Gabriella hadn’t come outside, and although I felt like perhaps I should have gone to make sure she was okay, I wanted to find Nash more. And I had an idea; his mother might know where he went. So, I put his ex out of my mind and drove to Linda’s house, hoping like hell she was home.

Fifteen minutes later, I pulled into her driveway, and was relieved when she answered her door. The minute she saw me, she knew something was wrong and ushered me inside.

“Is he okay?” she almost whispered.

“No. He just had a huge argument with Gabriella at the clubhouse, and then he took off. He’s in a very bad state, Linda, and I have no clue where he would have gone. Do you?”

Her eyes filled with tears, and her hand covered her mouth for a moment. “He’ll be at the cemetery.”

“What?” I couldn’t fathom why she’d said that.

She reached out and squeezed my hand. “You need to go to the Mount Gravatt Cemetery; that’s where he’ll be.”

There was an urgency to her voice, and the way she said it made me believe she was right. I decided not to stand there and ask questions.

“Okay,” I said, softly.

She didn’t say anything else; she simply nodded at me, trusting me to look after her son. I felt the weight of that, and hoped I could give him what he needed.

Thank fuck it was a Sunday. The traffic wasn’t too bad. I did speed a little though, but fuck it, I had a good reason. On my way there, my mobile started ringing. Normally, I wouldn’t be bothered answering it, but I figured it might be Scott or even Nash, so I pulled over and answered it.

Nash.

“Nash, where are you?” I begged him to tell me.

There was no sound on the other end, except for his ragged breathing. When he spoke, his strangled voice shredded my heart a little bit. “Velvet... I need you,” he pleaded.

“I’m on my way, baby. Where are you?” I fought tears. Nash was drowning in his pain, and all I wanted to do was put my arms around him, and hold him.

“The cemetery...” He choked on his words, but I had the information I needed.

“Okay, I’ll be there in about ten minutes,” I promised.

He hung up without saying anything else, and I planted my foot on the pedal.

I found him fairly quickly when I arrived at the cemetery. He was on his knees, hunched in front of a gravestone. It was an overcast, cold day, and he cut a forlorn figure in the distance. I hurried to where he was, out of breath by the time I got there. He heard me just as I got to him, and he turned his head to look at me.

The look of pure agony on his face threatened to rip my heart apart. The Nash hunched on the ground in front of me was not the Nash I knew. And yet, he was. This was the missing piece to Nash; the piece of the puzzle that had been missing for so long. I’d grown to love this man, but I’d often struggled to connect the two sides to him that he showed me.

I knelt next to him. I didn’t touch him, didn’t say anything. It was up to him now to do what he needed to do.

His anguished voice sliced through me. “He would have been thirteen this year.”

A sob escaped my lips. Oh, God. I hadn’t wanted it to be true, but it was.

“Aaron. That was his name.” His voice cracked, and he stopped talking. His pained stare locked onto mine. He needed me like never before.

I gently touched his arm. “What happened, baby?”

His chest rose and fell unevenly, and he expelled a long breath before finally giving me the missing piece of his story. “She cheated on me, over and fuckin’ over, but I wouldn’t have my son grow up without two parents so I tried to make it work. Fuck, the shit I put up with from her; that bitch should never have been a mother. Then, I fucked it all up myself. I’d been drinking, and her best friend threw herself at me, and I thought ‘to hell with it’. I wanted to make her fuckin’ hurt.” His wild eyes searched mine, frantically. “It was once. I only did it once. She found out, and went mental. Said she was gonna leave me and take Aaron, and never let me see him again. I was furious; no-one was taking my son from me. But she managed to get him into the car and she left. And that was the last time I saw my son.”

Nash had been ravaged by his grief, and my heart bled for him, for everything he’d lost. I moved closer to him, and placed my hand on his back, gently rubbing up and down. My touch seemed to calm him a little; enough to carry on.

“She crashed the car that day, and he died.” He breathed a long, deep breath in, and then blew it out. “And it’s my fuckin’ fault.” His eyes squeezed shut, and he began sobbing.

I couldn’t control my own tears, and they fell freely, too. My arms went around him, and he clung to me. Heaving sobs wracked his body, and he buried his face against my chest. I placed my hand on his head, and stroked his hair. It was hard to see Nash like this. He was such a powerful force; to see him devastated like this, ruined in this way, was difficult.

I had to be strong for him though. Nash was at the point where he couldn’t take it for a second longer. He couldn’t deal with the pain that had haunted him for the last ten years; he needed me to help him through this.

After I’d let him get his grief out, and I felt his shudders subside, I whispered, “It’s not your fault, Nash.”

He slowly lifted his head to look at me with pained eyes. “It is, Velvet. If I hadn’t slept with her friend, she wouldn’t have taken him that day, and they wouldn’t have crashed.”