He lets me go, and my hand flies over my mouth. How can I hide him?
The doorknob turns, andmy god,there she is. I gasp, expecting shock on her face, expecting her to draw a gun and shoot him between the eyes. But she doesn’t even blink. Not even a hint of surprise.
I swallow hard and risk a glance over my shoulder.
The window’s wide open. Curtains billow in the breeze like ghosts.
He’s gone.
Seamus is gone.
MySeamus. The man I hate.
The man I still long for.
He came back into my life at the worst possible time, right when I needed him theleast. And now, he’s disappeared again.
“Are you all right?” Yana asks, her face drawn and pale. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Have I?
A ghost would’ve been easier to handle.
I sigh and offer her a watery smile.
“I’m fine.”
It’s the biggest, boldest lie I’ve ever told. Bigger than the night I sent my brothers to that warehouse. Bigger than the wild goose chase I sent them on. This lie is darker. Deeper.
“I’m fine,” I whisper again, hoping that maybe if I say it enough, it’ll start to feel true. Hoping it’ll stitch the bleeding pieces of my heart back together.
I crymyself to sleep the night before my wedding.
I try not to because who wants photos with swollen eyes and blotchy cheeks?
But I don’t know how to stop. I don’t know what else to do.
I don’t know what else to think, or how to stop the aching inside me. It feels a lot like the hollow grief I felt when my parents died.
Raw. Scraped out. Gutting.
Only then, I was just a kid. Too young to fully understand.
Now, the pain cuts from a different place. Because now, I know too much.
And that knowing is a different kind of wound.
I wake early and stare out the open window. I half wish, half beg for him to be there. To see him again, just once more, even though I know it will kill me, and it won’t soothe the aching in my heart. If anything, it’ll make it worse.
I can imagine him there.
Perched on the windowsill, blue eyes steady on me, cheeks flushed with emotion, that maddening dimple in the corner of his mouth.
I saw how it hit him like a two-by-four when I said the wordUndertaker.
He doesn’t know that I know who it really is. But now I’ve said it out loud. Now I’ve exposed him for what he is.
And because of that… he’ll never come back again.
