“Go,” he says motioning his free hand toward the front doors. “I’m sorry that I put you through this. I’m so sorry.”
The woman in the flowered dress raises her eyes to him and then immediately bolts out of the store sobbing hysterically.
“Bray,” Caleb says turning to her, “I’m sorry for being such a dick.” He looks at me. “I really am.”
“I know,” I say.
Bray just sits there quietly with her back pressed against the wall. Her tears have dried up, her face devoid of any emotion.
Caleb goes to the door and opens it enough that he can yell out, “I’m going to come out! I’m going to surrender!”
Bray gets up, and her movement surprises me. She walks past me and goes toward the end of the candy bar aisle.
I follow behind her.
“Put the gun on the floor and come out with your hands up!”
Caleb sets the gun on the floor right in front of the door, raises his hands high above his head, turns around, and pushes the glass door open with his back.
The second the door closes, I see Bray’s dark hair whip behind her as she runs toward the door. I panic inside when she falls to the floor and grabs Caleb’s gun and then backs herself against the bread display.
“What are you doing?” I approach her carefully. My heart is hammering against my rib cage. “Baby… please… please don’t—”
She shoves the gun underneath her chin, pushing her head back against a loaf of bread, and her finger rests on the trigger.
I fall to my knees, tears streaming down my face. I feel like I’m going to throw up my heart is beating so fast.
“God, please, Bray… please… if you do this, if you take your life in front of me it will kill me. I love you so f**king much. I always have. I always will.” I’m choking on my tears, and the back of my throat burns. “You remember that pact we made when we were kids? Best friends always. Do you remember?” I inched closer on my hands and knees. My hands are shaking so badly I can hardly hold my body up. Bray’s face holds no emotion. None. She just looks at me through glass eyes, but the more I talk to her, the more I remind her how much I love her, the more I see the faintest of emotion flicker inside the glass. I see the Bray I’ve known and loved since I was nine years old, the one stronger than the darkness that lives inside of her. “I know you remember. But you’re more to me than my best friend. You always have been. My heart beats for you. If you die, every part of what makes me human will die.”
Her hand begins to shake. It makes me nervous. Her finger on the trigger… I don’t want her to shake.
“God damn it, Bray… I love you! Don’t put me through this!”
“I can’t be locked up!” she screams. “I can’t live like that! Away from you! You’re all I have in this world! All I’ve ever had!”
“I’ll be there!” I scream back at her with every ounce of emotion my body can produce. “I would never leave you alone! Do you understand me?! Never! I don’t care how long it takes, Bray, I will wait for you!”
And then the significance of the moment hits me.
“I will die for you, Bray! I will die WITH you!”
Her lips quiver uncontrollably. She stares deeply into my eyes for what feels like forever. And then she shakes her head no, the barrel of the gun moving with the movement of her head.
“Don’t say that!” she roars.
“I will!” I scream, and then I try to calm myself enough to make her understand. I inch closer. “Brayelle, this, this moment right here is the ‘anything’ I vowed to you last night. You didn’t ask me to prove it, but I’m going to prove it anyway—don’t look away from my eyes,” I say, and she looks back up. “Stay with me. Right here.” I point at my eyes with my index and middle finger. “If this is what you really want, then I go down with you. I don’t want to live without you, either. We’re in this together. We always have been. I won’t abandon you now. I’ll die with you if you think death is the only way.”
She shakes her head, over and over, and tries fruitlessly to produce words.
“I don’t want you to die because of me,” she finally says, her voice raspy from crying so much and so hard.
“I want to live, Bray,” I say breathily, and with desperation. “I want to live a life with you. I want to marry you. I want to grow old and have babies with you. I want to live. But I’m prepared to die. Do you understand?”
“Why are you doing this?!” Her features are tortured, her body trembling.
“Because we belong together! In life and in death! Because without you I’m dead anyway!”
She throws her head back against the bread shelf and screams, dropping the gun on the floor. I grab her and scoop her up in my arms and crush her so hard against me that it takes the breath out of my lungs. We cry into each other, her fingers grasping my shirt, mine digging into her back.
“Baby, I f**king love you so much. I’ll never let you go,” I murmur into her neck.
The police burst through the door, but I can only faintly hear them. They’re ghosts, like Bray had always been to her parents. I only see and hear and feel Bray when they’re pulling us apart. I only hear her yelling out my name as everything else around us is mute. My heart breaks as she is reaching out for me and I know I can’t reach back. Everything seems to happen in slow motion.
“I won’t abandon you,” I say almost in a whisper, as she’s being dragged away with her hands behind her back. “I won’t abandon you.”
And then she’s gone.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
One year and two weeks later…
Elias
I have written her every day. I’ve visited her every week during visiting hours. I’ve spent every waking moment not only proving to Bray that I would never abandon her, but fulfilling my own need to be with her.
Bray was sentenced to three years for involuntary manslaughter and for leaving the scene of a crime, but her attorney expected her to actually serve less than half of her sentence. Having no prior criminal record except a harmless stint in juvenile and offering to take a polygraph test really helped her case. Bray passed the polygraph, but it almost wasn’t admissible in court because Jana McIntyre’s family initially didn’t agree. But in the end, they relented.
Turned out that Jana McIntyre had more of a record than Bray had. Jana spent most of her teenage life in and out of juvenile detention and juvenile court for behavioral crimes, most of them related to violence. But the one key thing that Bray’s attorney made sure to bring to light in court was Jana’s three-month stay in juvenile for attacking a girl in the school gym and beating her unconscious. This helped back Bray’s story about Jana attacking her on the ridge and Bray shoving Jana only to get her off. Bray might’ve been given a lesser sentence if she hadn’t admitted to pushing her out of anger rather than self-defense. But at least she told the truth. It was self-defense, and the judge believed this, given the details of the situation, but it wasn’t life or death for Bray, and she had acted more out of anger than fear.