He Called Our Night a Mistake, So I Raised His Daughter Without Him novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Porch Morning

Sullivan's POV

I found her on the front porch, in the same spot where I had told her to go home.

She was sitting on the top step in her mother's old cardigan, with her knees pulled up and her phone dark in her hand.

Inside, the Ferrantes were doing the dishes in silence.

Nico had gone out the back door twenty minutes earlier, and no one had followed him.

I stopped at the bottom of the steps.

"Can I sit?"

"It's your porch too," she said. "Apparently."

I sat two steps below her, with my back against the rail, where I could see her face.

"I want to tell you about that morning," I said. "Not so you'll forgive me. So you have the real one."

"Okay."

"My team came home from a bad one. Two of mine didn't. I carried one of them out myself." I looked at my hands. "I didn't sleep for four days, and then at your brother's party I finally did. I had no business sleeping anywhere near anyone."

She didn't speak.

"I didn't know where I was. I thought you were someone who'd been trying to kill me. For a moment I was somewhere that doesn't exist anymore, and you were making a sound I've never been able to stop hearing."

"I remember that," she said quietly. "I remember you said, stay down, stay down."

"I let go as soon as I knew it was you. You were curled against the wall with your hand on your wrist, and you said, it's okay, it's okay, Sullivan, and you were crying."

"I wasn't scared of you."

"You should have been."

"I was nineteen and I was in love with you."

"I know," I said. "That's why it had to be that."

She turned her head.

"A dozen men were on that porch the next morning," I said. "Your brother was one. He saw your wrists. I saw him see them. And I knew that if I said one soft thing to you, if I said I was sorry, you'd stay, and I'd do it again someday and you wouldn't walk away. You'd say it was okay."

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