I was relieved to see that the parking lot was empty as I sat John Warren into his car seat. When I clicked his seatbelt around him, he reached for my hand and smiled. That smile would be forever burned into my mind. I took his little hand and brought it up to my mouth, gently kissing the fingers that wrapped around mine. “I love you, JW. Always will.”
I handed the little guy his giraffe as I put the rest of the bags in the seat beside him. I closed his door and got into the car. I sat there for a few minutes in the silence, trying to pull my shit together. Everything was so quiet. It was like I was stuck in some kind of nightmare, lost in a deep fog, and then JW started to babble. He was talking to me like I knew exactly what he was saying.
I turned back to him and said, “I know, little buddy. I know.”
I wiped the tears from my eyes and started the engine. It didn’t take him long to fall asleep, leaving me with a whirlwind of thoughts and questions. I still couldn’t believe how much had happened over the past year. If I had just known… if I hadn’t been so stupid and realized everything that was really going on with Hailey, maybe things could have been different.
I’ll never forget the first time I laid eyes on her. I’d pulled my bike into an old diner out on Highway 19. It was an out of the way spot, but it was raining, and I was wet and cold. The moment I saw her walk across the floor, I wasn’t cold anymore. She was waiting tables, and I wondered why a sexy woman like her was working at a place like this in the middle of nowhere. She had a figure that made a man want to peel her clothes right off, and I would’ve done just about anything to do just that. I instantly craved the touch of her skin against mine. Her long black hair was pulled back into a ponytail showing off the most beautiful blue eyes I’d ever seen. Her smile though, that mouth, those lips… damn, she was perfect.
One date was all it took. After that, the months rolled by so fast that I lost track of time. It was a whirlwind. She was everything I ever thought I wanted and more. She liked being on the back of my bike and enjoyed hanging with my brothers at the clubhouse. We spent hours talking and drinking with them. She fit. I loved that. We were happy. We’d even started talking about our future, making plans for our life together. She had enrolled in a nursing program and worked every day at the diner to pay for her tuition. Life was good.
Then the nightmare hit. Everything went up in smoke. It was hell. A stupid drunk crashed into Hailey’s car, leaving her severely wounded. The dashboard crushed in on her, breaking her leg and fracturing several vertebrae in her neck. It was my fault. I was being selfish that night. I just wanted to be with her every second, and I didn’t listen when she told me she was too tired to come to the club. She’d been working all day and just wanted to go home. I should have listened to her, but I was too selfish. I’d had a long day and just wanted inside her.
That crash stole her spark and replaced it with pain and anguish. Her injuries were so painful that the doctors prescribed her strong pain medication, and it seemed to help, giving her some relief from her misery. After she’d been home for a while, I noticed that she was taking too many pills. I figured she was just hurting, and since she was going to school to be a nurse, I thought that she knew what she was doing. A month later, when I saw her taking three at a time, I confronted her about it. She became defensive, but finally admitted that she might have a problem. As time went on, I tried to get her help, sending her to rehab and trying to find doctors that could stop the pain. But nothing worked. The pull of her addiction was already too strong. She tried to hide it from me, over and over again. Each time I discovered that she was still using, she’d promise to try harder. She’d swear that she loved me, and would do whatever it took to get better. I believed her, until the day I found another hidden stash of pills. That day, I knew I was done. She chose the drugs over the life we shared, and I refused to be a part of it.