I nodded and tried to inhale.
“Breathe,” he said again, as I managed to get some air into my lungs.
I focused on my breathing for a while and, finally, it started to feel possible again. I didn’t look up at Mike—I couldn’t—but, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him pull his clothes on. The act seemed so final. A full stop to something. I heard him sigh and then sit in the chair—the one that we’d made love in last night.
“Your self-worth shouldn’t be wrapped up in something like that. It’s not healthy,” he mumbled.
“Easy for you to say,” I said back quickly. “Your thoughts about me changed when you realized who I was and what I’d done. We probably wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been a fan of my book and a fan of Becca Thorne—”
“That’s insulting!” He cut me off angrily. “I actually quite like Pebecca-with-the-wrong-name, who likes hanging out in cemeteries. The person who doesn’t wear intelligent-looking glasses and pretends to be something she clearly isn’t. I quite like the person who I met at the bar, who opened up to me, the person tonight, who was kind and gentle and shared personal stories with me, and shared . . .everything.”
“Oh,” I said, quite taken aback by his statement.
Silence engulfed the room. This time, I could almost imagine a melancholic tune playing. A sad solo violin, the bow dragging slowly against the strings, causing that agonizing, heart-piercing sound that reverberated through my entire being. The sound had such a finality to it, as if it were the very last note played by the orchestra before the curtain came crashing down.
“Where are the letters from my grandmother to whoever this is?” Mike said, after the silence. His tone was much calmer than before. I almost wished he was still angry with me, because this tone made me feel like he had decided on something and he’d resigned himself to it.
“I don’t have them,” I murmured.
“But you have her diary?”
“Yes.”
He stood up again and walked over to me. I felt the bed dip next to me as he lowered himself on to it. Another silence stretched on between us. It was the silence that two strangers would share. This broke my heart, because we weren’t strangers, not after what had happened between us last night. We’d been so close, connected, but I guess we weren’t like that anymore. And it was my fault. I’d messed everything up. I was a mess. I waited for him to speak, trying to imagine what he was going to say, or what he was going to ask me, but I wasn’t expecting what came next, even though I probably should have been.
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave, now,” he said.
I started to nod my head. I was trying to hold back my tears, but it wasn’t working. “I’ll start packing.” I stood up and rushed over to my suitcase.
“I don’t just mean leavehere,” he qualified. “I mean, I’m going to have to ask you to leave this town and to never come back again.”
“And . . . what about us?” I stuttered, heart shattering into small shards, piercing my lungs, making it hard to breathe.
“What about us?” he asked. “There doesn’t get to be anuswhen it’s based on lies and deceit, like this.”
“But last night was—”
“It was.” He cut me off again. “But, let’s face it, it wasn’t really real, now, was it?”
“It was real for me,” I said.
“Yeah, I sort of thought that, too, until I woke up this morning and realized that everything about you is a lie.”
I inhaled sharply. Yes, that was the sound of my heart breaking.
