Cole keeps going, his sights set on Grayson. “You’re being me at my fucking worst. Pushing everyone away, convinced I had everything figured out, convinced I didn’t need anybody. Meanwhile I was drinking myself into the ground and taking Dana down with me.”
Zoe goes very still behind me.
Cole steps closer to him. “You didn’t give up on me. You dragged me out of that mess whether I liked it or not. You sat with mewhen I was at my worst and told me to get my head out of my ass.” He jerks his chin toward me. “I’m returning the favor.”
Silence stretches tight. Grayson rolls his lips between his teeth, his jaw tight, his gaze locked on me. My heart is pounding so loud I’m sure they can hear it, and I can feel the sour gummies making their way up my throat.
Cole looks between us one more time, softer now but no less certain. “You love each other. Fix it.”
Chapter 40
Grayson
The doorto the kitchen swings shut behind Cole, Maddox, and Zoe, and the silence that follows feels heavier than anything Cole just said.
For a second, I don’t move.I just stand there, staring at her like if I look away, she’ll disappear again.
Carly doesn’t speak either. Her arms are folded tight across her chest like she’s holding herself together, her fingers clutching the ends of her sleeves, knuckles pale. I notice the shaking almost immediately — small, barely-there tremors in her hands — but her chin is lifted, her shoulders squared.
Her guard is up, and it hurts that I’m the one who put it there.
“Hi,” I say finally, the single word coming out rough.
Her lips part like she’s going to respond, then close again. She swallows, nods once.“Hi.”
That’s it.That’s all we’ve got after four weeks.
I drag a hand over the back of my neck, feeling the five or six feet between us press in.
“I…” I stop, reset, force myself to do this properly. “I’m… so sorry.”
Her expression flickers, but she doesn’t interrupt.
“I’m sorry for the wedding. For not letting you speak. For—” I shake my head, searching for the right words and hating that everything that comes to mind feels insufficient. “For deciding what I thought happened and not giving you the chance to tell me what actually did.”
Her throat moves when she swallows. The shaking in her hands gets worse for a second before she tucks them tighter into her sleeves.
I take a step closer, careful, like she might bolt.“I'm able to listen now,” I say quietly. “I’d like to, if you’ll let me.”
She looks at me then, really looks at me, like she’s trying to figure out if this is real.“Okay,” she says cautiously.
So she tells me.
She tells me about the lease, about signing it right after I kissed her that first time and then acted like it didn’t mean anything. She tells me about thinking she’d pushed too far, that I’d fire her, that the whole thing would implode and she’d be left with nowhere to go.
“I panicked,” she says, her voice steady in a way that somehow makes it worse. “I needed a backup plan. Something I could control if everything else went to shit. Especially after I lost a place to live when Aaron and I split.”
She tells me about keeping it because she’d already signed, because breaking a lease costs money she didn’t have yet,because it felt stupid to undo it immediately when she didn’t know what was going to happen between us.
“But I was going to break it,” she says, her voice breaking just a little. “When things… changed. When this stopped feeling temporary.”
My chest tightens.
She laughs softly, but there’s nothing in it. “I looked into it. The fees. The penalties. I was going to eat it because it didn’t matter anymore.”
I close my eyes for half a second, feeling the weight of how badly I fucked up.
“I didn’t tell you,” she continues, “because I didn’t think it mattered anymore. And then everything got…bigger, and you saw that text before I could do anything about it.”
