“You were the first person who asked what I thought about something and actually waited for the answer,” I said eventually. It came out quieter than I’d intended, and more honest, the way things do when you’ve been holding them in long enough that letting it out stops feeling like a choice. “Not just about the books. About anything.” I looked at her—the downward tilt of her head, the loose strand of hair she’d stopped bothering to push back. “I wasn’t used to that. Someone just—talking to me. Listening. Like my answer actually mattered.”
She looked up at that, and something in her expression moved in a way that made it hard to look at directly. “It did matter,” she said softly. “It always did.”
I nodded once and looked at the shelves, because I needed somewhere else to put my eyes for a second.
Cara looked up. “That shouldn’t be rare.”
“No,” I said. “But it was.”
She held my gaze for a second and then looked back down at her mug, and I watched the small crease form between her brows.
“I read now,” I said. “For fun. Have for years.” I looked at the shelves. “That started with you. You made me see stories differently, and it never quite wore off.” I glanced back at her. “I don’t think I ever told you that.”
She went still. “No,” she said quietly. “You didn’t.”
“Well.” I turned my mug between my palms. “It’s true.”
She was quiet for a long moment. Outside, Sycamore Street was empty and still.
“I had a crush on you.” She blurted it to her mug, then made herself look up, and her shyness—the effort it cost her to say it plainly—was one of the mostCarathings I’d ever seen her do since we sat down back here. “Back then. I convinced myself you liked me too, and then afterward I spent a long time deciding I’d made the whole thing up. That I’d been fifteen and reading into things that weren’t there.” A small, self-deprecating breath. “It took me an embarrassingly long time to talk myself out of it.”
I looked at her steadily. “You didn’t make it up.”
She stilled. “Jasper?—”
“I knew,” I said. “And I liked you too.” I held her gaze because she deserved that much—the plain truth of it, said directly, not softened into something easier to dismiss. “But you were fifteen, and I was almost eighteen, and I was leaving. Starting something with you when I already had one foot out the door—” I shook my head. “That would have been the wrong thing to do. You know that. I would have hurt you. And myself too.”
She was quiet for a moment. Something moved across her face—relief, maybe, or the feeling of something you’d been carrying finally being set down somewhere solid. “Yeah,” she said. “I do know that. I just—” She stopped. “It would have been easier if I’d known at the time that I hadn’t imagined it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry for that part.”
She shook her head. “You don’t need to be sorry. You were right to go. I just needed—” She smiled, small and a little rueful. “I needed to know it was real.”
“It was real,” I confirmed.
She nodded once, and something settled between us that had been left open ended for way too long.
“The letter,” she said, after a moment.
“I wrote it three times,” I said. “Sent the safest version.” I looked at my mug. “You didn’t write back.” The words were quiet. No accusation in them—I hadn’t meant there to be—butthey sat in the air between us, and I watched her go still again. Her fingers tightened around her mug, and her eyes came up to mine, and I saw it there, the flash of something that looked like pain, the recognition that it had mattered to me more than the safe version of the letter had let on.
“Jasper,” she said, barely above a whisper. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said. And I meant it. I did. But there was anokaythat still carried some hurt, and I think she could hear it.
She was quiet for a moment, her eyes dropping to her mug. “What would you have said?” she asked softly. “If I’d written back.”
I looked at her for a long moment. “More,” I said simply.
Something moved across her face at that—something soft and a little undone. She turned her mug slowly in her hands, and when she spoke, her voice was careful, like she was setting something fragile down. “I didn’t write back because I was afraid you wouldn’t reply,” she whispered. “The letter was warm, and it was real, and I needed it to stay that way. If I wrote back and you didn’t answer, it would have become something else. Something that would have broken my heart.” She paused, her eyes bright. “I couldn’t do that to it.”
“I would have answered,” I said.
“I know that now.” Her voice broke on the last word, just slightly, and she pressed her lips together and looked away for a second, collecting herself with the quiet dignity she brought to everything.
We sat with that. It wasn’t grief exactly, what sat between us. It was something more bittersweet—the acknowledgment that something real had existed, and that the timing had been wrong, and that neither of us had done anything wrong, and that it had cost us both something anyway.
The hardest kind of loss. The kind with no villain.
