leaned against the open door where he stood next to Madison and said, “Beau, you have to take fault in this.”
And I lost it.
That frail grasp on my control.
On reason.
I don’t remember moving. Only knew that I was trying to get to Sawyer as Hunter held me back. All while I shouted, “I’ve tried!”
I had tried. I’d been ready to confess everything so damn long ago, and I’d kept my mouth shut for Madison. Because of her. Then she’d come back into all our lives about a month ago and destroyed everything exactly the way she’d begged me not to over a dozen years ago.
All of this came down to Madison.
I gripped one of Hunter’s arms where he struggled to keep me back and turned my glare on him. “Why the fuck do you think Madison left? Because I tried to come clean.”
Hunter’s tone was that same, soft calm when he said, “I already know.”
“I mean now,” Sawyer sighed and gave me a look like he was already over the confrontation. “This. What y’all did is only part of it for Savannah.”
“You talked to her?” I asked, chest heaving as I thought of anyone talking to my wife. Of anyone seeing her.
My world.
The answer to every fucked-up part of me.
As if finally realizing what this was doing to me, Sawyer shifted. Straightened. The annoyance slipped away from his expression as he gave a slight dip of a nod. “Yeah. We all have,” he said. “We’ll be there for her the same as we’ll be here for you. But, man, you’re not hearing me. This, what you’re doing right now, is a huge part of it for her. Your anger. Your fighting . . .”
When he didn’t continue, Cayson spoke up from Hunter’s other side. “That’s why you aren’t seeing them.”
The rage and need for revenge fled from me on a jagged breath and were replaced with the deepest kind of pain.
The kind that ripped through you. Slow and brutal.
Both Sawyer and Cayson had spoken softly. Gently. As if trying to soften a critical blow. But there’s no lessening the knowledge that you’re being kept from your family because of you. Because of something so deep inside you that is nearly impossible to control.
Something dark and sickening and toxic.
I staggered away from Hunter, my head moving in slow shakes as my life with Savannah and our kids flashed through my mind.
I had a problem with my anger—had since I was a kid. But Savannah had always been my calm. The ice to my fire.
One look at her. One touch. Even just hearing her voice, and my rage cooled. Disappeared.
But that constant, simmering rage was a lot to deal with. I knew that. And she’d told me long ago that if I got in one more fight, she was done.
I’d never been more afraid of anything than losing her. Then, when we had our kids, losing them as well.
I’d never fought as hard against anything as I had to keep myself in check, every day, until Hunter and Madison threatened to hurt my marriage.
“Savannah—my kids—I’ve never hurt them,” I said through the grief choking me.
“I know. She knows you wouldn’t,” Hunter said just as softly as our other brothers had spoken. The smallest spark of hope flared in my chest until he added, “But you got to a point . . .”
I forced my stare to him. To where he seemed to waver with what he was about to tell me.
And it fucking terrified me.
“Beau,” Hunter began hesitantly, “she’s afraid she can’t stop you anymore.”
The air rushed from my lungs on a pained breath as his words stripped me bare. Confirmed what I’d been agonizing over these past months—those demons I’d been battling. The reason my brothers would all take up against me. The same reason I’d stayed away when they’d begun reconciling.
Because I didn’t want to see the look in their eyes when they realized I was like our dad—the worry that I would become him someday. A man who physically and verbally abused his own kid for years.
Worse than all that . . . that my own wife would realize I wasn’t any better than him. That she was truly afraid of me.
My knees hit the wooden porch.
My fingers dug into my chest. Trying to tear at it. To relieve the fierce pain. To take my heart and offer it up