Hey! Is anyone actually still here? Visitors and reviews were half what I usually get for the last update, and I know the app and website are still riddled with issues! So many people saying they either can't view the latest chapter, didn't get an alert or couldn't review 😩

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Chapter 14

Someone to Stay

My dad dies two weeks later.

He slips away minutes after the September sun starts to rise on a Tuesday, his hand tightly clasped in mine, surrounded by love—Sue, Leah, and Rose all around his bedside. In the end, it's as peaceful and as pain-free as the nurses could make it. Despite knowing that, it doesn't stop the rush of grief—the acute feeling of loss that tears through me—nor does it stop the guilt from feeling relieved that he's no longer suffering.

Instead, his pain is now mine. I've already lost one parent, but losing the one who chose to put me above everything else in his life feels incomparable.

The hours pass by frighteningly fast in the aftermath. I spend the majority of them sitting in the same chair, brushing my hand through his sparse hair until he grows cold under my touch. After kissing his forehead one last time, I hide myself behind the kitchen door as they take him away to the funeral home. I stare at the clock above the door, unrelenting as it ticks towards another hour without him. Each minute that passes puts more distance between then and now. With him and without him.

Another marker in my life.

Another before, and another after.

It's only when Rose gently reminds me I should let people know that I bring out my cell. Edward's last message from the early hours of the morning is the first one I read, and I hurriedly tilt my phone away when I sense Rose looking over my shoulder and reading the incriminating messages above it. Her eyes narrow as she sits down in front of me, but she doesn't say anything. Not yet.

Thinking of you x

I text back the only two words that matter.

He's gone

Those words are the same ones that I send to Angela, Ben, Riley, and Eric who have rallied around me in the torturous days leading up to now. The same words I numbly leave on a voicemail for Kate to tell her I won't be in for the rest of the week.

I turn my cell off. I can't bear the thought of the sympathy calls, or the fact that life is moving on without him already. Despite knowing this would be the outcome, the reality of his death-day is just as bleak as I had always imagined it would be.

"We'll get through this together, just like always," Rose tells me later on, stroking my hair and squeezing my hand. I usually love her when she has a shred of optimism, but not today. Today it feels hollow and premature.

But not as premature as the time in the following days that are spent deciding on the date of his funeral, or the exact order of service, or the flower arrangements, or even the picture to use on the service program. They're all things we put off despite knowing full well it was inevitable.

•

The local press is here, taking photos as we exit the black town car and head toward the church for the service. I'm wearing the short black shift dress and long trench coat I've had picked out for the last three months in morbid anticipation. My head bows to avoid the lens of the camera, my eyes hidden behind large, dark sunglasses that also obscure my face. The last thing I need is anyone recognizing me in the press and coming forward with anything about my salacious activities.

The church is filled with a sea of familiar and unfamiliar faces all watching us with somber eyes as we file in and sit at the front, the wooden pew that creeks with every adjustment.

Hymn.

Prayer.

Eulogy.

Hymn.

Prayer.

I try not to hate every depressingly sad moment of it.

Superintendent Uley delivers a speech on behalf of the force, and when I read the short poem Dad picked out for his funeral, I do so with all the strength and grace I can muster. The faces staring at me with sympathy tell me that he was loved, respected, and admired by many, and even if they didn't know him like I did, I try to appreciate that he must have had an impact for them to pay their respects today. It makes me want to strive to be the person he was, even though I know I already fall short in all the ways that matter.

Dutifully we follow my dad's coffin back out of the church, draped in the flag of his police department and carried by his department colleagues in crisp dark uniforms, and into the grounds for the committal. I clutch my flower arrangement, focusing on how Dad's plot is in the sunniest spot. He'd like it.

My legs tremble as I stand next to Sue, her hand woven tightly with mine. Leah is on the other side of her, a quiet support to both of us. Rose is at my other side, the pillar of strength I need in this moment. I bring a hand to my face, moving a stray strand of hair blown free by the wind as the late summer sun beats down, making me feel nauseous and light headed as finally, the minister commits him to the earth.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

•

"Where are you going?" Rose asks as she follows me down the stairs, two steps at a time. Leah comes to hover in the doorway of the kitchen, looking at me like I'm a grenade, and I wonder if I look half as crazed as I feel.

It's been this way for days—the overbearing hovering, as if they're too scared to leave me alone in case I do something terrible and drastic. Now, after the longest of days, I just want to be alone and miserable, and I'm not going to get that in this house. My home.

"I need some space. I'll be back tomorrow," I say, my voice hoarse from all the stilted conversations I've had with distant relatives, friends, and colleagues at the wake. I pull on my thin cream coat over leggings and a University of Michigan sweatshirt and slip into a pair of sneakers.

"You can come to my place," Rose offers immediately, but I'm already declining with a firm shake of my head. I rifle through my bag and make sure I have it, breathing a sigh of relief when my fingers grasp onto the cool metal.

"It's okay."

"Where else are you going to go?" she asks, bewildered.

"Bet it's the same 'space' you've been sneaking out to see every night for the past few months," Leah pipes up, dark eyebrow raising in challenge, fingers still poised in air quotes.

"Not today, Leah," I say impatiently as I reach for the door. Maybe not ever.

"You're seeing someone?" Rose says. Her tone tells me she's hurt. She has every right to be—we've told each other everything since we were eleven years old—but if she knew, she wouldn't approve. It's why I've been distant the last few months. Because not telling her is so much harder than I thought.

"As long as it isn't that married prick from before," Leah says under her breath.

"What married prick?" Rose says, open-mouthed.

"It's not! Look, I love you both, but I just desperately need some time alone. I'll be back tomorrow. I promise."

I'm out of the door before I hear another word.

•

The silence is welcome as the door swings open to our apartment. It's finished and furnished. Things I picked out before my world crumbled have been delivered and put in place: from the sofa to the bed in the master bedroom. There's even a large piece of art hung behind the dining table: a sensual abstract picture of the curve of a woman's body. Edward seems to have taken great care in getting everything unboxed and in place, and I'm more grateful for it than ever that he is who he is. Efficient and presumptive.

I could happily live here, I think, as my aching feet find the soft rug that stretches from the sofa to the TV unit. But not yet. Not now. Now I just get to exist in the quiet and sit with my grief.

I don't know how he knows I'm here, but it's where he finds me in the wee hours of the night when the city is quiet and my eyes are stinging with tiredness. I've barely moved, sitting on the sofa staring out at the dark streets, the TV on low for background noise.

Edward sits down heavily next to me, bringing in the cold night air that clings to his clothes. He's still dressed in a navy blue suit jacket, his striped tie loose at his neck, obviously having come straight from the airport.

"I'm so sorry I couldn't be there," he says as he embraces me, his hand cradling my face. He brushes his lips against my forehead. My head finds the crook of his neck, breathing in the familiar scent of sandalwood and cedar of his aftershave.

"You're not supposed to be here," I mumble. He should be in DC still, until Monday.

"I'm right where I need to be," he tells me, sincerely. "But I can leave if you don't want me here. I just brought you some groceries."

I should tell him to go, but the fact he's here for me and not for anything else has me telling him what I truly want.

"Stay."

One word he's asked a hundred times and now I'm the one now uttering it. He accepts it quietly, without comment. I don't think the significance of it is lost on him. Another step toward a place we can't come back from. Another step toward a place I want to be.

"Have you eaten?"

"I'm not hungry."

"You're not wasting away, Bella. I won't let you."

He's on his feet and in the kitchen before I can protest. He takes off his suit jacket, hangs it off the back of a bar stool at the kitchen island and rolls up the sleeves of his shirt before he begins to pull out items from the brown grocery bag. Fifteen minutes later, he's offering me French Toast with blueberries and Greek yogurt. I take the plate from him, wondering if he knows how little experience I have with simple, normal, relationship-type things.

He cleans up in the kitchen, and by the time he's finished, I've demolished every last crumb on my plate.

"Have you slept at all?" His thumbs brush under the dark shadows that ring my permanently puffy, red-rimmed eyes.

"Not often. Not well."

He holds out his hand for me to take. "That needs to be remedied too."

I don't argue. I'm exhausted. From thinking. From breathing. Lying down sounds good to me right now. Lying down with Edward sounds even better.

We don't sleep though. We lie in a comfortable silence, staring at each other in the half-light, hands woven together as something more passes between us. Care. Appreciation. Adoration. It soothes my aching heart just a fraction when he looks at me like this. And I realize… I've missed him.

"Why are you doing these things for me?" I ask into the darkness.

"I thought the reason would be obvious."

"To someone normal, yes. But to me … you don't even know how much it means."

"I think I do." He brings the crook of his finger to caress my cheek, and my eyes flutter closed. I've been holding my feelings back for months, not letting myself cave completely. Not wanting to know this side of Edward, but now?

"Tell me something about you," I ask. "Something no one else knows."

His fingers draw a pattern over the curve of my bare hip as he contemplates, before he clears his throat.

"The scar that runs down the side of my thigh is from a snowboarding accident when I was fifteen; I was in Aspen with Emmett. He dared me to go off-piste. It went great until it didn't. I was so close to piercing my artery and bleeding out. I'm still not sure how I got so lucky. A few inches to the left and I would have. But … I lied and told everyone I almost died, because it was more dramatic. I thought that would get my parents' attention. It didn't, but it was a winner with the girls at school."

"Do you not have a good relationship with your parents?" I frown. "Why would you want to get their attention like that?"

He chuckles humorlessly.

"They were busy. My dad was a high-flying cardiothoracic surgeon, and my mom a lawyer so … saying they were hands-on parents would be a lie. I resented it. Our relationship is better now, especially since they've retired, but it's always been distant. They're proud and loving but have had expectations of me since they sent me to school. I ticked them off one by one. Graduated top of my class in high school. Went to Yale. Then law school. Prosecutor. Then landed in the Senate after they funded a hefty part of my campaign."

"What's next?" I muse. "The White House?"

"Potentially," he says. "They want it for me, but sitting in that office is—it's not where I saw myself when I was fifteen years old snowboarding, that's for sure."

"What were you like? At fifteen."

He grins. "Nerdy. Typically awkward. Not quite grown into my looks or my height. I needed braces. I never struggled for girlfriends though, so I guess it must have been my personality."

"Heartbreaker?"

"A few."

"I can see that."

He's already breaking the heart of a woman he professed to love for as long as he lived, even if she's oblivious to that fact. "Tell me something else."

"I got a golden retriever I called Fuzzy when I was five. I've wanted a dog ever since he died, but between long working hours and travelling, I can't have one. And I really fucking resent the fact I can't."

"Is there not a way? I can picture you as a dog person."

Edward grimaces. "It would be highly unfair on a pet when I'm so rarely in one place, at the moment anyway."

"Is that why you don't have children yet either?"

He didn't expect me to ask something so personal; the way he holds his breath in his lungs tells me so.

"Sorry," I whisper. "I just—you're at an age and point in your life where it's almost expected. There's speculation in the media."

"I know." He considers me. "Don't be sorry for asking hard questions." He pauses as if figuring out the right words. "We're both incredibly career-driven but I've got very mixed feelings about children in general. I don't see it yet. I don't know whether—" He stops. "I don't think I'd be a good parent."

"Why not?"

"You know the answer to that."

"Because you're not committed enough to your wife?"

He nods. "It's hard to see us as a family unit. It'd be unfair to bring a child into a situation when I'm not certain."

Not certain of what exactly, I don't dare ask. Instead I lighten the heaviness for him.

"Plus, your naming skills leave a lot to be desired. Fuzzy?"

"I was five. He was fuzzy." Edward shrugs with a small smile.

"Tell me something else," I ask softly, my fingers coming up to trace over his mouth. He kisses them, before threading his through mine.

"Don't you think it's my turn? Tell me something no one else knows."

I'm silent for a moment. "I've never been in love," I confess to the ceiling.

"That's … very hard to believe," he settles on after a long pause. "No high school boyfriend? No one in college? Not once?"

"I thought I loved my high school boyfriend but I didn't. I cheated on him. You don't cheat on people you love. I had a couple of short-term relationships in college, and then for the last few years, I've been an escort. Feelings don't come into it. After everything with my mom, I think subconsciously I thought that loving people hurt and that inevitably when they leave, I'll end up getting hurt. I push people away before they cause any emotional damage."

"What happened with your mom?"

"She was a drug addict. Ironic since my dad was a cop."

He waits for me to elaborate, but when I don't, he squeezes my hand encouragingly. "Where is she now?"

"I don't know. Dead, maybe. I don't like talking about it but …" I exhale heavily. "She left when I was nine. She left me in the house alone while my dad was at work, and I sat there and waited for her to come back all night. Sad, right?"

"Horrifying."

"I last heard from her just before I started college. She wanted money. Not to see how I was, or beg for forgiveness. I haven't heard from her in any of the years since. She could be dead. She could be sober with another family of her own. I wouldn't know."

A bitter laugh escapes me. "She proved to me love is conditional, and ever since, I've never felt good enough, or worthy of it. I think it's why being an escort is so easy for me—I disassociate. I don't care. Deep down, I think that makes me more like her than I would ever have wanted to be. She took advantage of my dad's love for her and broke his heart. Mine too."

"And you think you do that too?"

"I take advantage of the whims of men for what's in their wallet. I entice and deceive and lie. I sell myself. Those are all things my mom did and that makes me just as bad."

The conversation I managed to have with my dad about my mom is still fresh in my mind. He explained in stilted breaths, as we reached the bottom of a memory box, that he hadn't kept the pictures of my mom in there for himself, but for me—should I want them. If he'd had the strength later that day to get to the kitchen after our heart-to-heart, he would have seen the majority of them in the trash. I kept one—a picture of my mom at the same age I am now, with a flower crown in her hair and the white babydoll dress she chose to get married in. He looked at her like she hung the moon, and that's the only reason I've kept it, because it reminds me that my dad loved her to a fault.

"Is that what you see this as," Edward probes. "You taking advantage of me? Because I can't think of anything I would disagree with more."

"And what if I am? What if everything I ever say or do is just me playing pretend with you, Edward? What then?"

"Then you'd be a better actress than my wife."

"That wouldn't be hard," I snipe.

Edward laughs deeply, pinching my hip, but he doesn't defend her. "You're not that good."

"Aren't I?"

"No. No one can fake that many orgasms."

"It's a fine art."

"Stop fucking with me," he warns. "I don't believe you. You're deflecting."

I bite my lip, because it's all true.

"Do you know what I think is tragic? That you don't think you're worthy of love. Of being loved. Of giving love," Edward says so gently, his words a caress against the emotional wound I've carried for most of my life. "You are."

"Maybe. I don't know." I swallow thickly. "How much more tragic is it that you're the first person in my life in years I've felt myself falling for and you're a married man who pays me to have sex with him?" I bite my lip, regretting blurting that out loud, glad that the room is dark so he can't see how flushed I am. The confession doesn't seem as big when you're in the grips of grief and sleep deprivation.

Edward stills his hand. "A couple of months ago you said that would be a very silly thing to do," he says tauntingly, his fingers continuing their path along my hip. "Just now you said you could be pretending."

"I lied. This is me not fucking with you. And it's still a very stupid thing to do, and an even stupider thing to admit to you, but here we are. It's why we had rules at the agency. To stop attachments forming. It should end here." I swallow hard.

"And yet you're not the only one falling, Bella," he admits in a low voice that sends my pulse soaring.

"It could still just be lust," I counter. "Sometimes the two can be misconstrued."

"It could," he agrees. "But I think there's more than chemistry between us. I wasn't lying that I think if our circumstances were different, the outcome of you and me would be exactly the same. Some things are just inevitable." His hand urges me closer, so I'm tucked under his chin and completely enveloped in his warmth. "Your mom was callous. I'm sorry she hurt you so badly. You didn't deserve that."

We lapse into a poignant silence, until I stifle a yawn behind my hand.

"You need to sleep," he says.

"I can't stop seeing his face," I tell him, lurching to the grief that refuses to leave, my voice unsteady. "I still can't believe he's really gone. I don't want to keep waking up and having to remember why everything hurts. I'm all alone."

"You're not alone. Exhausting yourself isn't going to change anything," he says, firm and gentle. "Try closing your eyes, at least. For me."

I swallow hard. "For you."

It takes a while, but with the soothing motion of his fingertips running over my back, the steady beat of his heart under my ear, and the warmth of his body so close to mine, eventually, for the first time in years, I find myself drifting off to sleep in a man's arms. Safe, comforted, lulled into a place where I can see faint glimmers of possibility.