When she slipped into deep darkness, Elizabeth hoped she wouldn’t wake back up.
* * *
It was morning when her eyes fluttered open. She was on her side.
They stopped her from dying.
Her heart broke all over again. Her heavily bandaged wrists were strapped to the bed railing and she gripped it tightly. Tears fell like a river to the pillow under her head, the drops so large that they sounded like small explosions as they struck the linen.
Riley was just beyond the edge of the bed. The sun shone behind his head.
“It’s just until we can get you steady, Elizabeth. That’s all.”
“Let me go…please, Riley.”
“I’m not letting you go, do you fucking hear me? You’re my family. The scar will always be there but you have to give it time to scab over, Elizabeth. You have to give yourself time.”
“No amount of time will give him back to me. I can’t live without him.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, love.” Donovan came to stand over her and he stroked his fingers through her hair. “You might not want to but you can. You aren’t quitting. Not on us and not on yourself. Even if you hate us for it.”
“I’m so tired, Donovan. Please…”
His tears fell to the sheet. “I know you’re tired. I know but I won’t let you quit. We’ve lost too many people we love, Elizabeth. We can’t lose you, too. As bad as it hurts for me, I know how much worse it must be for you. I know that, honey.”
“My heart is crushed.”
“I’m so sorry. You know how much he meant to me, Elizabeth.” His face contorted in grief. “I miss him constantly but I won’t lose you, too. I made a promise to Nana and that means keeping you in the world. It will always hurt, pretty girl but over time it will hurt less.”
She drifted back to sleep and they were sleeping in chairs when she opened her eyes again. It was dark. Her mind went back to the day her baby was born and took her through each memory they’d shared.
Then the image of him too still, not breathing in the hospital became stuck on loop and she sobbed silently until morning.
The next day, Elizabeth learned she was in a private outpatient facility. She’d been diagnosed with an acute mental breakdown.
She slept too much. They fed her through her IV because she couldn’t eat.
Days passed, doctors tried to talk to her, they gave her medications, and still the sadness continued.
Every day, one of her friends would sit with her. Sometimes she could talk to them but usually she retreated into her mind, into her memories, and tuned them out.
Two weeks after being admitted, she opened her eyes around midnight and saw a stunning man standing beside her bed. He was very tall and slender with black hair and silvery eyes.
He looked like an angel but she knew he wasn’t.
“Elizabeth.”
“Hollow. You didn’t strike me as the house call type.”
“You didn’t strike me as a quitter.” Her eyes closed but it didn’t stop her tears from slipping beneath her lashes. Tissue gently wiped them away.
“I’m sorry about RJ, Elizabeth.”
She nodded.
“You were probably one of the most devoted mothers I’ve ever known.” He hauled a chair closer to the bed. “You filled his life with fantastic amounts of love while you had him.”
“I had a lot that wasn’t being used. He was so easy to love, Hollow.”
He said quietly, “Tell me about your favorite memory with your son, Elizabeth.”
One of her wrists was restrained at all times because she wasn’t responding to treatment. Hollow took the other between both of his. He had beautiful hands.
Clearing her throat, she whispered, “There were so many. Everything amazed him and he laughed all the time. The first time we took him to a real petting zoo upstate, he got to ride a pony.” She pictured the moment.
“Most of the kids were scared but he put his head back and closed his eyes. He soaked up the sun and wore this relaxed smile the whole ride.” Hollow smiled and so did Elizabeth.
“What was his favorite color?”
Voice hitching painfully, she told him, “Green. He said his favorite color was green because…”
Unable to finish the sentence, he did it for her. “Because your eyes are green. Brilliant green and filled with all the love and honesty a child craves. I imagine that every time you looked into his eyes, your heart filled with wonder at the gift you had…he did the same thing.”
Wracking sobs shook her frame and he stroked her hair. “That’s it. Lance the poison and the pain so you can start to heal. You have so much to live for, Elizabeth. So much love and goodness to offer the world. Fight, sweetheart. You have to fucking fight.”
Hollow stayed with her through the night and stood to leave as the sun lightened the sky.
“I’m going to send you something and I need you to accept it with an open mind. Right now, you remember your boy, the memories you shared, and let them make you stronger…not weaker. Yours was not a fragile love.”
“Hollow?”
“Yes, Elizabeth?”
“Why did you come?”
“I came to meet the woman face to face that has fascinated me for years. A woman who loves completely, fights for those weaker than herself, using nothing but persistence and kindness. I have your name flagged in my systems because you have a pure heart, Elizabeth. One of the purest. If there is ever a way for me to help you, I plan to do that. You have to go on. The world would not be the same without you in it.”
His fingers stroked over her face.
“I’m the opposite of you. I am incapable of love. It has always been this way for me. I’ve learned to accept this facet of who I am but I try to do good things to make up for the fact that my heart is defective. If I could love, I would choose you, Elizabeth.”
“Thank you, Hollow.”
Bending, he kissed her temple and whispered at her ear, “Remember that the universe always balances itself out. Perhaps not the way we think it should, but the balance is always restored. That’s how energy works. There was no reason for you to lose your boy but you have to wait for the positive to happen, Elizabeth. Don’t give up.”
Pulling back, he tilted her face and lightly kissed her lips. “Stay in the world. It makes my damaged heart feel better knowing your purely good one is out there, keeping the balance.”
Stroking his fingers through her hair, he sighed. “Open mind when you get my gift, promise?”
Elizabeth nodded and he turned to go. “Hollow?” He paused just beyond her bed. “Your heart isn’t defective. It is dazzling and fully functioning. One day, you’ll find the person who makes it roar to full life and then you’ll know.”
He blinked and then a slow smile spread over his face. “You are a magical creature, Elizabeth Clayton. Perhaps you’re right. Stick around and see if your prediction is correct.”
Then he gave her a wink and walked out the door.
When he was gone, she lay there, thinking about the enigma of Hollow. She knew it was not a real name but a description of how he felt.
She wondered what pain had occurred in his past that carved out his insides so completely. Perhaps he was making atonement for some perceived sin.
Whatever the case, he deserved to find love, to experience it. She wished that for him.
* * *
It wasn’t until the orderly entered the room with the breakfast she usually didn’t touch that she realized she’d spent almost two hours thinking about something other than her own pain.
It was the first time that the last hour of her little boy’s life was not stuck on replay in her mind.
The young man placed her tray on the table and rolled it over her lap. She thanked him and he told her to have an awesome day.
As the door closed behind him, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Thank you, Hollow. You’re more than a little magical yourself.”
Then she picked up her spoon and took a bite of oatmeal.
* * *
That was the day Elizabeth started getting better.
She still slept too much and food remained unimportant, but she sat up when she was awake. Making an effort with every tray brought to her, she ate a few more bites every day.
Riley and Donovan didn’t ask her about her improvement because they’d acted and spoken from the beginning as if she was already getting better.
They talked about the places they would go as soon as she was back on her feet, a new restaurant they had to take her to, and how much she was going to love BiBi’s new boyfriend.
She saw the growing happiness and relief on their faces but she needed to be sure that the chain reaction Hollow put in place would hold. The sadness could sneak up on her viciously, devastating her for hours, and she had to let it roll over her and wait for it to pass.
As her “next of kin,” Riley and Donovan were initially the only people allowed to visit her.
When her doctors told her that her platelets were improving and they no longer feared that she would hit the floor if she stood up, they cleared her for other visitors and BiBi was the first person to show up. The tall woman held her close and whispered to her for almost an hour.
Her friends started taking her outside every day.
The first time, as she lifted her face to the sun with her eyes closed, she remembered RJ on the back of a pony.
It caused her to cry but when she told the men why, they spent two hours talking about that day at the petting zoo. The more they talked about the thousands of memories with her son, the more that last horrifying hour began to fade.
It would never completely disappear but there were better memories that came easier to mind without the damage to her soul.
* * *
Two weeks after her nighttime visit from Hollow, she was sitting in the garden alone. Riley would be by later. Donovan was traveling for work.
Glancing down at her wrists, she traced the lines she’d sliced in her skin. Her doctor removed the stitches and they treated the cuts every morning to speed healing and minimize the scars.
That moment was not clear to her but she knew that – at the time – she’d believed it was the only way to stop the pain.
“Lizzy.”
Lifting her head, she stared at Dylan as if he was an apparition. His being here didn’t make sense. He looked exquisite. Tanned and healthy, wearing khakis and a button down shirt with leather dress shoes. Sunglasses were perched on top of his dark blonde hair, shaggier than the last time she’d seen him.
His eyes practically glowed from his face.
She watched him walk closer and sit on the bench beside the wheelchair she’d sat in so the nurse could push her outside.
Their faces were level but she couldn’t read the expression on his face. Without a word, he took her hands and turned them over.
For a long time, he stared at the wounds she’d inflicted and she watched tears slide silently down his cheeks.
Dylan traced the scars with his thumbs. Then he bent over and kissed first one, then the other.
When he sat up, he slid his arms beneath her knees and behind her back and lifted her from the chair into his lap.
She wondered if she’d fallen asleep and was having a dream.
Gathering her close, he hugged her without speaking. One large palm cradled her head against his shoulder. He rested his cheek against her hair.
Elizabeth didn’t know how long they sat like that. He scooted back on the bench and held her even closer, one hand gently stroking through her hair and down her back. The sound of his voice after so long with nothing but the breeze and the birds startled her slightly.
“Lizzy, I’m so fucked up that I had it all wrong. Maybe if I explain you can help me get it right.”
Against his collarbone, she asked, “Explain what?”
“How I’ve loved you since I was ten years old, Lizzy. That I fell deeply and irreversibly in love with you at eighteen and my heart has never wavered from that path. How you were always the only one for me.”
She sat up and stared at him in confusion. “What are you talking about?” Large palms held her face. They were warm, slightly calloused, and she absorbed his touch again.
“I was too filthy to touch you, Lizzy. Too fucking damaged to be allowed in your life. With you is the only place I’ve ever wanted to be. The only place that felt like home.”
His eyes were agonized. “I didn’t deserve someone so good, so clean. I didn’t want who I was to rub off on you.”
He hugged her so hard that it bordered on painful. “All I’ve done is hurt you over and over. I didn’t know, Lizzy. I’m sorry I didn’t know how to show you how much I love you.”
Elizabeth felt dizzy.
Memories shifted around in her mind with the words Dylan told her. Their moments together over the years looked different and she wondered how both of them had been so wrong.
This changed everything.
Chapter Fifteen
Dylan held the only woman he had ever loved, and breathed her into himself.
For so many years, he’d tried to stay away from Elizabeth. He wanted to protect her from who he was, the things he’d done, and everything about him that was twisted and broken.
* * *
The first time Dylan saw her, something shifted deep in his heart. Lizzy was ten years old and had the prettiest smile of anyone ever.
You could see her soul in her smile.
When he looked at her, the chaos in his mind seemed to calm. He knew where she lived. Sometimes he would walk by just to catch a glimpse of her and her grandmother through the windows.
They were almost always laughing.
Donna’s rage the day she learned that his father named his children as his only beneficiaries was the first time she struck Dylan. It was three days after they buried his dad.
He didn’t know what anyone was talking about and he didn’t care. Carol was only five and she cried all the time.
They’d loved their father and he was the only thing that had controlled the insanity of his second wife. The woman he married three years after Dylan’s mother died.
As long as he and Carol lived in Donna’s house, she would receive an allowance from the estate but Peter Lang had calculated carefully. It would never be enough for her to waste.
The sexual abuse started when Dylan was eleven. His stepmother told him he was “in heat” and she couldn’t sleep at night.
She screamed at him, “How dare you make me do this? You filthy animal!”
For years, she said that because he got hard when she touched him, he welcomed what she did. She would laugh when he ejaculated.
“That means you like it, Dylan. You love it.”
He didn’t want her anywhere near him but he was unable to control his body and that made him ashamed. He felt dirty, wrong in every way.
When he was in tenth grade, they had to do a project about local news. In the newspaper, he saw a story about Lizzy and her grandmother. He clipped it out and saved it. He wrote “Lizzy” under her picture and used a tiny heart to dot the “i” in her name.
Donna found it and laughed. “No girl is ever going to want you, Dylan. Not after all the nasty things you’ve done.”
On the day he turned eighteen, he talked to his father’s lawyer. He made sure that if anything happened to him, his stepmother wouldn’t inherit one cent.
Without ever speaking one word to Elizabeth Clayton, he legally named her as his beneficiary if he died. He didn’t think he’d live very long and he imagined all the good things she would do to help people with that money.
Two days later, Donna learned what he’d done. She shackled him in the basement and beat him for hours.
One of her bobby pins fell on the floor and he used it to pick the lock and stumble from the house.
That was the day Lizzy found him in the park.
The day she took care of him
, fed him, and cried for him. No one but Carol had ever cried for him before and in that moment, everything he was – good or bad – belonged to a girl with the prettiest eyes he’d ever seen.
Back in the prison he lived in, he opened the bag and broke down at the medicine, bandages, and food Lizzy had sent home with him. He stashed them behind a stone in the basement and there would come a day when those supplies would be the only thing that kept him from starving to death.
The night she picked him up from the police station, he’d been so eaten alive with guilt for asking her to come to such a place. As he was led from the back, she’d glowed in all the darkness that surrounded her. He promised himself never to ask her to go through such a thing again.
He didn’t have the right to touch her. He shouldn’t have taken her innocence but being able to kiss her, hold her, and make love to her as if he was a normal man had been too tempting for him to resist.
Shoving thoughts of everything he’d done with Donna from his mind, he focused on Lizzy. The way she smelled, felt, and tasted. It was the most extraordinary experience to happen to him.
It was also wrong.
He went away and tried to stay away. It would have been better for his Lizzy if he’d never darkened her door again.
While he watched his sister spiral out, Donna used his love for Carol to keep him under control. He was chained almost constantly. Thoughts of Lizzy were the only thing that kept him sane.
Desperate to withstand the physical reactions he couldn’t seem to stop, he tried to picture Lizzy’s face when Donna climbed on top of him. He would close his eyes, thinking about her captivating green eyes – matched only by the beauty of her soul – and inevitably, his body would betray him.
Laughing, his stepmother would gloat until the next time. Then one day he asked about Carol and she informed him coldly that “the crack whore” was dead.
Fighting to get free, she knocked him unconscious.
When he woke up, he wasn’t chained and she was pointing a gun at him. There was a fear in her eyes that he’d never seen before.
“Get out of my house. Don’t come back. I’m done with you.”
The only place Dylan wanted to be was with the woman he loved and that was where his legs took him, though he didn’t remember making the journey.
Completely Wrecked: A Dramatic Romance Page 13
