And Kieran knew, with a blinding flash of insight, everything that was inside her. She thought herself rejected, her offer of help reviled.
She saw in his eyes what he’d seen in Lori’s. “Alexandra,” he said, starting toward her. “Don’t. It’s not you. It’s me.” He struggled to find words that could reach her. “I—can’t let you get too close. I don’t trust myself.”
Still she looked through him, her face pale and her body trembling. “Because you still think you might have killed Peter?” She laughed. “Do you want to know something, Kieran? I could have killed him.” Her eyes grew dark with horror. “There was a moment when I was glad Peter was dead. When I saw him again, when I realized why he’d come back, that he was trying to make me believe he still loved me, I hated him. I hated him.”
Kieran broke his paralysis and strode to her, taking her shoulders in his hands, touching her as much as he dared. He had thought only of himself, his own pain, and Alexandra had suffered far worse. Losing her father, and then her former lover, to a terrible death—forced to go on the run to fulfill her obligation to him…
“Alexandra,” he said. “It wasn’t your doing.”
She raised her head. “I did love him once. Once he was the world to me, when he was the only one who didn’t turn his back. He never deserved—” She swallowed several times, set herself stiff and straight on the bed. “You asked me after the murder… why I would warn Peter’s possible killer.” Her eyelids trembled. “I felt so little when he died. I still feel… numb. But it’s as if my wish to make him go away did something, caused something. There’s something wrong with me, that I can’t feel more—”
“There is nothing wrong with you, Alexandra,” he said harshly, shaking her. She flopped like a doll. He turned her around to face him. “Too much has happened. You need time.”
But she seemed not to hear him at all. “It wasn’t only Peter I hated,” she whispered. “I hated my father, almost as much as he hated me. I thought he hated me. And now they’re both dead. And my mother…”
Her mother. The one she spoke to in the journal she kept so close. Kieran damned the risk and pulled Alexandra to his chest, cradling her head against the hollow of his shoulder.
“It’s all connected,” she said into his shirt. “All the same. My fault. My hatred… it might as well have killed Peter. And my father. My mother died because of me.”
“You didn’t hate your mother,” Kieran said, stroking her hair.
Her voice came muffled and small. “I loved her. But it was still my fault that she died.” The words came halting and fragmented, pulled out of the very depths of her. “We were driving by the ocean that day. It was only a month after I’d come back from my grandparents’. My parents were arguing about whether I should come back to Minnesota. Father didn’t want me to go again. I was begging Mother, and they were shouting…” Her fingers worked spasmodically at the cloth of Kieran’s shirt. “I don’t know how it happened. Father was yelling. He turned around to yell at me, and suddenly there was another car coming toward us, and we were swerving, and falling, rolling over and over.”
Kieran stroked her hair. “Alexandra.”
“Father was… thrown clear. I was trapped. Mother was bleeding everywhere. She got me out, and then she told me to run, but she fell unconscious.” Alexandra’s fingers dug hard into Kieran’s back. “I promised to save her. I tried to pull her out. But there was a fire, and I was afraid. I ran, and it exploded…”
Her pain was his, her horror. “I promised to save her,” Alexandra whispered. “I couldn’t do it.”
And he understood, at last, her obsession with promises. Her stubborn determination to keep her promise to help him.
“Your father survived,” he said softly. “And he blamed you for your mother’s death.”
Bald words, but he knew they must be true. She pulled back and looked up for the first time. Her face was strangely still, eyes unfocused, calm water over a turbulent current.