Free Eight Second Angel: The Ballad of Lily Grace (Lonesome Point, Texas Book 7) by Jessie Evans

you,” she sobbed as a wave of misery bent her double. “Damn you, damn you, damn you,” she chanted as she pressed her arms tight into her stomach, feeling like she was about to be ripped in two.
    She wasn’t sure who she was cursing, or where to direct all the rage bubbling beneath her grief, only that she had to let it out or be destroyed by it.
    “Why?” she asked, her voice breaking as she tilted her head back to look up at the sky through the leaves of the trees. “Why!”
    “Grace? What’s wrong? What happened?”
    She turned to her left, seeing Canyon standing a few feet away, his breath coming fast. “You followed me?” she snapped, hands balling into fists, her rage ready to lash out at anyone close enough for it to touch.
    He held his hands up by his sides. “I just wanted to make sure you were safe. What happened back there? Why did you run?”
    “You want to know what happened?” she asked, with a sob. “ Fifteen years happened. I thought I was only gone a year, maybe two. But I was up there wandering around for fifteen damned years! I missed everything.” Her eyes squeezed shut, sending fresh tears streaming down her cheeks. “And now they’re all grown up. They’re grown and she’s the mother they remember and they don’t n-need me anymore.”
    She heard Canyon moving closer but didn’t open her eyes. She couldn’t stop crying and who cared if he thought she was crazy?
    After looking up at Carter and Peyton and seeing the ghosts of her babies’ chubby cheeks in the lean faces of the men they’d become, she felt crazy. She’d wanted to take them by the shoulders and shake them until they turned back into the people she remembered, little people who had hugged her goodnight and drawn her homemade cards every Mother’s Day filled with sweetly misspelled professions of love.
    But it was too late.
    “It’s too late,” she said, hiccupping she was crying so hard.
    Canyon’s hands settled on her knees, but she flinched away.
    “Don’t,” she said, sucking in a breath. “I feel like I’m going to fall apart. If you touch me, I will.”
    “You’re not going to fall apart, I won’t let you,” he said gently. “Let me get you out of here. There are people coming up the trail.”
    Lily sniffed. “I can’t. I can’t get up.” She was telling the truth. She couldn’t imagine ever moving from this spot. She would just sit here and cry until the day Canyon died and her new body fell over.
    “Then I’ll carry you.”
    Before she could protest, she was in his arms. He lifted her like she was made of air and moved down the trail with a swift, steady stride. But then this body didn’t weigh much.
    Just another thing that was different. Wrong.
    She didn’t want Grace’s slim legs and tiny hands. She wanted her old body back, stretch marks, love handles, and all. She wanted her old life and all the years she’d missed. Once she was loved. Now, she was nothing but a dead woman inside a dying woman who had failed to be of any use to anyone.
    “You should have left me there,” she said, her voice thick as her head fell against Canyon’s chest. “It doesn’t matter.”
    “It matters to me,” he said.
    Neither of them said another word all the way down the narrow trail or up the rise to the campgrounds. Canyon continued to carry her like she weighed nothing at all and she continued to wonder why she remembered.
    They never should have let her keep her memories. Then she wouldn’t have had to realize how much she’d missed.
    But maybe they’d wanted her to see that the world had moved on without her. Maybe then she would stop clinging to what she’d left behind and move on to whatever lay beyond the in-between.
    “I hope it’s forgetting,” she mumbled numbly as Canyon set her on her feet to unzip the tent. “I hope it’s darkness deeper than sleep and nothing and more nothing and no more hurt.”
    Canyon guided her in and helped her lie down on her sleeping bag. Their