I shower and dress urgently after finally noting the time. Just enough to go see Beth, tell her everything I’m feeling, then bolt it to work. I’ll probably wake her up at this hour. She’ll look all sleep-rumpled and soft against the sheets. Leaving her might be a challenge.

As I’m grabbing a travel mug for my coffee, my phone rings from the bedroom. Puzzled, I run back up the stairs. It’s barely after five. No one calls me this early.

Beth Davis, from McGill’s flashes across my screen.

A familiar heat warms my chest, spreads down my spine. I’m suddenly wide awake.

“Hey, I was just coming over to see you. You’re up early.” My steps feel lighter as I advance back down the hallway. “God, Beth, I . . .”

“Reed, is she with you? P-Please tell me she’s there.”

I halt, not quite at the opening to the kitchen, recognizing the voice instantly. “Hattie? Hey, what’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“Beth,” she strains through a whimper. “Is she with you?”

I glance around me, confused, suddenly expecting Beth to jump out from behind something. “No,” I answer curiously, brushing a wet strand of hair off my forehead. “Why?”

“Oh, no,” she whispers. “Oh, no, no, no.”

Her voice sounds miles away. Worry plagues me, spreading in my veins like an infection. Coffee forgotten, I swipe my keys off the counter and head outside to my truck. I’m sprinting, my boots kicking up gravel.

“Hattie, what’s going on? Where’s Beth?”

She mumbles something I can’t understand, her voice breaking between fragile cries. Trapping the phone between my ear and shoulder, I start the truck and peel out onto the road.

“Hattie! Where is she?” I ask again when I don’t get an answer, my voice more demanding. My skin growing hot at the base of my neck.

She cries harder, sobbing now, breaking down completely. “She l-left. She went b-back ,” she wails, gasping for air.

Panic pollutes my mind. I break out in a cold sweat.

“What?” My response sticks to my tongue, struggling to roll past my lips as the world blurs in front of me. I blink heavily, solidly training on the road ahead. My hand violently shifts gears.

She went back? Why would she leave? What the fuck?

I search my memory for an explanation, something I obviously missed.

Images of Beth poison me with guilt. I looked at her yesterday, but did I really see her? Her sorrowed expression in the morning when I opened the bathroom door, the way she kept her head down, or turned away from me in the truck on the drive home. She was so small, so quiet.

How could I have been so blind?

“I love you . . . I love you.”

Three words, three simple words. The ones she nearly sobbed the night before, the ones I couldn’t seem to repeat. She wasn’t dealing with the shit that happened with her dad. She wouldn’t leave because of him. He wasn’t here.

It was me.

I told her I would never hurt her. I told her I could only give her so much of me, when in reality I never had a choice. I loved her, and I never said it. She left thinking I never will.

I blow through a red-light, heading for the nearest road that takes me to the highway. “Hattie, where was Beth before she moved here? Where in Louisville? Do you have an address?”

Hattie whimpers, quietly murmuring practiced words, as if she’s reading them off something. She isn’t hearing me. I can’t make anything out over the noise of the engine.

“Hattie.” I try for her attention again. Frustration flares to life in my veins. My blood runs hot. Realizing I’m wasting my time trying to get any information from her over the phone, I veer off onto a side road, heading to my original destination.

“I’m coming over, okay? I’m almost there,” I tell her.

Her voice never pauses, never reacts to mine, but it does grow softer as the one in my head dominates for attention, reminding me over and over again why this has happened.

Why this is all my fault.

I feel sick when I don’t see Beth’s car parked in the driveway. I hate that fucking car, knowing she lived in it, but I would give anything to see it right now. I send a short text to my dad before I get out of the truck, telling him I won’t be in today. Speaking to him would lead to being lectured about how reckless I’m being with my sick leave. The opinion of a man who’s never missed a day’s work.

The front door is unlocked, and I announce my presence quietly as I step inside. I don’t have time to knock and wait to be let in. I’m hours away from Beth. This is about getting the information I need and getting on the road.

A soft light from the kitchen draws me down the hallway. No voices.

Hattie looks up from the kitchen table when I enter, a piece of paper in her hand, her face flushed and wet with tears. The phone with the black floral case sits in front of her.

I disconnected our call shortly after I told Hattie I was on my way. I couldn’t stand hearing and not understanding her at the same time. Knowing she was on Beth’s phone, and that Beth was now without one.

I move further into the room, ready to ask for an address.

“I was hoping she was at your house. That she changed her mind,” Hattie whispers, her eyes drifting to the paper. “We got home late from the bar last night. Her car was gone, but we figured she was still with you, so we went to bed. I didn’t find her note telling us goodbye until this morning.” Our eyes lock. She pushes away from the table, standing. “Reed, we can’t let her go back to that man. I don’t know what happened between you two, or if this is just because of the stuff with her dad, which I feel so horrible about, but she can’t go back there. Not there. He was awful to her.” Her face falls apart in tears. A hand covers her mouth, muffling her sobs.

He was awful to her? HE.

I stare at Hattie as every muscle in my body locks up at once. As the conversations with Beth about her life in Kentucky flood my mind with snapshots of information.

Her mom dying. Beth homeless, living in her car. Until . . .

I was so absorbed in her absence, in the address I needed to pry from Hattie, I didn’t consider who Beth was going back to.

The guy she was with before me. The stranger who took her in. The one she didn’t seem keen on discussing.

“Nobody. Just this guy I met. It doesn’t matter.”

She couldn’t satisfy me with an answer quick enough on the phone. Then a day later, in my arms, she was vague again.

“Relationships change. There’s really nothing more to it.”

Fuck. FUCK. What didn’t she tell me? I understood her reserve as a sad moment in her life she didn’t want to dwell on. I could tell she was uncomfortable discussing it. I didn’t want to pry. I didn’t want to sound desperate to know her.

This is all my fault.

And God, I was desperate, to anything involving her. I was sated and starved at the same time.

My nostrils flare in time with the heavy expansion of my chest. I begin to pace. “What did he do to her? Who is this guy? Fuck!” My hands tug my hair. “Fuck, Hattie! Did he hurt Beth? My Beth? Who the fuck is he?”

She lifts her hand. “Shh. Reed, please. You’ll wake Danny. I don’t want him to know about this yet. He’ll drive up there and kill that man. I won’t be able to talk him down.”