"Yes." Shivering, I nodded. "I remember."

"I wanted to sleep on the beach that night," he continued, keeping his arms wrapped tightly around my small frame. "I begged you to stay with me, but you said that your daddy was away on business and you couldn’t –"

"Leave Bobby on his own with my mom," I filled in, feeling the memories of that night bombard me. "Because Daddy wouldn’t be home…"

"And your mom might not get out of bed to check on him if he cried," Daryl added quietly.

"I asked you to stay at my house," I whispered, biting down hard on my lip. "Because you always used to sleep over when you had a fight with Wren."

"But that night, I told you that I couldn’t sleep knowing he was across the street from me," he filled in.

"So I went home," I breathed, heart hammering violently. "And I told you that I'd come back first thing in the morning with something for you to eat."

"And I stayed at the beach," he added, blowing out a frustrated breath. "Or at least that's what I intended to do."

"But?"

"But a couple of hours in, I got worried," he admitted, voice pained.

"Worried about what?"

"About you," Daryl confessed with a shiver. "Because I remembered what Wren had said to made me snap and fight him."

"What was it?"

"Wren had said that the world would be a better place if your entire family just upped and disappeared, and that he'd told your mom exactly that when she called him on the phone begging and pleading to see him earlier in the day," Daryl bit out, tensing. "It made me think, and when I started thinking, I started panicking. I'll never be able to explain the feeling in the pit of my stomach that night – the one that was screaming at me to go back." A deep shudder seemed to roll through us both simultaneously. "So, I did. I went back – hell, I ran back. I had this god-awful feeling in my gut that something terrible was happening. When I finally reached our street, I saw your mother, standing outside, watering the flowers in her pajamas, and sobbing inconsolably. I didn’t think much about it. She'd been acting all kinds of strange so watering her flowers in the middle of the night wasn’t even that abnormal of behavior for her. Until…"

"Until?"

"Until she started watering your windows and front door and I quickly realized that what I had mistaken for water was actually gasoline."

"Oh my god," I wailed, burying my face in his chest.

"I hollered at her to stop. I remember shouting 'what are you doing, Mrs. Peterson?' but the minute she heard me, she ran back inside the house and locked the door," Daryl continued to recall, voice cracking in parts, as he tried to piece that night of terror together. "A few minutes later, the flames started to rise. It went up so damn fast, Molls. I'd never seen fire spread like that before, and I haven't seen it happen since."