Maybe Jazz was right. Maybe men like him don't change.
"Walk me through it," I say. "I want to understand. You called in a favor with somebody important. You got me a job I never applied for. You picked an apartment. You set a date." I count it off on my fingers, because some unhinged part of me needs him to watch the list get long. "And nowhere in any of that did it occur to you to turn around and tell me you were leaving at all. Let alone ask, hey, Maddie, I have to move across the country, do you want to come with me?"
"I was going to tell you. This week." His jaw is tight. "With the offer in front of you, so you'd see it was real. So you'd know I'd handled it."
How can a man so smart be so blind? I huff, lifting my hands at my sides in a gesture of both surrender and frustration.
"You handled it." I shake my head. "And there's your problem."
"It's the best ICU in the state." His voice climbs, and there's no anger in it. Just a kind of pleading, like if he gets the numbers in front of me I'll come to my senses, which only makes me angrier. "It's the kind of position nurses fight years for, and I took all of that away. The waiting, the competition, the uncertainty. I gave you back the career you put down for your mother."
"I never asked you to clear the way for me." My voice cracks down in the middle of the sentence and I have to cough to get the rest out. "That's what you never understood. Your money doesn't give you the right to decide what's best for me."
He flinches like I slapped him.
"I want you with me." His hands have gone to fists at his sides. "Is that the crime? I love you. I am not losing you to a zip code, so yes, I found a way to have everything. You, the merger, your career, all of it at once. I'm sorry I didn't wrap the conversation up in a bow first, but I do not understand how building you a better life is the thing I've done wrong."
And there it is. The whole man, laid out in one breath. It would almost be funny if it didn't make me want to lie down on the floor of this study and stay there, curled in the fetal position.
"You never changed, did you? You're still the same guy who walked away from me when I told you no. I guess the joke's on me for not seeing it sooner."
The room goes still, and my eyes burn. A fat, solitary tear rolls down my cheek and I'm afraid that if I wipe it away, I'll break down and I won't be able to do what needs to be done.
"Fifteen years. Fifteen years later and here you are again, deciding my whole life and calling it love." My voice is shaking and I let it shake.
"Don't," he says, low. "That's not fair."
"You know why you didn't bother asking? Because asking means I could say no. And you have never been able to survive me saying no, so you arrange it so I can't." Each word goes down like bricks on a wall I'm building between us. I shake my head. "That isn't love, Demetrius. It's just a nice golden cage. That's the part of me you've never understood. I don't want life handed to me."
He doesn't answer. His eyes are doing something I can't look at, so I don't, because if I look at it I'll back down and get all weak.
I take a breath, and square my shoulders.
"Maddie." Just my name, like it's the only word he has left.
"Goodbye, Demetrius."
He said the same word to me once, on a pier in the gold light, and then he turned around and left me sitting there in my new blue dress. I used to wonder what that took out of a person. How you just walk.
Turns out it takes nothing at all.
Just all the pieces of my broken heart.
Chapter Eighteen
Demetrius
Itturnsoutaman can walk and talk and breathe and still be dead inside.
I'm the proof.
The clock on the mantel says it's morning, and the light at the edge of the curtains agrees with it, so I'll take their word for it. Nothing else in this room is volunteering an opinion. I'm at the desk, where I have been since yesterday night, but I'm not doing any work. My laptop screen has long gone black and I'm still staring at it.
There's a tray by the door that Mrs. Fairweather brought up at some point. Eggs and toast, gone cold and unappealing. Beside my hand is a glass of something amber I poured and never drank, which is its own small joke. A man reaches for the cliché and can't even commit to it.
I haven't slept. I didn't even try. All I did was stare into the void until my eyes burned and my brain felt fuzzy.
The only thing I know for certain is that I lost Maddie.
