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And I do the only thing I can after swatting the pillow at him one more time: I cross my arms over my chest. And pout. And glare at him. But hell if it's not the hardest thing in the world to be mad at a man whose face is half-covered by pillows, with a laugh so contagious I'm fighting back a smile, and who looks so damn cuddleable I just want to crawl over the bed and curl into him.

“I'm so sorry, but everything about that was classic.” I can still hear the laughter in his words as he pushes himself back up to a sitting position, eyes now locked on mine.

“I'm pouting.”
Just thought I'd make that statement since I don't know what else to say.

“And you're adorable,” he murmurs.

“That was mean.”

“No, it wasn't. It was perfect timing because you were second-guessing buying whatever this is for me and so I distracted you.” My attempt to level him with a glare serves only to widen his grin farther. “And it worked, because now you're more mad than worried. Secondly, you should know sex toys can be a whole helluva lot of fun, so never count them out, Socks.”

“Your present . . .” I redirect the conversation with a lift of my eyebrows, because I'm not going there with him right now.

“Hmmm.” He leans forward, giving a quiet chuckle as he reaches out and taps the tip of his finger to my nose. “Sex toys for your next present, then.” And before I can even finish rolling my eyes, he continues with impatience. “But now, tell me about mine.”

I can only stare at him with a wide smile and a shake of my head in exasperation, but my nerves are now nonexistent. “I wanted to get you something to say thank you . . . to say I understand . . . to tell you to
just jump
.” My voice fades off as his eyes darken before he looks down to start unwrapping the gift.

He takes his time. Pulls the humidor from the bag. Runs his hands over the smooth surface. His eyes glance up to meet mine momentarily before shifting back down to where he's lifting the lid to look inside.

“Getty . . .” It's barely a whisper but once again, he knows how to tell me everything he's feeling in the simple utterance of my name. Surprised. Awed. Confused. Gracious.

“We both came here escaping from something. And you've spent so much time helping me . . .” I struggle with the right words to say but then realize he already said it for me. “. . . want to be found again that I wanted to get you something to do the same.”

When his eyes find mine again, I can tell he understands this has something to do with his mother, his reasons for being here, but isn't quite sure how.

“This is to keep the good memories in.” Something sparks in his eyes in acknowledgment, but I continue. “That box in your room might hold both good and bad. And when you choose to go through it, I wanted you to have somewhere to put the good. A safe place. A new home. That way when you leave here, you can leave the bad in the cardboard box behind you and bring the good home with you in something new.” I struggle with getting all the words out. Too much emotion for him. Too much sadness thinking of him leaving me.

But when he reaches out over the box and cups a hand
to the side of my face without speaking—his eyes swimming with emotions I can only assume are similar to what I feel inside—I know I did the right thing.

“Thank you, Getty.” He looks down to where his hands are on top of the box, his voice rough, his fingers fidgeting. “This is perfect and thoughtful and timely.”

“Timely?”

His chuckle fills the room, but there is a tinge to it I don't recognize. “Yes. Come here. I want to show you something.”

He gets off the bed, picks up the humidor, and reaches back to grab my hand to make sure I'm following him. I'm surprised when he turns abruptly into his room and then stops. But the confusion lasts only for a second because the cardboard box sits squarely on the center of his bed.

“I had planned on asking you to go through this with me tonight.” He twists his lips, eyes focused on a seemingly innocent cardboard box. Except I know it's something that holds so much power over him. “I guess we were on the same page.”

My smile is soft as I nod, but he doesn't see it. He lets go of my hand and sets the humidor down beside the box. Silence weighs us down. Zander's discomfort so palpable I can feel it.

“It's time.”

“W
hat do you remember of your mother?” Zander asks me.

At his question, I glance over from where we both have our heads back on the pillows of his bed. The cardboard and walnut boxes sit between us, and I take in his profile as I consider the answer. His straight nose, his strong jaw, the fan of dark lashes against his tanned skin—he's biding time, taking a moment before delving into the unknown.

And I'm not sure why he fears it other than the fact that it is something unknown to him. But I can't imagine it will hold anything other than parts of his past that he can piece together and then put it all behind him.

Then again, I know better than anyone how your past can own you even in the present. Steal your hope. Taint your soul. Change your outlook, your expectations. And even after you break free from its clutches, it's still there. In the crevices of your mind. In your reactions to everyday things. In the smile you show to the world while you cry inside.

He turns his head to look at me, his blue eyes so solemn, prompting me for an answer I forgot to give.

“My mom?” My smile comes quickly; although some of the memories have faded, the feelings are still fresh. “Her
name was Grace. She was beautiful. Full of life. She was everything.” Quietly I sigh, hating that there's doubt now when I think of her because of what I've experienced.

“I bet you were her life.” His voice is nothing more than a murmur, but I can tell he knows I'm struggling with the truths I've come to learn as an adult.

“I'd like to think that.” I nod as Ethan's and my father's words come back to me. The ones that were thrown in my face.
Can't you be more like your mother? Your mother never disobeyed your father. Your mother would be so ashamed of your lack of class.
“But now . . . now I wonder if she really was as happy and perfect as I thought or if she was just putting on a show, hiding it all to—”

“To protect you?” he adds.

I nod, a lump lodging in my throat as distant memories hint of the truth. Of her taking me out for our special dates when my father would rage. Of impromptu sleepovers at the Four Seasons to pretend we were Eloise. Of carefully applied makeup or large-lensed sunglasses she'd even wear inside because she had migraines for a few days.

“Yes.” My voice breaks and he reaches out and links pinkies with mine in the space between us. “I have a feeling, looking back with what I know now, that she played the part perfectly but hid so much, mostly from me.”

“You were her truth.”

The way he says the simple statement—quiet, matter-of-fact, like it's the most obvious thing in the world—nearly undoes the waning composure I have left. But at the same time, I think it's exactly what I needed to hear. It lights some of the darkest places within me to know that as much as I loved her, wanted to be just like her, I think she'd be proud that now I don't want to be anything like her.

I was her truth.
My smile returns. I can handpick the memories to hold on to the best times with her. To shut out the bad. And a reminder for me to live a life, on my own, void of big sunglasses and sleepovers at the Four Seasons, because she couldn't. And because I want to make her proud that I did.

Nodding, my mind overloaded with emotion, I curl my pinkie a little tighter around his. He shifts some, the
mattress moving as he reaches past us. The nightstand drawer opens. Closes. And then he's handing something to me.

I take a stack of about ten pictures from him. It's obvious they are old—the clothing and car dated—but it's the people on the paper that hold my attention. A brown-haired boy with skinned knees, a dusting of freckles across the bridge of his nose and the tops of his cheeks, and blue eyes that seem to express a mixture of happy and weary.

The eyes of a child who has seen way too much in his short life. He has a baseball glove in one picture, makes a funny face in another. Items that should denote a normal childhood, but the backgrounds of the pictures reflect something different.

A five- or six-year-old Zander stands on the grass in front of a run-down house, one window boarded up, the other with metal security bars over it. Zander with a stuffed dog clutched tight to his chest sitting on a stained couch in a darkened room. A small section of the coffee table is visible in the shot; it's littered with scraps of tinfoil, two bent spoons, a child's looped belt, and the discarded caps of syringes.

I stare until I can't stare anymore at the surroundings to try to understand as best I can the things he wants to shut out. It's not very hard to comprehend.

The one bright spot in the stack of pictures is the woman who accompanies him in some of them. She has long brown hair, an olive complexion, and blue eyes identical in shape and size to Zander's. And I notice the only pictures where she seems happy are the candid ones where she is paying attention to her son. Her smile is magnetic, expression one of complete adoration.

Then there's the man in the photos. Standoffish. Arms always crossed, a cigarette habitually dangling from the corner of his mouth. Maybe it's because I know the end of the story, but I dislike him instantly on sight.

I sift through the pictures several times, each time my eyes drawn to the little boy, making comparisons with the man I know now. And when I finish, I turn my head and meet the intensity in Zander's gaze.

“She was beautiful, Zander. You look so much like her.”

He nods his head ever so slightly, one ear on the pillow, the white pillowcase in such a stark contrast to the dark shadows across his features.

“I'm sure you think I'm being a pussy about this.”

His bluntness surprises me and leaves me clamoring for the correct response. “No! This is your past, Zander. Your history. There is no judgment on how you're handling it or the pace at which you're choosing to. Sometimes looking back is so much harder than looking forward. Just remember that while whatever is in that box may be part of your history, it doesn't define the man you've made yourself to be today . . . unless you want it to.”

I hear his shaky inhalation as his eyes flicker to the pictures in my hand. One of him and his mother rests on top. His Adam's apple bobs and he exhales a sigh of exasperated confusion.

“Until this box arrived, I didn't have any pictures of my mother other than my memories.” I shift some to sit up so I can face him, let him know that I'm listening and ready for whatever he needs from me. “I keep telling myself that no matter what else is in the box, this is enough for me. That this is more than I had before.”

I angle my head to hold his gaze, my mind turning, transforming the thoughts I had previously. When he first told me about the box, I thought it was just the idea of it that freaked him out and reopened old wounds a little boy had managed to forget. But now, with the way he's so apprehensive, I'm realizing it's so much more than that. What does he think is in the box that has him so worried?

“I hope there are more good memories in there for you, Zander.”

His chuckle is soft, exasperated, self-deprecating. “Well, considering the only other thing I pulled from the box and looked at says I was the one who killed my mom . . . let's hope you're right.”

His words startle me. “Wait.
What?
” My hands are in midair between us. He's thrown me so thoroughly for a loop that it's like my gestures and my thoughts are in two different worlds.

Zander doesn't say anything; he just stares at me. And I'm not sure if he's waiting to watch my reaction or if he's testing me to see how I process the ridiculous comment he just made. But the longer he searches my eyes, the more I see that he really believes what he's just said. It's in the quiet intensity of his eyes, the gritted clench of his jaw, the unflinching tension in the muscles of his neck, and the overall deflated sadness that I'm watching slowly sap the vibrancy from his expression and posture.

Needing to make a physical connection with him, I carefully move the pictures out of the way with the mind to cross the small space separating us. But before I can finish, he shifts suddenly so that he lies sideways across the bed, head in my lap like a little child, face toward my stomach and one arm hooked around my back.

My heart breaks and swells all at the same time.

“Talk to me, Zander,” I murmur softly. My fingers run through his hair on reflex. His breath is hot through the thin cotton of my shirt. His fingers cool beneath the hem of it at my back. Contradictions. Everything about him right now tells the same story: a grown man struggling with the memories of the little boy he can't quite remember being.

And so I do the only thing I can: I give him time to find the words to speak. He's been flying on broken wings for so long, I'm sure it's going to take him a minute to figure out how to land so we can repair them and make him whole again.

I thread my fingers through his hair. Over and over. Soothe. Comfort. Let him know I'm here.

“The first thing I pulled from the box,” he begins, voice thick with emotion. And I just keep doing exactly what I'm doing: fingers through hair, body relaxed, thankful for the trust he's bestowing upon me. “It was her autopsy report. I don't know why I even looked at it. It's not like I didn't know how she died. I was there for fuck's sake. How could I ever forget that?” The break in his voice breaks me too.

“What was her name?” I speak softly, wanting to bring him back to the important thing. To her. Not the blood
that I can imagine stains his memory of her. Because, yes, while we both know the pain of losing a mother isn't something that can be quantified or compared, Zander, by far, has had the tougher of our situations.

“Lola. Her name was Lola.”

“Lola,” I repeat. His fingers flexing against my back are the only sign he's heard me. “I think Lola would be proud of the man her son's become.”

His ragged sob catches me off guard. All the emotion he's held in for what I can assume is so long manifests in that single, heart-wrenching sound. The storm rages outside the windows and I have a feeling it's similar to what's happening inside the man before me too.

All I can do is sit here, wait it out with him, and hope to be his lighthouse this time around.

“I remember her lying there, blood everywhere,” he finally continues sometime later, a dreamlike quality to his voice. The emotion that was nonexistent the day he told me amid the pine trees comes back tenfold in his tone right now. “And there was the handle of the scissors against her neck. She couldn't . . . her breath . . . it was hard for her to breathe and I thought it was because of the scissors . . . so I pulled it out.”

And that last statement tells me what the report says. What the adult in me can infer but what the scared little kid could never have known: that dislodging the scissors most likely opened up an artery. Caused her to bleed out. But she was bleeding out anyway from all of her other injuries. Zander did not kill his mother. A fact that he has to recognize on some level.

But I think the brutality of the report, the reopening of old wounds he couldn't remember himself, was a reality he wasn't ready to face.

His sudden spiral out of control. His continued avoidance of an innocent cardboard box. His lashing out at his family, his career—everything makes so much sense to me now. A man can't control the uncontrollable.

“Oh, Zander.” I lean forward and press a kiss to his temple, leave my lips there, right above his ears, so he can
hear what I need him to hear over the noise I'm sure is roaring in his head. “I don't care what that report says. You did not kill your mother. Your dad did. I know the report might state otherwise, but you know differently. You were there. You were with her. You were the last thing she saw, her son, her baby.
Her truth.
”

The two of us are huddled together, his mouth against my stomach, mine against his head, my hands still in his hair, and we just sit here for a moment. Thinking. Accepting. Dealing.

“I know.” His breath is hot against my shirt. “I know,” he repeats, sorrow morphing to anger in a matter of seconds as he sits up and stares at me, head shaking, fingers on one hand fidgeting with the fingers on another. “But that's the problem, Getty. I dealt with this shit years ago. Fucking therapists upon therapists upon therapists and then some more. I talked about feelings and drew pictures of my feelings, of what happened. Christ!” he barks out as he rises from the bed, paces back and forth, restless with anger, and scrubs his hands over his face. “I'm supposed to be over this shit. The memory of my mom shouldn't fuck me up and yet it did and I'm so goddamn angry that it did. All this time later and something I fucking lived, breathed, and dealt with did it again. Took ahold of me. At first I thought my anger was at not knowing this. At how it was kept from me by Colton and Rylee. So that's why I lashed out at them. But then when I came here, I had distance. Time. Space. I realized I was just angry because it shouldn't affect me AT ALL and it does.
And I can't stop it.
”

I get how a grown man can be so angry at being blindsided. At fate's way of proving he's weak when it's all he's bucked against his whole life. At feeling like you've overcome something only to have it resurface later and beat you back down, make you question what you always knew to be the truth.

“Zander,” I say his name, watch his feet falter. His eyes full of duress and emotion lift to meet mine. “You want to be angry? I would be too. I'd be fucking furious. Shouting and screaming and hating the world. There is no shame in that. There is no brushing her under the rug. She was your
mother.
Your everything.
If this didn't affect you, I'd be worried.”

Silence. The thunder rattles the windows.

“The robe I wear? The ridiculously expensive one you noticed? That robe was my mother's. It's the little piece of her I get to touch every day. I slip it on and feel close to her. It's silly, Zander. It's a reminder of the pain and a memory of her all at the same time. But sometimes we have to take the little things we are given to help on those days when all you feel is the hurt.” I look down to the box on the bed with me and then back up to him. “My robe is your box. It's brought you both so far, the good and the bad. . . .”