Her tortured expression damn near buckled Jay’s knees before she disappeared behind a curtain of Gray’s wet hair as she threw her arms around Becca in a fierce body slam of a hug.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Davis run for the barn.
Then Eve appeared, exiting the house from a side door and running for the other women like the world had caught fire. She reached them in seconds, throwing her arms around both of them as Becca sagged and her legs gave way.
They crumpled to the ground together.
A human ball of misery.
“Here,” Summer cried, appearing with Jamie and Cody. “Take Halia.” She handed the baby to Jamie, and before anyone could protest, she flew off the porch, her socked feet kicking up mud as she splashed her way over to the women huddled on the ground.
She threw her arms around Becca, doing her best to shield her from the worst of the driving rain. Eve shifted, folding herself over both women until Becca disappeared into the protection of the bodies around her.
“Jesus Christ!” Cody muttered as Davis reappeared, running at full tilt with Chase and a blue tarp trailing behind him. “Is somebody gonna go get them?”
“No,” Jay said. “Becca needs to choose.”
“Choose what?” Cody demanded, his agitation at seeing the outpouring of grief making his voice crack.
“Herself,” Jay replied as Adam walked by to give Davis and Chase a hand. Together, the three of them spread the tarp open.
“Yep,” Jamie said, handing Halia over to Cody. Then without another word, he jogged through the rain to grab the fourth corner, and lifting as a team, they held the makeshift roof over the women while the rain hammered against the plastic. Cold. Hard. Unrelenting as it drowned out everything else.
The men didn’t talk as they sheltered. They simply waited. Acted as sentinels. Witnesses to the hurts of mankind carved into the hearts and flesh of the people they loved. Jay understood their pain. Their helplessness. Their frustration at being unable to erase the suffering and take the burdens from their significant others.
Because he felt the same way.
He’d do anything—give anything—to spare Becca. To give her a single moment of peace. But he knew in his heart she had to walk through this deluge on her own, so that the choice she made, she made freely.
And for herself.
Jay’s hands curled into fists of restraint as he watched the love of his life sob uncontrollably in the arms of the women who refused to let her fall apart alone. Refused to let her drown in a sea of sorrow.
“I can’t!” He heard her anguished cry, the guttural wail tearing from Becca’s throat as if it’d been exorcised from her soul. “I can’t do this!”
His feet pulled him off the porch. Carried his heavy weight. Brought him closer to the group protecting his woman, shielding his love, and saving his life by helping her to choose her own as the storm inside her broke.
The pain. The heartache. The unbearable weight of her grief and guilt. The years of pent-up emotions breached her chest in a steady stream of pure devastation as they held her together.
Gray. Eve. Summer.
Each one an anchor as she wept. Furry, loss, betrayal—bleeding from Becca’s body until nothing remained. They were the ghosts of her daughter, her parents, her friend, her sister, all clawing for space inside a heart that no longer knew what to feel or how to feel it.
“I don’t know who I am anymore,” she choked out. “I don’t know how to breathe without breaking. I don’t know how to live. Not like this. It’s too much. It all hurts too much!”
“You’re Rebecca motherfucking Barrows,” Gray said, her own voice choked with her tears. “And if I have to remind you every day about what a badass you are, I will.”
“We all will,” Eve said, tightening her hold around Becca’s shoulders.
“We’ll breathe for you,” Summer added as Davis wiped away the tears streaming down his cheeks, prompting Jay to do the same. “We’ll breathe for you until you’re ready. Until you’re strong enough to do it on your own. We’ll breathe for you.”
“I’m not strong enough,” Becca sobbed. “I’ve never been strong enough.”
“Bitch, you’re one of the three strongest people I know,” Gray replied.
“Four,” Summer insisted, and she wasn’t wrong. Each of the women holding onto the other had survived their version of hell. Had faced their own demons, real and imagined. And they were stronger for it. Strong enough to sit in the mud and the rain and the aftermath of what had been done to them.
Strong enough to make the choice, every single day, to stay and fight, even when it hurt.
