The Biker Who Married Me Without Asking novel · Chapter 43 of 48

Chapter 43: What He Never Cried

Cade's POV

I went back to the headland at two in the morning, because I did not know where else a man goes.

Willa did not ask me to stay home.

She asked if I wanted company, and I said no, and she said, "Then I'll wait up, and the porch light will be on."

She meant it, and I loved her so much that for a minute I could not start the truck.

The coffee can was where I had left it.

It sat on the gravel beside the rail with its dented lid, where I had put it down to kiss my wife, and nobody had moved it.

I picked it up and sat on the bumper of the truck with it in my lap.

It was empty.

It had been empty for five years.

I had scattered everything it ever held in a lake in Nevada, and said I was sorry to a man who was not my brother, and carried the empty can home because I could not throw it away.

I took the lid off.

It smelled of rust and old coffee.

I put my hand inside it like a fool, as if something might be at the bottom.

There was nothing.

"Rory," I said, to the water.

The wind took it.

I tried again.

"You stupid son of a bitch."

The sea went on.

"I'd have given you the cottage. I'd have given you the garage. I told you that. You walked up to me and asked for forty thousand like I was a bank."

My voice broke on the word.

I put the can down on the gravel.

I put my hands on my face.

I had not cried when they gave me the vest on a steel tray.

I had not cried when I put my name on the form, or at the funeral, or in the reeds of a lake in the dark, or in the chapel in Reno with a girl in a veil asleep on my arm.

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