Page 7 of Falling With You

Maybe she should. Because I hadn’t been there. I had left her alone. When I voiced my concern, she had waved me off, and I left her.

I should have stayed.

Maybe if I had stayed, she wouldn’t have been hurt.

Maybe if I had stayed, she wouldn’t have been scared.

Maybe if I had stayed, I wouldn’t have broken my fucking hand.

Maybe if I had stayed, I wouldn’t be lost as to what the hell I was going to do.

Because I truly had no idea what the fuck to do.

I sat in my house, in the dark even though it was light outside. I just hadn’t opened my blinds, and I didn’t really want to.

I wasn’t allowed to work yet, even to stand in the kitchen and order people around.

The doctors said that I might be able to soon, but my brothers told me I needed to stay at home. I needed to rest. I needed to get to a hundred percent mentally before I could step foot in that kitchen and try to figure out what the fuck I was going to do.

For all I knew, the whole place that I had helped rebuild was just going down in flames.

Yeah, I might be a little egocentric, but I wasn’t so much so that I thought that no one could run things without me. But, still. I was the one who had made the menu. I was the one who had taught everyone in that kitchen what they needed to do.

I was the one who had fired a couple of people who didn’t like the change and wanted to do things the way they had been.

The thing was, they hadn’t really been doing too good of a job under Jack. But my dad had wanted to keep them on because he had a hard time firing people.

He hadn’t had such a hard time when I was younger, but as he’d gotten older, after he had lost Rose, he’d had a harder time keeping the good people on staff and not firing those who didn’t need to be there.

Maybe it was sentiment, perhaps he just hadn’t cared anymore after losing his wife.

My mom.

I didn’t know what Jack had been thinking those months, but the almost failing of the bar wasn’t just on him. It was on the whole lot of us, and the fact that we Connollys hadn’t been there to help him. I had spent the last few months changing my life, completely putting myself into the place that had been my father’s, my mother’s, my family’s. And now I wasn’t there to see it through.

Because I’d broken my fist on some fucker’s face.

Yeah, I was pissed off. But maybe it was what I deserved.

Regardless, Sienna hadn’t deserved any of that.

And I hadn’t spoken to her since the incident.

Oh, I wanted to. I wanted to make sure that she was okay, but all I had been able to do was look at her in the distance when she passed me in the emergency room and nodded at me.

She nodded at me, even though she wouldn’t say a word.

She had been pale, her eyes wide, a little glassy.

I had never seen Sienna like that.

She was seriously one of the strongest, bravest people I had ever met in my life, and she was always in your face—loud, happy, and helpful.

She was like that Pinkie, the pink unicorn that bounced around on that little pony show that my ex-girlfriend had made me watch at one point. The fact that I was now worried that maybe Sienna wasn’t a unicorn, but maybe just a regular pony told me that the pain meds might be making me a little off right then.

But that was life.

Sienna wouldn’t talk to me. I had texted her once, and she hadn’t texted back.