All the Pretty Poses (Pretty #2)(51)
Author: M. Leighton

“Can we talk?” I ask.

I feel her stiffen. “Of course.”

“I know this might be hard for you, but I need to work all this out. Will you tell me about the baby?”

I feel as much as hear her sigh. “Oh, Reese, she was beautiful. For the hours that she lived, she was the sweetest baby in the world. She had your hair, dark and a little wavy. A head full of it from the moment she was born. Her little hands and feet were the most precious thing I’ve ever seen. And the way she fit in my arms when I got to hold her…even for those few minutes…”

I can feel her anguish. It’s different than mine, but I feel it nonetheless.

“Where is she buried?”

“At Bellano,” she sniffs. “Near the cottage. Hidden”

“Malcolm never knew?”

“I never told anyone. I can’t be sure who Hank told. Malcolm found out about her somehow. He might’ve known where she was buried.”

I hesitate to ask this of her, but I’ll need her help if the grave is that hard to find. “Would you mind if we go visit her?”

She turns in my arms to look up into my face, her pale green eyes glassy with unshed tears. “No, I wouldn’t mind at all.”

The way she presses her lips to mine, like she’d rather kiss me than to take her very last breath, tells me that this will mean as much to her as it will to me.

It’s when we get to the old groundskeeper’s cottage that I begin to wonder if I might’ve been mistaken.

Kennedy gets quieter the closer we get to the place where she spent such difficult years. When I pull to a stop in the gravel drive that approaches the house from the rear, I hear her take a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“Does it still hurt you to see this place?”

She worries her lip as she thinks. “No, it doesn’t hurt. I just think of how much Hank changed after Hillary died, how he went from a loving husband and a good foster dad to a man who would want to put his hands on a child. It turns my stomach.”

I reach for her hand. “I’m so sorry that I never looked deep enough to see what you were going through.” It makes my guts twist into knots just thinking of what he did to her, even more so when I think that he cost her the life of her baby, of our baby.

She laces her fingers through mine. “You weren’t supposed to see. I didn’t want you to see. Although I desperately wanted someone to save me, I loved you too much to let you carry that responsibility. That’s why I hid it so well.”

“But I would’ve done things differently. I would’ve—”

She leans over to put her finger across my lips, shushing me. “I know you would’ve. I didn’t want you to stay because you had to or because I needed you to. I wanted you to stay because you wanted to.”

“I did, you know. I wanted to stay. I was just so weak. My father knew all the right things to say to get me to go along with him. I just… I hate that I’ve let him go this far. I hate that I didn’t put a stop to this long, long ago.”

“But you’re doing it now. Not all is lost, Reese. There is still so much life out there for you.”

I bring her hand to my lips and turn it over, kissing the palm. “For us,” I clarify.

She smiles. “For us,” she agrees before she reaches for her door handle. “Come on. Let’s go meet your daughter.”

Kennedy leads me around the house and into the woods to the left. We walk along a barely-there path until it just stops, just disappears into the dense undergrowth. She strikes out to the left again, weaving through the trees and stepping over a hollow log until she comes to a little patch of yarrow that completely covers the ground. She doesn’t have to tell me that we’ve arrived. The spot rests in sunshine and I can see the arrangement of rocks on the ground. They’re shaped like angel wings.

Slowly, I walk to where the wings meet and I kneel. Instinctively, I know I’m directly over the final resting place of the daughter that I’ll never get to see this side of heaven.

I feel Kennedy as she drops to her knees beside me. I feel the pitter pat of her tears as they coat the back of our joined hands with warm salt water. I feel them on my left hand, too. Only those aren’t Kennedy’s tears. They’re mine.

We stay like that for a long time, spending quiet time with our daughter, neither of us saying a word. It’s when we’re finally making our way back to the car that I find myself unable to hold back another thought.

“Do you ever think about having more children?”

From the corner of my eye, I see Kennedy look at me, but I keep my gaze trained forward. I don’t want to influence her answer one way or the other.

“Of course. But you don’t, do you?” she asks, a tinge of sadness in her voice.

“I didn’t used to. I’ve never wanted to have a baby with anyone else. But with you it’s different. I don’t think I’ve ever stopped thinking somewhere in the back of my mind that maybe one day we’d be together.” I stop, taking Kennedy’s other hand and tugging her toward me so that I can put my arms around her. “When I got the vasectomy, I talked to the doctor about the possibility of having it reversed someday. How would you feel about that? Would you want to have another baby with me, Kennedy?”

“Oh, Reese,” she says, tucking her head against my chest, but not before I see tears fill her eyes again. I feel a pang of guilt that I seem to make her cry so often.

“Don’t cry, baby. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

I hear her sniff several times before she looks back up at me. “These aren’t sad tears. These are my ‘happy as hell’ tears. There’s a difference.”

I smile at that. “Well, in that case…”

I bend my head to kiss her. Fire sparks between us quickly. With all the skeletons out of the way, it seems that we are closer. And the closer we are, the hotter that flames burn.

“I love you,” she says when I finally release her. “Thank you for loving me even though I’m not rich and I didn’t finish high school and I—”

“Wait, what?” I interrupt. “You didn’t finish high school? How did you—”

“I got my GED. When Hank took me out of school, I got too far behind to catch up, and after the baby died, I guess he saw me as soiled goods. He didn’t try to touch me anymore, but he wasn’t the least bit afraid of hitting me or kicking me if he felt like I needed it. So after he died, the first thing I did was go get my GED. That’s where I met Gena Lamareau. She was the teacher, but she also owned a little dance studio in town. Once she found out that I wanted to dance, she started letting me come by and participate in her lessons for free. Those were my first steps toward leaving my past behind and becoming someone that I wanted to be, to have something that no one could take away from me.”