“I’m sorry,” I heard myself apologize.
“We’re still getting married, Sybil. Just because you lost the baby doesn’t mean I don’t love you anymore. I forgive you. I want to spend forever with you.”
Forever.
I felt the walls of inevitability rise up around me, closing in brick by brick.
“I’m going to school in California,” I said, as if that was some get-out-of-jail-free card. “I just got into USC.”
“I know.” Liam’s face darkened, but he reached out and grabbed my hand. “We’ll make it work.” But it didn’t feel like a promise. It felt like a sentence.
“Don’t tell my parents,” I said. I didn’t want them—or anyone else—to know about our engagement. That would make it real. “Let me tell them when I’m ready, okay?” Liam must have feared that my parents would try to talk us out of getting married so young, because he agreed.
When the summer came to an end, we loaded up the car todrive to California. The citrine ring was tucked in my jewelry box, my clothes and books all carefully packed by my mom.
I kissed Liam goodbye and felt the lightest I had in months.
It was easy to fall into a new life with new patterns at school, but still, Ihadtried to make things work with Liam. Kind of. But the distance between us meant he had to resort to more and more elaborate ploys to keep me leashed to him. He demanded that any night I was out past midnight, I had to call him every fifteen minutes.I need to make sure you’re safe, he insisted. He wanted to know everyone I talked to. Everywhere I went. What I was drinking. What I was wearing.
Things finally came to a head on video chat when he threatened to hurt himself if I didn’t transfer to SMU. I slammed my laptop shut, knowing that Liam was bluffing, but terrified all the same. A week later, I awoke to angry banging on my door. It was Liam. He’d flown all the way to California to forcemeto apologize for abandoning him. When I refused and mustered the courage to tell him it was over between us, he said: “It doesn’t matter. You’re damaged goods anyway. I could never marry someone who didn’t respect themselves enough to wait for marriage.”
The hypocrisy of it rolled over me—after all, the only person I’d ever slept with was Liam himself—but I didn’t try to contradict him. I just sat on my extra-long dorm bed in stony silence until Liam left the dorm, slamming the door behind him.
I was depressed for weeks after that, but eventually, Nikki coaxed me out of our room to a party, and that night I decided to be the exact opposite of the person that Liam wanted.
I let myself be wild and carefree.
And yet, it was always there, lingering somewhere in the recesses of my mind: the fear that I’d neverreallybe free, because the brokenness was in me. The fear that Liam, for all his toxic traits, might have been right about this one thing. Even now, all these years later, I can still feel it. The fear that my past would always be waiting, like a dark tide, to swallow me under.
18
THE DRIVE BACK TO THE HOTEL FROM THE FESTIVAL IS MORE LEISURELY,the lush rainforest to our left and the ocean to our right. The wind tugs strands of my hair loose, and they flutter around my face as we round the curve that leads to the hotel entrance. The golf cart rolls to a stop as the fountain bubbles quietly and the scent of plumeria rises up around me. Sebastian hops out of the golf cart, then turns to wait for me. He doesn’t hold out a hand to help me down, and I wonder why I should care. It’s an old-fashioned gesture, something Jamie would do.
“I guess this is good night.” Something in Seb’s tone catches my attention. He stuffs his hands in his pockets and looks at me with a half grin, and I realize he looksnervous. Or as nervous as Seb gets. Uncertain might be a better word. He looksuncertain. And it’s something I’ve never seen from him. I always admired how clear-eyed he was with his future. He stepped, sure-footed, out of his front door into the wide, wide world, with a camera slung across his chest, staring straightahead. He never looked back to see if I was behind him. I would either follow or I wouldn’t.
But right now, he doesn’t look so sure. I shiver at the cool breeze, and without a word, Seb takes off his button-down shirt and slips it over my shoulders. The movement seems to loosen something within, and his lips turn up in a conspiratorial smile.
“Would you want to go for a late-night boat ride with me? I know where they keep all the keys.” He loops his arms through mine, pulling me into the lobby. “We can swipe a bottle of rum from the bar. Really make a night of it.”
I laugh, but then notice Seb’s not laughing with me. “Oh wait—you’re serious? Seb, we can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Um, because it would be super dangerous?”
Something flickers across Sebastian’s face, as if he’s recalibrating his memory of me to match the person I am now. There’s something about his expression that makes me want to throw him a bone. If only to prove to him that I’m not, despite the way he’s looking at me, some body-snatching alien inhabiting the corporeal form of one Sybil Rain.
“Besides,” I say with a shrug, “I’m already on thin ice with the resort’s boat people. Imaaaayhave jumped off the side of the snorkel catamaran before we were officially instructed to do so.”
“I knew it,” Seb says with a grin. He starts walking backward, toward the east end elevator banks. “Haven’t changed a bit.”
“Still the same old me,” I reply with an eye roll.
He raises his hand in a quick salute before he turns to walkaway. As I watch him leave, I realize how much Seb still wants to see me as the old, carefree Sybil. The person I always tried to be when I was with him. After Liam, he was the antidote I needed. A breath of fresh air. The perfect twin flame who never judged me for my wild ways, who encouraged every questionable impulse I had and made me feel like I just might be okay, if only I could keep the party going long enough.
I’m about to head to the west end elevators and my own room when I remember: Mason’s birthday party. If I head there now, I should be right on time to be fashionably late.
THERE ARE PROBABLY TWOdozen people scattered along the beach and mingling around a bonfire piled high with driftwood and palm tree bark. Dani had texted me directions to this little cove that’s separate from the resort’s main beachfront. There’s a low one-story building, which must be the staff housing. The sun is just setting, and the sky is a dazzling rainbow of yellows and pinks doubled in the sea’s reflection.
