Page 111 of Worth the Fall

“Em? You okay?” I’m on my feet as Grady opens the screen and gives her a soft greeting before jogging down the path toward his car. “Emerson?”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have . . . I just didn’t want to be alone.” Her voice is barely audible.

“No. Please. Come in.” I have my arm around her shoulders and am guiding her into the house. She seems so frail when I’ve never thought her to be anything but the opposite. We move to the couch, and she sits beside me as if she’s on autopilot. Concern rifles through every part of me.

Within seconds, I have the television off and the police scanner on the table beside me silenced. The overwhelming urge to hold her, touch her, soothe that look out of her eyes is too much, so I pull her into me—her head to my chest—and wrap my arms around her.

“What’s going on, Em?”

“My head’s messed up,” she says.

“We all have messed-up heads,” I murmur, my lips against the top of her hair, my fingers rubbing up and down her arms. It’s only when she hisses that I realize my fingertips have run over the ridge of scars, causing me to jerk my hand back in guilt over hurting her.

“Not like mine,” she eventually says.

“Want to talk about it?”

Her chuckle is despondent. “Do you know how many times in my life I’ve been asked that question? Therapist after therapist until I got so sick of being picked apart I just up and quit going.”

“I can imagine,” I say but know I have absolutely no fucking clue what she has been through. “Did something happen today?”

“Today? No. The other night? Yes.” She lets out a deep breath. Her vulnerability transparent and haunting since I’ve never seen this side of her. “I can’t stop thinking about Keely. I can’t stop obsessing over whether her dad is doing to her what mine did to me. I can’t stop wondering about what other horrible things he has done to her mother that she’s been a witness to. It’s messing me up, Grant, and that’s really hard for me to admit.”

“Sh. Sh. Sh,” I say, guilt riding me hard over being the one to bring this all upon her. This is on me. The little girl I see as her, she does, too, and there’s nothing I can do to reassure her that Keely will be okay. So, I just hold her a little tighter and press my lips to the top of her head while we both process the turn of events.

Her needing me, and my wanting her to need me.

“I’m going to do everything in my power to save her, Em, but without her mom pressing charges or the little girl admitting anything, I have zero legal rights. My hands are tied.”

“And that’s why you were talking to her about the rocks.”

My hand stills halfway down her back. This is the first time she’s reacted to any mention of the rocks. For a while, I thought maybe it was a fake memory I had created to deal with her leaving even though I know for a fact it was real.

“What do you mean?” I fish.

“The rocks. You were kneeling, talking to her, picking up rocks that I couldn’t see but that I knew had color on them.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I didn’t remember, Grant. I didn’t remember the rocks until I had a dream about them the other night.” I can sense the hysterical confusion in her voice despite how muted it is. “You’ve mentioned them a few times, and I just thought . . . I don’t know what I thought, but I just kind of let it go because it didn’t make sense. Then I saw you with Keely and then that night I dreamed of the rocks. Of our rocks. The zombie rocks. And the ones you’d leave there for me to find when I’d come out to escape from my house and—” She loses a huge, heaving sob of a sound, her fingers grip into the fabric of my T-shirt, and her body shakes as she fights with every part of her to keep from breaking down.

“Don’t be sad. It’s a good memory. It was the only way I knew how to let you know I was there for you. It seems cheesy now, but we were eight.”

“Not cheesy,” she murmurs. “I looked forward to seeing if there was a new one every day.”

“I didn’t know what was going on inside your house, Em, but I knew it made you sad.” I smooth my hand over the back of her hair and just pull her tighter against me, hating myself for doing this to her. “I’m sorry I brought you to the call. I didn’t mean for it to upset you.”

“You don’t understand.” She pulls away, her eyes red but not a single tear has fallen.

“Then make me understand.” The confusion in her expression kills me. The vulnerability in it even more so.

“If I didn’t remember that, then what else do I not remember?”

“It was rocks, Em. That’s it. I’m sure there are a million things you remember about what we did or where we played that I don’t. It’s no big deal.”

“It’s not—you don’t—you’re here and I can’t stop them,” she says, flustered and visibly anxious.

“You can’t stop what?”