Ashes, p.1
Ashes, page 1
Copyright © 2023 by Abbi Glines
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Editor: Jovana Shirley, Unforeseen Editing, www.unforeseenediting.com
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Copyright
Playlist
Prologue
I One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
II Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Acknowledgments
ashes Playlist
Last Kiss
Taylor Swift
You Could Be Happy
Snow Patrol
The One That Got Away The One That Got Away
Katy Perry
The Dance
Garth Brooks
Never Let Me Go
Florence and the Machine
Back to December
Taylor Swift
Run to You
Lea Michele
Stay
Rihanna, featuring Mikky Ekko
Strong Enough
Sheryl Crow
Die for You
The Weeknd
Still into You
Paramore
I’m Yours
Jason Mraz
To every heart that still belongs to “what could have been.”
Oakley
My granny had said this was the first of many heartbreaks that life would deal me. It was best for me to face it young, toughen up, and learn to love the moment because tomorrow could always bring a pain we weren’t expecting. That was quite possibly the saddest thing I’d ever heard.
But as I stood there, in the back of the church, I knew there was truth to it. Besides, you didn’t live seventy-six years and not know what you were talking about. Granny had to be wise. I just wished she were as senile as my stepmother claimed. Then, at least there might be hope for my future just yet.
The guests had started to arrive, and I was expected to have a bright smile, happy for my stepsister, Sylvia, but I knew I couldn’t manage that right now. I also wasn’t sure I could stomach watching her get ready to walk down the aisle. With my dad giving her away when it should be me he was giving away. Sylvia had her own dad. It wasn’t my fault she had chosen to ignore him. It felt as if she was taking everything from me. But then hadn’t that always been what she wanted to do? She wanted my life, and it seemed she was getting her wish. Taking it all.
Trying my best to flatten the layers of chiffon on the skirt of the most hideous bridesmaid dress there ever was, in order not to brush past people and draw attention to myself, I hurried to the back door of my granddad’s church. Okay, fine, technically, it was the Lord’s house, but my granddad had built it with his own hands and preached here for over fifty years. I felt as if he had a claim on it. I was sure the Lord would agree.
Pressing my hand on the smooth, aged wood, I pushed hard and bolted from the building that would soon witness my worst nightmare. The cool, early spring breeze hit me, and I inhaled, wishing it didn’t burn my chest to take a deep breath.
How was I going to make it through the ceremony? If it hurt this bad right now, without even seeing … him …
I pressed a hand to my chest and winced. God, how was I going to survive it?
Wrapping my hands around my waist, I bent over and fought back the tears. I thought I had cried enough over the past two months. Since the moment they’d announced their engagement.
“Oakley.” The familiar, deep voice startled me. He wasn’t supposed to be out here.
Tightening my hold on my stomach, I straightened and turned to see the only man I had ever truly loved standing beside the oak tree that shaded the memorial gardens behind the church. I’d never seen him in a tux, and, oh God, he was beautiful.
Why? What had I done to deserve this?
I stared at him. Those brown eyes that seemed to read into my soul.
Before him, I had been happy. Enjoying my life, my first real boyfriend, being a normal teenager. Then, I met him, and … he made me love him. He became the center of my world. He had been everything … and in less than an hour, he would be my brother-in-law.
“Why are you doing this?” I cried, unable to pretend this wasn’t destroying me.
How had it all changed in such a short amount of time? When I had gone off to college, Wilder had been proud of me. He texted me daily, checking on me. We talked on the phone at least once a week. He had promised to wait for me. He’d loved me. Lies. All lies!
His jaw clenched as he jerked his gaze from mine. “Go inside, Oakley,” he said with a hard edge to his voice. One he had never spoken to me with.
That only added to the agony this was causing me. That he and my stepsister were inflicting on me.
“You said you loved me,” I spit out. Anger tangled with the anguish inside my chest.
I hadn’t made him explain. I never asked questions. The betrayal had been so fierce and overwhelming that I ignored him. Sylvia was a little harder to ignore. She had never allowed anyone to overlook her. If Sylvia wasn’t the center of attention, she did whatever must be done to change that. Granny had said it was because she was jealous of me. But right now, I would do anything to trade places with her.
Once, I had hoped Sylvia and I would be as close as real sisters. Losing my mother to uterine cancer when I was six years old had been hard, and the years following, it felt as if I had lost my dad too. He withdrew from life, drinking too much, forgetting things like picking me up from school and my birthday. Then, he met Cleo, my stepmother. She had a daughter a couple of years older than me. He slowly became my dad again. Smiling, laughing, being there for the everyday life. I believed we would become a real family. To think, I’d once believed there was a chance at that. Those days were gone now. Never to return.
“Go inside, Oakley,” he repeated.
His refusal to even give me a reason, an explanation, even an apology ignited the burn building in me. I needed to scream and cry. To demand to know why.
Was I that easy to toss aside? To forget?
My hands dropped to my sides and fisted as I glared at him. No. He was getting what he wanted, and so was Sylvia. They were getting their happily ever after. While they stepped over my broken pieces without a thought. He was going to say something. Give me a reason. I deserved that much.
When I began stalking toward him, his eyes swung back to me, and his brows drew together in a scowl. I didn’t care! He could be pissed. I was far beyond that emotion.
Stopping a few feet from him, I tilted my head back and glared up at him. His angular face, wide mouth, thick lashes, and those deep chocolate eyes that appeared black at times, but at other times, when he was happy, it was as if there were golden highlights trying to break free. It all made my heart race and my knees weak. I hated that. I wished I could rip him from my heart, my head, forget how I felt for him. Go back and stay with Wells, his cousin. Why had I thought Wilder was better? Wells was good to me. He had told me he loved me. He wouldn’t have done this to me.
“Not until you tell me why! Give me a reason, Wilder! I deserve to understand how it happened. How—” I swallowed hard and refused to break down. Not in front of him. “How you could stop loving me so easily and fall in love with her.”
He winced and closed his eyes briefly before leveling me with them. “I can’t do this with you. Not when I have to get through this fucking day.”
I shoved him in the chest, surprising myself. He didn’t budge, but the veins on his neck stood out. He was clenching his teeth. Needing to push him more, make him feel a little of the fury inside me, I took both hands and shoved him again. Still, he stood there, doing nothing.
Why wasn’t it making me feel any better? Why didn’t anything give me relief?
“PLEASE!” I shouted as my eyes stung. “Just tell me how! Or when … when did you stop loving me?” Those words sliced through my soul.
The day he’d told me he loved me, I had thought it would always be the happiest day of my life. Thinking of it now was pure torture.
I balled my hands into fists and began pounding his chest. He should know how this felt! This complete wreckage he’d made of my heart. It wasn’t fair. If he was going to love her, why … why had he ever let me think I had a chance? That he would be mine one day?
A sob tore through me just as his hands covered mine forcefully. I tried to jerk free of his hold. I didn’t want him to touch me. Not like this. Not when the last time he had touched me, it had been perfect.
“Sylvia is pregnant.”
Those three words spoken from his mouth in a hoarse whisper caused whatever fight I’d had in me to evaporate. I blinked at the tears that broke free and ran down my cheeks, my eyes locked on his chest, unable to meet his gaze.
Her mom didn’t know. She couldn’t. Not with all the praising she had been doing over Sylvia. How pure and good girls got the reward. There was no way my dad knew. No one knew. They had to be keeping it a secret until after the wedding. My perfect stepsister—who helped her mom in the church, sang in the choir, volunteered at the food bank—had not only taken the man I loved from me, but she’d also had sex before marriage. It felt as if he had taken my throat in both his large palms and was squeezing it so hard that I couldn’t inhale.
“Yours?” I choked out, unable to believe that my Wilder had done this.
Every time I thought it couldn’t get any worse, fate seemed to show me that it indeed could.
“Yes.” His reply was so quiet that I almost didn’t hear him.
I pulled my hands free of his and stepped back, finally lifting my eyes to meet his. There were no other words I could say. Nothing else that could be done. The reality was, Wilder had wanted her in a way he hadn’t wanted me. I had thrown myself at him that night before I left for college, and all he’d wanted to do was hold me.
A life with Wilder was all that I had hoped for and dreamed of, but facing the truth that he hadn’t wanted it, too, destroyed me.
The girl I had been was gone. I would never be the same.
I
“I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken—and I’d rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.”
—Margaret Mitchell
One
Wilder
Nine Years Later
Through the doorway, I could see my daughter packing the last of her things in a cardboard box. It was physically killing me not to go in there and help her. But she’d asked if she could do it herself. Alone.
My plan had been to stay a week here, give her time after her mother’s funeral to mourn, adjust—hell, I didn’t know. What was an eight-year-old little girl supposed to do after she saw her mother’s casket being lowered into the ground? I was so fucking lost in what it was she needed and what I should be doing.
My daughter wasn’t a normal eight-year-old. She had seen too much over the past five years. I hadn’t seen the signs, and by the time I caught on to what was happening in this house, the damage had been done. Too much darkness, and I blamed myself. I should have known. Sarah was with me every other weekend, two months every summer, and most holidays. But when she was at my place, she was happy. Or I had been too fucking blind to see the darkness she hid in her eyes.
Rubbing my hand over my chest didn’t ease the pain or regret. All I could do was make damn sure her life was picture-fucking-perfect from now on. No more leaving her with someone else. I wanted her with me. If she was with me, I could keep her safe.
Turning, I headed back down the stairs. There was little I wanted from this house. I had lived here the first two years of Sarah’s life with Sylvia, her mother. Our marriage had never been good. The only happiness that had happened here was after Sarah was born.
As my foot hit the bottom step, I glanced over at the hunter-green recliner, worn and faded, sitting in the corner of the living room. I remembered the first night Sarah had come home.
Sylvia had refused to nurse, and I’d offered to get up and do the nighttime feedings. Holding that tiny little baby in my arms, I stared at her in awe. It was a surreal moment. Seeing that face peering up at me, knowing that, only eight months ago, I had thought she was destroying my life.
I hadn’t wanted anything to do with Sylvia’s pregnancy. I stayed gone as much as possible. Worked hours that I didn’t need to. Anything to pretend that I wasn’t about to be a father.
Then, when the day had come and Sarah was placed in my arms, she had become my reason for living. All my joy revolved around her.
The slamming of the screen door jolted me out of my thoughts, and I headed to the kitchen to see who had come into the house. I expected to see Sylvia’s mother before we left. I’d called and spoken to her stepfather about Sarah’s desire to leave today. He had been more understanding than his wife was going to be. Preparing to deal with my ex-mother-in-law, I braced myself for her forthcoming lecture on why Sarah was better off staying with her. That would be a cold day in hell. My daughter was living with me.
When my body had barely made it through the doorway, my eyes locked on a pair that, to this fucking day, still haunted me. Granted, they no longer sparkled with excitement at the sight of me. It was more of a detached expression, and I hated that it even bothered me.
“Wilder,” Oakley said before walking over to the refrigerator and opening it.
I tried like hell not to look at her ass, but, damn, it was hard.
Oakley had been breathtakingly beautiful at sixteen, when I shouldn’t have been looking at her. At eighteen, when she was still too entirely young for me, she owned me. She could walk into a room and become the center of attention without saying a word. The way she could smile and make a man believe he’d fallen in love instantly was a weapon I knew she had used more than once over the years. There was a time that I would have died just to hold her and have her look at me again as if I were the only man she wanted. God, I had lived for that look. To see that smile.
She wasn’t a kid anymore. She was a twenty-seven-year-old woman and a complete stunner. The kind that turned heads, made men stumble when they caught a glimpse of her. The unreal kind of beauty that was unfair to the female population. She was also Sarah’s only aunt and, unfortunately for me, one of Sarah’s favorite people.
Oakley despised me, and she made no attempt to hide the fact. Except around Sarah. My daughter was the only mutual ground between us. Otherwise, she acted as if I were invisible, and I did the same. The best I could at least. Ignoring Oakley Leola Watson was just about fucking impossible for any straight man.
“I was expecting Cleo,” I said when she turned around with a can of soda in her hand.
She smirked, but there was no amusement in her eyes. “That’s why I’m here,” she said, then popped the can open. “I figured you’d need my help.”
My eyebrows shot up in surprise. It had been so long since Oakley had spoken to me. Much less wanted to help me.
A bark at the screen door interrupted what I was going to say. Oakley walked over to open it and let Belladonna—Sarah’s reddish-brown labradoodle—into the house. I had assumed that we’d be forced to leave Belladonna behind. Sylvia had refused to keep her, so for Sarah, Cleo had taken her when she was a puppy. I hadn’t expected Cleo to allow me to take Belladonna.
The dog had looked like a stuffed teddy bear the one and only time I’d seen it. Sarah had run out to the truck to show me her new puppy when I came to pick her up. That was two years ago. Belladonna was huge now. I only recognized her from pictures that Sarah had texted me of her.
“Sarah hadn’t mentioned the dog,” I said, trying to decide if this was a good thing. Letting her tell the dog bye might be more painful for her. “It might do more harm than good, having it here when we leave.”
Belladonna walked inside, and her eyes locked on me as she fell into step at Oakley’s side.
“It’s a she, not an it. Do you have a thing against dogs?” she asked me with an annoyed gleam in her eyes.
