view. Whoever came up with the saying “the truth hurts” deserved an award for that golden nugget of accuracy. The truth did hurt, and right now it was slashing at his insides like Freddy Krueger.

Sadie put a palm over his forearm, and when Aiden tilted his chin down, a tear splashed onto the top of her hand.

* * *

Vulnerability was not Sadie’s forte. If asked, anyone she knew would say she was as stoic as a Viking ship in gale force winds in the middle of a raging sea storm. And yet, Aiden had been here no more than ten minutes and she’d opened her case of secrets and laid them out like prized jewels.