Unloved, a love story Read online

  My father, Paul Isaac Porter, was convicted twenty years ago for the brutal murder of twelve innocent girls.

  Though I was only eight years old at the time, I am aware, every day of my life, that I am his child, his only son.

  To protect the world from the poison in my veins, I live a quiet life, off the grid, away from humanity.

  I promised myself, and my mother, not to infect innocent lives with the darkness that swirls within me, waiting to make itself known.

  It’s a promise I would have kept . . . if Brynn Cadogan hadn’t stumbled into my life.

  Now I exist between heaven and hell: falling for a woman who wants to love me, while all along reminding myself that I must remain . . .

  UNLOVED, a love story

  Copyright © 2017 by Katharine Gilliam Regnery

  Sale of the electronic edition of this book is wholly unauthorized. Except for use in review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part, by any means, is forbidden without written permission from the author/publisher.

  Katharine Gilliam Regnery, publisher

  This book was written between March – August 2017.

  A serialized version of the first eight chapters of this novel appeared first on Radish.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Please note, lovers of Katahdin and the surrounding areas of Maine, that I have taken some fictional liberties with my descriptions. I hope you will forgive me.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, with the exception of reviewers, which may use up to five lines from Unloved, a love story, within the body of the review.

  Please visit my website at www.katyregnery.com

  Cover Design: Katy Regnery

  Developmental Edits: Chris Belden

  Technical Edit: Melissa DeMeo

  Proofreading: Nom de Plume

  Formatting: CookieLynn Publishing Services

  First Edition: October 2017

  Katy Regnery

  Unloved: a novel / by Katy Regnery – 1st ed.

  ISBN: 978-1-944810-15-3

  ~CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR UNLOVED, A LOVE STORY~

  “Poignant and absorbing as it shifts in perspective between Cass and Brynn, Unloved is a read like few others and is highly recommended for audiences who like their love tempered with a flirtation with danger, frosted with psychological inspection, and packed with revelations that resound in the heart long after the last page is absorbed.” –Diane Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

  “Fans of edgy contemporary romance with a happily-ever-after ending will fall in love with Brynn and Cassidy’s one-of-a-kind romance.” –BlueInk Review, starred review

  “Regnery’s latest is a dark, fast-paced tale of two people who meet under unusual circumstances . . . The tension is just right, and the Maine setting is well crafted. The story unfolds organically, with a twist readers won’t see coming.” –RT Book Reviews

  “When I finished this book, I hugged it to my chest, trying to hold onto its beauty for a little bit longer. Beautifully written and poignant, every reader will love Unloved.” –Carey Heywood, New York Times Bestselling Author

  "Mind. Blown. Unloved is a masterpiece of darkness and light and gasp-worthy love that rocked my freaking world! This year’s must-read!" –Annika Martin, New York Times Bestselling Author

  “Real, raw, sometimes gritty, but also incredibly romantic and healing. This epic love story is Katy Regnery at her very best.” –Mia Sheridan, New York Times Bestselling Author

  “One of my favorite reads this year! Gritty, intriguing, inspiring." –Leylah Attar, New York Times Bestselling Author

  “Heartbreaking, sexy, and so lovely. I absolutely loved Unloved! It begins in tragedy and takes you on a journey of healing and forgiveness. One of my favorite books of the year!” –Tia Louise, USA Today Bestselling Author

  “Unloved is the best book I have read this year and if I could, I’d be awarding this amazing book 6 stars! Well done Ms Regnery!” –Emma, Kindle Friends Forever

  “When the truths are revealed, your jaw will join mine on the floor. I am not joking. That last quarter of the book? Brilliant.” –Jessica, BookedJ Book Reviews

  “…her new book, Unloved, has to be the very best book she has ever written. In my humble opinion it is a gem. It is at the top of my list of THE BEST READS OF 2017.” –Nancy Parken, Goodreads reviewer

  Table of Contents

  UNLOVED

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Epilogue

  UNLOVED PLAYLIST

  A Modern Fairytale

  Also Available from Katy Regnery

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For George, Henry, and Callie.

  You are loved.

  xo

  Brynn

  My car wouldn’t start.

  That’s how it all began.

  With something as ordinary as a dead battery.

  Turning the key again and again, I was rewarded with silence and finally texted Jem that I wouldn’t make it to the concert. I told him I was sorry. I told him to have a great time. I told him not to wake me up when he got home.

  He didn’t.

  Because he never came home.

  A million times, I’ve returned to that night, to the simple, nothing decisions that started a chain of events in my life leading to today. I think of Jem checking his phone, wondering why I was late. I picture him getting my text and grimacing in disappointment. I see him in my mind, considering whether or not to leave the club and come home to me—or to stay.

  He decided to stay.

  Twenty minutes later, he was dead.

  The shooter left a note saying that he didn’t love or hate the music of Steeple 10. What he hated was the idea of all those people in a club for the same reason: having something in common that they all enjoyed. He didn’t enjoy anything with anyone and was jealous of their communal happiness, their shared appreciation for noise pop. So he opened fire on three hundred people packed into the crowded club, killing thirty-one. Among them, my fiancé, Jem.

  Sometimes, in my dreams, I’m back in my car on that rainy night, and the engine turns over. I drive to the club. I park outside. I see Derrick Frost Willums get out of his 2011 Toyota Corolla, his black trench coat too heavy and too hot for an unseasonably humid August night in San Francisco. In some versi
ons of my dream, I imagine myself intercepting him, talking to him, befriending him, and inadvertently letting him know that he’s not alone. In others, I race into the club, looking frantically over the hot-pink and indigo-blue lights to find Jem’s blond, spiked hair in the crowd. I imagine running to my love and telling him to lie down on the floor with me, since those who quickly dropped to the floor mostly survived. I imagine us huddled together on the filthy, beer-slick floor as bullets rain around us and terrified concertgoers slowly realize what’s happening, darting chaotically in search of cover, slipping in pools of blood, trying desperately to dodge Willums’s relentless rounds of open fire. But mostly, in nine out of ten dreams, I am too late. I see myself sprint, in slow motion, from my car to the club, swinging open the door just in time to see Willums turn the gun on himself, pull the trigger, and fall backward.

  I stand there frozen: a lone, paralyzed figure, unable to help anyone, way too late to save Jem, who probably died instantly from a clean shot to his heart—to his strong, beautiful, bursting-with-love-for-me heart.

  When I wake up, my pillow is drenched with tears and I reach for Jem, hoping that the dream I’ve had is somehow just a horrible nightmare, not the truth, not an actual, outlandish, and still-incomprehensible part of my life. But Jem’s side of the bed is always empty now, as it’s been for almost two years.

  The rest of the world moved on from the Steeple 10 Shooting, ever more numb to the news of similar events, out of sympathy for nameless strangers who meet the same tragic end.

  But I can’t seem to move on.

  I had someone in the crowd that night who had a name, who was dearly loved. Those of us who survived are the walking wounded. Or the walking dead.

  And some of us, even if we never set foot in that club that night, are still somehow there, facing the spray of Willums’s fury with our lost loved ones, and uselessly wishing that everything could have turned out different.

  Brynn

  Present Day

  Brynn, any chance you’ll be able to complete the website by today? Was hoping to go live this weekend. Please advise. –Stu

  I stare at the e-mail over the rim of my coffee cup, rolling my eyes. When I quoted Stu (of Stu’s Pools) a price of $1,200 to build his website, I was clear that it would take up to three weeks to complete. It’s been ten days and he’s already bothering me to finish?

  “I hate people,” I tell Milo, my four-year-old Siamese cat.

  Purring, he paces back and forth on my desk, between my forearms and the warm keyboard, before falling dramatically atop it. The screen quickly starts to fill with line after line of question marks.

  “I can’t work if you stay there,” I say, taking another sip of coffee.

  “Meow,” he answers, licking his paw. Oh, well. Too bad for you.

  Milo has always been chatty. It was the reason that Jem chose him for me from all of the other kittens at the pet store that day.

  “Now you’ll have someone to keep you company while you work,” he said, handing the cashier his credit card.

  “I don’t need anyone to keep me company,” I pointed out. “I like working alone. Besides, litter boxes aren’t my gig.”

  “I’ll keep it clean,” Jem promised.

  “I don’t want the responsibility of a cat,” I insisted, whining a little.

  “Just let him be your friend. I’ll care for him,” he said, his New England accent strong on the word care, which sounded more like “cay-uh.”

  In the end, that’s what had swayed me—the way his sweet lips said care. It made my toes curl. I’d always had a thing for accents, and as a born-and-bred San Franciscan, I’d fallen for his at the first hello.

  Jeremiah Benton was from Bangor, Maine, a place so far from the Bay area, it may have well been a different country altogether.

  “What are you drinking?” I asked him the first time I ever saw him.

  I was working behind the bar, blown away by the aqua blue of his eyes when he looked up at me, and determined to be nonchalant about how insanely, ruggedly hot he was.

  “Whatever you have on tap there.” Thay-uh.

  “Thay-uh?” I repeated, raising an eyebrow, my lips quirking up.

  “Did you lose an r?” he asked, grinning at me through a scruffy beard.

  “I think you did,” I teased, pulling him a pint of Go West! IPA.

  He chugged down half the beer and swiped at his beard before speaking again, those aqua eyes darkening just a touch as they captured mine. “Sweet girl, I’ll wager I’m gonna lose more than just an r to you by the time this is over.”

  Just like that . . . I was a goner.

  He told me he’d just spent a month hiking in the Sierra National Forest on assignment for Backpacker magazine.

  I told him I’d never been on a hike in my entire life.

  He called me a city slicker and asked me when I was free to take one.

  I had never dated a customer before that day, despite many offers, but I told him I was free the following Saturday.

  He lost an r. I lost my heart.

  “Meow?” asks Milo, pausing in his bath, his blue eyes demanding I return to the present day, which, unfortunately, includes building a website for Stu’s Pools.

  I push Milo gently off the keyboard and delete four pages of question marks, toggling back to my e-mail account.

  No, Stu. I’m sorry, but if you’ll recall, our contract gives me three weeks to build the site. It will be ready on June 26, as promised.

  My fingers fly over the keys, my eyes always slower than the words I’m typing. When they finally land on the date, my fingers freeze and my breath catches.

  June 26.

  June 26. Jem’s birthday. Jem’s thirtieth birthday.

  The sudden lump in my throat is so big and so painful, it almost feels like choking, so I reach up and massage it, pushing my rolling chair away from the desk, away from the date, away . . . away . . . away . . .

  “Would. Have. Been,” I say aloud, the words more bitter than my coffee.

  Would have been . . . would have been . . . would have been Jem’s thirtieth birthday, I force myself to acknowledge.

  My therapist, Anna, told me it was like this when you lost a loved one in a violent or unexpected death: for years—or sometimes, in extreme cases, for the rest of your life—you might still keep track of the important days and milestones. It was because you never got to say goodbye or prepare yourself to say goodbye. Even if you are someday able to make peace with their passing, part of you may not be convinced that the loved one is actually gone. Some secret, hidden, yearning part of you might stubbornly hold on to the unconscious, irrational belief that they aren’t actually gone at all, just missing, just away. And when your brain forces you to realize that they are, in fact,

  Dead

  . . . for a moment—for that moment—you will lose them all over again.

  It doesn’t happen to me as often now as it did in the first year . . . but it still happens occasionally, and it knocks me on my ass every time.

  “Lean into it,” advised Anna. “Take a few minutes to remember Jem—what he meant to you, how much you loved him. And then take the time to say goodbye again. Ignoring it won’t make it go away, Brynn. Ignoring it will only keep you from healing. Leaning into it may help your mind, eventually, accept that he’s really gone.”

  With burning eyes, I stand up from the desk chair and leave my office, listening to my slippers scuffle against the hardwood floor of the hallway as I walk past the bathroom and hall closet. Entering the bedroom I shared with Jem, I head for the walk-in closet and step inside, reaching for the shoe box on the top shelf.

  Anna was also the person who helped me come to terms with donating Jem’s clothes to Goodwill and sending his books and albums back to Maine for his parents to keep. I’d sent his beloved backpacking equipment, maps, and guidebooks to his twin sister, Hope, who was also a hiker. I’d kept for myself only what could fit in a small box: a matchbook from the bar whe
re we’d met; letters and postcards we’d written to each other during the two years we were together; pictures from the various hikes we’d taken, mostly in Yosemite; my engagement ring, which I’d stopped wearing on the first anniversary of his death; and his cell phone.

  His cell phone.

  It lay, as it had for almost two years, in a Ziploc evidence bag, uncharged, on the bottom of the box, his dried blood still caked in the crevice between the screen and the plastic body. It had been found several inches from his hand, under the hip of a Stanford undergrad who’d been at the concert with her sister.

  Milo wanders into the bedroom, his face inquisitive and vaguely accusatory, as I sit down on the bed and open the box.

  “Anna said to,” I tell him, wiping a tear from my cheek.

  “Meow,” he answers, winding around my legs before lying down in a patch of sunlight on the carpet and giving me permission to grieve.

  My eyes settle first on the matchbook, a shiny, fire engine red with “Down Time” emblazoned across the top in silver. Pushing it aside, I find a picture of Jem and me—a selfie taken at the Vernal Fall Footbridge in Yosemite. Wincing, I lift the pile of pictures and letters gingerly from the box and set them gently on my bed. Generally, I go through the photos at this point, crying as I remember good times, then tearfully replacing them and whispering, “Goodbye, Jem” as I recover the box and put it back in my closet.

  But today, for whatever reason, I turn away from the photos and look back in the box at the two items remaining: my ring and his phone.

  Impulsively, I reach for the phone and pull it from the box. Unsealing the evidence bag for the first time since it was given to me a year ago, I do something that makes my heart race so rapidly, my head feels light: I lean over my bed and plug Jem’s phone into the charger on my bedside table. After two years, it springs to life within seconds, the outline of a battery taking shape on the black screen.