I don’t wait.
I snap my fingers.
A security guard appears immediately—one of my father’s hires. Big. Quiet. Efficient.
“Escort her off the property,” I say. “Make sure she and her car don’t come back tonight.”
The guard nods once and takes her arm.
She twists back toward me, desperation breaking through. “Tony?—”
I lean in one last time.
“Don’t think for a second I won’t have people watching,” I tell her. “That little beat-up car of yours parked under some oak tree, waiting. You better be gone by the time my wife cuts the cake.”
Her lips tremble.
“Wish me a happy honeymoon,” I add coolly. “We’ll be speaking when I get back.”
The guard leads her away. She doesn’t fight it.
I stand there a moment longer, camera heavy in my hand, listening to the muffled music from the reception, the laughter, the life continuing without her.
Then I straighten my jacket, toss the camera into a trash bin, and walk back toward my bride.
I don’t look over my shoulder.
Not once.
Maui is quiet at night in a way that feels almost unreal.
Melissa is asleep inside, curled up in white hotel sheets that smell like coconut and sun, her breathing slow and steady. I’ve got a drink in my hand and sand still stuck to the cuffs of my pants, standing barefoot on the balcony, staring out at the black ribbon of ocean where the moon keeps breaking apart and putting itself back together.
This should be mine and his.
Moments like this.
And it is—but not in the way Ethan once imagined it would be.
Ethan always talked about sunsets like this as asomeday. A wife. Kids. A dog named Bear. A house close enough to the water that you could smell salt in the morning and grill at night without checking the weather. He used to say it like it was a promise, like life would eventually click into place if you just loved hard enough and worked long enough.
He invited me into those dreams once. Like they were shared property.
But I knew—standing there in Maui, glass sweating in my palm—that those dreams were never going to be his. Not really. Not with her.
Ethan was never going to marry Sage and ride off into a clean sunset. He was never going to get the version of love that settles instead of burns. And that’s the thing nobody wants to admit about that summer: it wasn’t just hot and reckless and unforgettable. It wassingular. A once-only collision.
None of us will ever have that exact version of ourselves again.
But for Sage… it was different.
For her, that summer was everything.
She was an only child. No father. Maybe no mother by then, either. A wedding that never happened. A fiancé who—no onetalked about this much, not out loud—died that September day three years later. Hedge fund job. Towers. Gone.
When she found out, she clung to Ethan like he was the last piece of driftwood in a flood. I get it now. I didn’t then, but I do now.
Some love stories aren’t meant to end cleanly.
