We make it down the road about two miles when I pull over onto the white line.
“Please tell me you’re not going to make me walk from here,” Max says, giving me a worried smile.
“I don’t even know where to begin with the questions I have. But will you even answer them?”
“I’ll answer anything you want to know.”
“Why did you go back to New York?”
“I had to attend a board meeting for my company.”
I glance at his bag. “Start talking.”
“Avery—”
“No.” My voice comes out sharper than I mean it to. I swallow and try again, lower this time. “No carefully chosen words. Just…talk.”
That finally gets him to look at me.
And it’s worse than I expected.
Because he doesn’t look like the version of him I’ve been trying to sort in my head. Not the polished man in expensive suits, not the controlled voice on the other end of assumptions I made without realizing I was making them.
He looks exhausted.
Real.
Like the mask finally slipped and he didn’t bother getting put back on.
My chest tightens anyway.
“Who are you?” I ask.
“That depends on what you mean,” he says quietly.
“I mean,” I exhale, trying to hold myself together, “are you the man I met in Penrose Beach or the man from New York?”
His eyes don’t leave mine.
“I’m both.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only honest one I have.”
That lands somewhere I don’t want it to.
I look away first, out the windshield, where nothing is happening and everything feels too still.
“You lied to me,” I say.
“I didn’t?—”
“You didn’t tell me,” I cut in, turning back. “You let me think you were just…Max. NotthatMax.”
His hands flex once in his lap, as if he’s holding in as much nervous energy as I am.
“I didn’t correct it because I didn’t want you treating me differently.”
