If Forever Comes (Take This Regret #2)(6)
Author: A.L. Jackson

Fuck.

And neither was I. Not even close.

I knew she could feel me, the severity of my hidden stare, even when I was doing my best to conceal it beneath the suffocating tension that ricocheted between us every single time we were in the other’s presence. She tucked her chin deeper as if she could deflect my concern, curled and clenched her hands.

God, seeing her engagement ring on her left hand killed me.

I wanted to shake her. To beg her to snap out of it.

To plead with her to open her eyes and see. To remember exactly why she’d allowed me to place that ring there in the first place. I wanted to demand to know why she didn’t take it off.

But me pushing her was exactly what had cast the fatal stone, what had driven the last nail into splintering wood. The fracture between us was so profound, the pressure so intense, there was nothing we could do to stop the break. A separation of hearts when they just wouldn’t hold.

My gaze jerked upward when I heard footsteps above. Lizzie ran out of her room. She bounded downstairs, her inky black hair set free. Soft wisps and bangs framed that precious face. Her backpack bounced on her shoulders with each urgent step.

The pain in my heart ebbed. Just a fraction. But it was there.

This little girl was my light.

She smiled when she hit the last stair and hopped down into the foyer.

“Morning, Daddy.” She smiled through her haste.

“Good morning, princess. How’s my baby girl this morning?”

“I’m good, Daddy. I’m all ready for school and my backpack is all full, too,” she said with a distinct sense of pride and a resolute nod of her head.

“How about your lunch, sweetheart?” Elizabeth asked.

“I already packed it, Mommy. I’m all ready to go.”

“Well, I do believe you’re forgetting something, Lizzie,” I said, forcing myself to find a smile, to continue to show her how much I loved her.

Lizzie frowned, her little nose scrunched up in question. “What?”

“My hug, you silly girl.”

A roll of giggles escaped her, and she rushed in to hug me around the waist. I wrapped my arms around her shoulders, leaned down to bury my nose in her hair, breathed her in.

When she started first grade a few weeks ago, she told me she was too big for me to hold her anymore.

God, did I ever disagree.

All I wanted was to pick her up so I could feel the weight of my daughter in my arms.

The way she was squeezing me now, I thought maybe she was feeling the same way, too.

“I missed you so much, Daddy,” she finally whispered, all the levity from before gone, replaced with the gravity of our situation.

“I missed you, too, sweetheart. More than you could ever know.”

She’d matured so much. The child had to have grown at least three inches over the summer. But where that maturity was really noticeable was in her expressions. Her cheekbones were becoming more prominent as the soft roundness of her chubby cheeks slowly faded away, as that baby face gave way to a little girl’s.

And her eyes. The vast innocence that had swum in their depths had been erased in time, wiped out by circumstances no child should ever have to face.

“I think I’m going to need one of those, too, Lizzie,” Elizabeth said with a tip of her head. Her smile was as forced as mine.

When we were with Lizzie, Elizabeth and I did our best to pretend as if everything was fine. It was the worst kind of deceit. The child had been affected just as severely as we had been, even if she hadn’t been able to fully grasp the meaning. She only knew that the life we’d finally attained had been destroyed, that for six weeks, there’d been so much torment filling the walls of this little house, none of us could breathe.

And then she’d known her daddy had left.

Her sixth birthday had come with such joy. We had a party just as big as the one I first attended the year before, although this one had been without all the unease and tension that had tarnished her fifth birthday party. None of that had existed on her sixth. Our family had been whole. Complete.

A week later, the security she found within the walls of that home had been crushed.

There was no doubt all of this had rocked her.

I glanced at the delicate gold ring she wore around her finger, the one Elizabeth and I had given her the night after I’d proposed to Elizabeth.

The commitment we had made to Lizzie was one we refused to break. No matter what happened between us, Lizzie would always know she was adored by both her mother and father. There was no fighting whether Lizzie would still be a part of my life. It’d come without question.

Now, it was just Elizabeth and I floundering, trying to figure out how to make all of this work.

Work.

Agony constricted every cell in my body, as if the life were being squeezed out of me, a slow asphyxiation. It was hard to comprehend how much standing here truly hurt. Physically. Mentally. Emotionally. It was excruciating.

Nothing about this worked.

We were barely surviving, just fumbling through the days.

And all of them were spent missing my girls.

Lizzie turned and mashed herself to Elizabeth. Elizabeth ran her fingers through Lizzie’s hair and placed a tender kiss on the crown of her head.

“I’ll be there to pick you up after school,” she promised as she stepped back to free Lizzie from her hold.

“Okay, Mommy.”

I rubbed at the sore spot on my chest, wishing there was some way to soothe it. Hide it. Cover it. But there was no relief found in this miserable situation. How could there be? Because all I wanted were the two girls standing in front of me, and having only one of them for meager minutes a day did nothing to fill up the aching void.

Picking Lizzie up every morning for school took me to my highest high while it simultaneously knocked me to my lowest low.

Those precious moments with her were the only thing in this lonely life that I cherished. But leaving her there at the school entrance, watching her hair swish along her back as she disappeared through the gate, was the worst kind of reminder of what I was missing.

Warily, I glanced at Elizabeth. The woman I loved. The one who wouldn’t even spare me a glance.

I swallowed the lump in my throat. “We’d better get going or you’ll be late for school,” I coaxed as I brushed my fingers along Lizzie’s shoulder.

She nodded, the sweet smile making a resurgence. It was as if the child didn’t know how to act, the joy that lived deep within her, that natural goodness vying to make its way out while the sorrow that had taken over our lives fought to keep it down.