“I knew about the order.” She swallowed and glanced away before bringing her gaze back to mine. “You didn’t know it was him.” She stated it as fact rather than questioning me.

I shook my head. “Not until it was already too late.” If she knew about the order, did that mean she knew about the choice I’d made, too?

She nodded slowly, as if confirming an idea she hadn’t voiced. “I don’t forgive you. There’s nothing to forgive. You loved Sullivan more than anyone in the world. What happened over there had to have been out of your control, because you would have died with him otherwise. You never would have come home without him.” Her voice dropped to a whisper.

“But I did.” Somehow my voice made it through the stranglehold of my throat.

“You did.” She smiled and swiped away another tear. “So I know there wasn’t anything you could have done. I know, Cam. I. Know.”

Her words were supposed to bounce off my walls. They were supposed to fall flat with the I’m so sorry for your losses and the let me know if I can do anything for yous. Instead those soft, healing words slid right into the mortar of my defenses. Instead of attacking, they simply sat and soaked in.

And when the tension was too much, when it threatened to slice me in half and bleed me out, she didn’t push me to accept or even acknowledge her absolution. Instead she leaned back against the couch and simply asked if I still read out loud like I had when we were kids.

So I picked up East of Eden from the coffee table, even though I was already halfway through its nearly six hundred pages, and I began at page one.

“The Salinas Valley is in Northern California.”

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Twelve

Willow

I blinked awake slowly as sunlight streamed in through the picture window, hitting me directly in the face. Sheltering my eyes with a hand, I glanced around the room, the events of last night flooding in.

Right. I was in Cam’s living room, stretched out on one of the leather couches with a quilt his mom had made covering me.

He was directly across from me in pretty much the exact same condition on the other couch, but he was still asleep. Both of us had been too stubborn to take his bed, so neither of us had. Taking advantage of this rare moment, I blatantly stared at him, committing every detail to memory.