Hold Me (Love The Way Duet 2)

Besides. There are other things I know about Kamden.

“She’s like your little sister, but you didn’t go to visit her.” My tone is deathly low, and wrought with emotion I didn’t realize I had for that small fact. I don’t bother to hide it, the obvious pain he caused her. “She was alone, locked away, and you didn’t visit her once.”

All that color runs out of his cheeks, leaving him strangely pale in the gray light coming through the window. Ella told me he never went to visit her while she was at the Rockford Center, and that is definitely the kind of thing an older brother type would do. It’s most certainly the kind of thing Kamden should have done.

Kamden opens his mouth. “I—” A subtle shake of his head stops him from continuing. He was going to tell me one thing, and then he changed his mind. His thumbnail finding his bottom teeth as he leans back, once again he focuses on the empty fire. Another few long seconds go by. The rain makes it easier to sit through this conversation. It gives me something to listen to other than the beat of my heart and all my own thoughts. His expression gives me something new to think about; it reads nothing but regret. The longer I sit, the more questions build in my mind.

“I had a relapse,” he admits in a whisper and then clears his throat, meeting my eyes. “I didn’t go to see her, because I couldn’t. I know one of your dirty secrets. Now you know one of mine.”

“A relapse?” The leather armrest tightens under my grasp. Kamden stands up and shrugs off his jacket. He’s wearing a heather gray shirt underneath with his jeans. He’d look comfortable here if he weren’t trying to suppress so much emotion. He tosses the jacket onto one of the other chairs and sits down again.

“I overdosed.” Kamden’s mouth curves down, his cheeks reddening again, and I’d know that expression anywhere. I’ve seen it on my own face in the mirror enough times. He settles back into the chair and he’s joined by guilt.

Guilt. Real, pained guilt.

That heat I felt before dims instead as I watch him, finding no trace of deception.

Kamden clears his throat. “Fuck you for judging me.” His eyes are hard on mine now. He looks like this hurts to say even more than admitting the relapse. “I found her. I’m the one who found her. She’d jumped out of a window. Not this place. I can’t go back to her southern home. I thought she was dead. Lying there like a corpse, there was so much blood by her head. I thought she was dead.”

The image slams into me like a long-haul truck. Ella, lying lifeless and still on the ground outside some featureless window. The horrified feeling of coming upon her that way. The slow realization. Kamden wouldn’t have wanted to believe it was true. Reality would have forced its way in anyway. She had lived. Obviously she had lived. But there would have been a moment when his heart was in his throat, when his mind was screaming for her not to have done what she did. My own heart pounds to imagine it. I have to keep my face neutral with every bit of restraint I have.

It’s far more serious than I thought with Ella. I thought she had a moment of weakness once. Only once. “She tried to kill herself more than once?”

“Twice now,” Kamden answers and swallows hard. “She was admitted after she jumped out the window. The only thing that saved her that time was the railing. Her ankle caught it on the way down and prevented her from landing on concrete stairs.” He readjusts again in his seat, this time opting to sit back, his gaze focusing on the blanket. Like all he wants to do is hide beneath it. As if it could all be written off as a bad dream. “I couldn’t do anything about it. The police came. I was in shock. She’d jumped. It was obvious. I wasn’t there when they spoke to her when she woke up, they wouldn’t let me. They admitted her before I could do a damn thing to help her.”

A chill settles between us, dragging the tension down to the ground until it’s subdued entirely. All I can wonder is if Damon knows. My mind drifts to the file. Kamden’s quiet for another long stretch until he tells me, “And then, at the center, she drank drain cleaner. I’ve been—” He stops, putting a fist to his mouth, and takes a deep breath. Putting his hands in his lap before he continues. “I’ve been clean for a decade, but I couldn’t stop blaming myself.”

“For what? What did you do?”