I try one last attempt. One last hope in hell.

“Lachlan,” I say, my voice trembling. “I love you. No matter what you say or what you believe, I do. And I swear you believed me, you felt it, up until hours ago. Please, don’t forget that. I don’t regret coming here, no matter what’s going on with you. But you have to work with me, please. You have to understand that you’re drunk.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

“You’re drunk,” I repeat loudly, trying not to scream until he gets it, until he sees. “You have a problem and it’s nothing to be ashamed of but it is going to kill us, kill you, if you don’t stop. Please. If you can’t help yourself, please let me help you.”

He watches me for a few beats then cocks a brow. “Is that all?”

“No,” I say, the frustration choking me. “No. It’s not all. It’s everything.” I pause, closing my eyes because I’m afraid to see the truth. “Don’t you love me?”

Time is stretched thin. Too many moments pass and my heart is thudding so loudly that I’m afraid I couldn’t hear his answer anyway.

Finally he says, quiet and gruff, “How could I ever love anyone who could love me?”

Fuck.

That does it.

My eyes snap open, the anger hitting me all at once. “You know what?” I snap at him. “I’m getting really sick and tired of your woe is me bullshit!”

But he just shrugs at that, looking away. “You know where the door is.”

“Unbelievable,” I say. “Do you hear yourself?”

“Do you want me to show you the door?” he says, looking back at me, like he’s completely fucking earnest.

“Are you seriously threatening to kick me out of here?”

“Do I have to threaten you?”

Whoosh. All the air is sucked from my lungs.

“No,” I tell him, the tears starting to flow. “No you don’t have to threaten me, asshole. I’ll show myself to the door.” I walk past him and pause briefly at his side, staring down at him with so much rage that it might just rival his own. “I don’t know who you are, or what you did with Lachlan. But I do know that this you, I don’t love. I have nothing but hate for this you.”

He doesn’t say anything. But it doesn’t matter.

I storm past him and out into the hall. I can barely see through my tears. I don’t even know where I’m going, but I have my purse on me and for some reason I think that’s all I’ll need, that I’ll be okay.

Lionel is sitting by the door, whining to go out, looking scared and pitiful. If I don’t take them, no one will. Lachlan is a lost cause.

So, so, lost.

I grab their leashes, hook Lionel up to it and then find Emily, who is shaking under the coffee table. I leave the flat quickly, almost running down the stairs and then head out into the night. I run down the street, the dogs running beside me, nervous, frightened, not sure what’s going on.

I don’t know what’s going on either.

I just keep going and going and going.

Because I have nowhere to go.

Eventually I collapse onto a bench, on a park by the Leith waterway. It’s dark, and probably very dangerous, maybe even with two dogs. But at the moment, I’m not scare of anything except the demons who have taken hold of the man that I love.

I put my head in my hands and break down, wild sobs ripping out of my throat. I cry because I feel nothing but hopelessness, I cry because I love him so much that I don’t know where he ends and I begin. I cry because he doesn’t deserve any of this, because he never asked for the life that was handed to him.

My broken beast.

How you can both love and hate someone at the same time is a merciless trick of the heart.

I don’t know how long I stay on that bench for, but eventually the dogs are getting restless and wanting to go back. I don’t really have a choice but to return. The dogs belong with their owner and I belong with him too, if not just for one more night. I honestly don’t know what tomorrow will bring.

While I head back, I’m scared that he’s going to still be up, still be angry, still be that horrible person I hate. The things he said echo in my head, the foreign, heartless look in his eyes. Each recall hits me like an ice pick, cold, sharp and deep.

But thankfully when I get into the flat, there’s no sign of him until I look into the bedroom. He’s asleep, sprawled on the bed and snoring loudly. Normally I’d bring him some water and Ibuprofen for his hangover but tonight, well tonight he can go fuck himself and if he wakes up feeling like shit, then good, he deserves that and so much worse.

I can’t imagine sharing a bed with the thing he’s become, so I change into my nightgown and settle down on the couch. Lionel curls up at my feet, Emily on the rug beneath me. Their presence is comforting, but not enough.

I try not to cry again but it’s pretty much impossible for me to turn off my emotions at this point. That black heart of mine is long gone and this new one is beating in agony. The only good thing about crying your eyes out is that it works as good as a sleeping pill and it’s not long before I fall asleep.

I wake up briefly though, in the dark, maybe the middle of the night, to see Lachlan’s shadow at the foot of the couch.

I hold my breath, waiting.

He places a thick blanket over me, tucking me in.

Then he turns and stumbles back to the bedroom.

I pull the cover up over my shoulders and close my eyes.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Lachlan

Guilt isn’t an emotion.

It’s a living, breathing organism. It’s another man living deep inside you, screaming so loud sometimes that you wish you could tear off your skin and let him escape.

But you can’t.

And there’s nothing you can do to silence him.

Nothing at all.

There are things that you think will help you.

Wicked, beautiful things.

Sex.

Narcotics.

Alcohol.

They all sing their sweet siren songs to you, hoping you don’t recognize the evil underneath. They are a temptress, promising to alleviate your pain, promising you a soft, warm hug. They promise you the world.

And they deliver. They always keep their promise. Maybe for a moment, maybe for a few hours, they let you be taken by the undertow.

That’s why you keep going back. Because they don’t lie.

And because the next day the guilt has multiplied. You’re an even worse person than you were before, as if that was even possible. As if the hate inside you for yourself could ever deepen.

But it does.

Again and again.

Day in and day out.

And there’s only one way to get through it.

To dull the pain.

Mask the sorrow.

Numb the hate.

You do it to yourself again.

Until it’s the rest of your life.

But I don’t want it to be the rest of my life.

Because there is someone in my life that makes it worth living. That makes me want to be a better man. That makes me want to fight against all the things I’ve given into time and time again.

The irony is, I think I’ve already lost her.

I don’t even have to open my eyes to know she’s not with me.

Her absence hits me harder than the pain inside my head, the sour, rolling swell in my gut. When Kayla isn’t in bed beside me, I feel utterly adrift.

Alone.

Somehow I push aside the self-pity, the loathing and the hate, and try to formulate a plan. My brain is sluggish and keeps re-circuiting into old patterns. It’s painful to re-route it, to concentrate, to figure out what to do to fix this before it’s too late.

If it’s not already too late.

I open my eyes and the sunlight streaming in through the window nearly blinds me. I blink at it, gathering courage, pushing past the sick agony that rushing inside me.

I don’t remember much from yesterday and that’s a problem.

It didn’t use to be a problem. The blackouts. There was something so neat and tidy about them. Whatever happened in the spaces I didn’t remember, never happened. Even if someone told me that I fought someone or said something horrible or vomited all over the bar, or whatever it was, I couldn’t conjure up the memory for the life of me. So it became like make believe and I just pretended that it was some other guy who did all of that because me, me, well I would know exactly what I had done.