Isn't It Bromantic (Bromance Book Club #4) by Lyssa Kay Adams

            I let a captive bird go winging . . .

            He’d spent six years clinging to his mother’s interpretation of the poem, that Elena was a frightened bird who needed to fly free for a while before returning to the nest. But didn’t that mean their marriage was, and had always been, a cage from which Elena had to be set free? Didn’t that trap him in the role of the beast holding her against her will until he chose to open the door to the cage?

            All his time in book club, all the lessons he thought he’d learned, and he never learned the most important. He wasn’t the cage. He wasn’t the captivity to which she had to eventually return.

            He was the air beneath her wings. She needed him to fly with her.

            “I need to go home,” he rasped.

            Colton dug his keys out again. “Yes, you do. You have a lot of groveling to do.”

            Colton drove as fast as he could, but it was too late.

            Elena was already gone.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE





The hotel by the freeway had only gotten more depressing since she’d last checked in. She couldn’t get a flight out until the morning, but the thought of staying in the house was too painful, so she ended up back here.

            In all her lonely years, this was the loneliest she’d ever felt. She was in a hotel by herself, headed back to a place that was no longer home. But the only home she did have left was suddenly cold and empty. Vlad had taken its light and warmth and walked out the door with it, leaving behind nothing but ugly accusations.

            You’re trying to justify in your mind why his job was always more important than you.

            It wasn’t true. It wasn’t.

            You’re chasing a ghost.

            No.

            Is that how you justify the fact that you hid in a hotel room for three days with almost nothing to eat? Why my mother had to buy you your first tampons? Why he never, ever remembered your birthday?

            Elena didn’t realize she was crying until she felt the dampness on her pillow when she rolled onto her side.

            What happens after you get that report?

            A bone-deep fatigue settled into her limbs, because the answer to that question was a dark horizon. A cliff she couldn’t see over. Clue after clue after clue. None of them led anywhere definitive. How long was she going to do this? How long was she going to ignore the beauty of her present for the ugliness of her past?

            Vlad was right. She was chasing a ghost. She was the ghost. The little girl she once was before she realized how different her life was from others. Before she figured out that no matter what she did, her father was never going to come home on time. Never going to help with her homework, make sure she had a good lunch or clean clothes. He was never going to take her ice skating or to the movies. He was never going to remember her birthday. She’d spent years trying to figure out why she mattered so little to the one person who was supposed to love her above all else.

            Tears soaked her pillow now as sobs racked her body. What was she doing? Why was she leaving the man who did love her above all else? Who always had, even when she’d rejected him, even when it was clear that she didn’t deserve him.

            She didn’t want this. She didn’t want to spend her life blindly chasing something in her past until she was unable to see what was right in front of her.

            Elena shot out of bed, wiping madly at her face. What was she doing here? There was only one place she wanted to be, one place she belonged. Home. And home was with Vlad. She shoved her feet into her shoes, grabbed her backpack and her suitcase. She hadn’t unpacked anything yet. All she had to do was go home.

            The woman at the counter who checked her in watched with confused curiosity as Elena dropped her key cards into the return box. As soon as she walked through the automatic doors to the outside and into the humid night, Elena started to run. The wheels of her suitcase bounced along the seams in the sidewalk. Her car was around the corner of the hotel entrance and beneath a skyscraper-high streetlamp.

            She unlocked the car with her key fob, opened the back, and threw in her suitcase and backpack.

            And that’s when the world went black.



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