"She loved me the other way." He says it like it still guts him. "She was nineteen. She stood in my front hall and told me she'd been in love with me for years, and I turned her down. As gently as I had it in me to do, which wasn't nearly gentle enough because there is no kind way to be handed a girl's whole heart and give it back. She ran. It was raining. She got into a car she was in no state to drive—"
He stops. He doesn't finish. He doesn't have to.
"The accident," I breathe.
"The accident." His jaw works around it. "They kept her heart beating long enough to ask me one question, and I said yes because it was the last thing left that she would have wanted. A stranger I'd never met got the rest of her life. I got two years on the floor of a locked room." His eyes don't leave mine. "A girl loved me, Jassy. I couldn't love her back. And it killed her. That is the man you've been grieving."
And there it is. Not a rival. Not a dead great love I could never hope to match.
A wound shaped exactly like me.
"And then you," he says, low and wrecked, "walked into a diner two years later with her heart in your chest and started loving me the exact way she did, loud and all in and asking for nothing back, and I lost my mind. I wasn't keeping the truth from you to protect Mary. I was keeping you at arm's length to protect you from me. From being one more girl who made the mistake of loving me and paid for it. I would rather you hated me alive than loved me into the ground."
"She wrote me a letter." His voice is the one that breaks now, the most guarded voice I've ever known coming apart at the bottom. "I finally read it, two years too late. She'd already forgiven me for it, all of it, the no and the rain and the rest, before it ever happened because she knew me better than I have ever known myself. She told me not to build her a museum. She told me that if a stranger ever ended up with her heart, I was to let them live. Let them have a whole loud life." He laughs, wet and wrecked, nothing like a laugh. "She'd have loved you on sight. She'd have taken one look at you and known you were exactly the one who was supposed to get it. The only thing I've done right in twoyears is fall in love with the girl my sister would have picked for it herself."
I'm crying openly now. He isn't. Men like him don't. But his throat works around something that won't go down, and his hands are fists at his sides, everything in him clamped shut to keep from coming apart in front of me, and the rain does the weeping for both of us, the way it's apparently been doing all along.
"That's not an apology," I manage. "That's just...true things, said too late, in a storm."
"I know." He holds my eyes and doesn't blink the water out of them. "The apology is the rest of my life. If you'll let me spend it. I'm not asking you to forgive me tonight. I wouldn't believe you if you did. I'm asking you to let me stand right here tomorrow. And the night after. And the one after that, until you believe me."
Chapter Thirty-Eight
I DON'T SAY YES. NOTthat night.
I let him stand in the rain, and I get in my cab, and I make him do exactly what he said he'd do because a year of hurt doesn't rinse off in one storm and I'm done being the only brave one.
So he comes back. The next night, and the night after, dry now, patient, always across the alley, always just my name like a question. And little by little, one night at a time, the girl who forgives too fast lets herself forgive at the right speed instead.
It takes three weeks.
On the last night I walk across the alley instead of to my cab, and I stop in front of him, close enough to count the ways he's terrified I'll change my mind, and I ask him the only question that's left.
"So." I tip my face up, the way I did on the very first night, outside a different door, a whole life ago. "What does H stand for now?"
Something moves through his face, and for once he doesn't lock it down. He lets me watch it. He smiles, that rare accidental smile, except this time it's on purpose, and it's shaking, and it's for me.
"Hopeless."
"Hopeless?"
"Hopelessly in love with Jassy Beale." His voice doesn't waver on my name, not even a little. "It never stood for anything else. I just wasn't brave enough to spell it out."
And I've waited a year and a lifetime and one long storm for this, and I'm not about to wait through a single second more.
And I do what I've wanted to do since an alley and a diner and a booth full of stolen dumplings.
I kiss him first. And I take my time about it. A whole year of wanting him poured slow into one kiss, no script to read from, no lesson to hide inside, no page number left between us and nothing held back. For one breath he goes still against me, the old reflex, the wall coming up out of pure habit. Then it comes down, and this time it stays down.
Mine,he thinks, the word breaking loose in him at last, the one he'd swallowed a thousand times and never once let himself keep. Me, crossing a cold alley to kiss him first, a year of hurt behind us and not one wall left standing between. And that, more than the kiss, is the thing that undoes him. His arms come around me like he's been drowning and I'm the first air in two years, and he kisses me back like a man who's finally, finally stopped guarding the door and walked all the way through it. He kisses me like he has the rest of his life to do it and every intention of spending all of it right here. Slow. Sure. Like he's learning me by heart and is never once going to need the notes again.
Right there in the alley. In the cold. Under the ugly buzzing light.
The best kiss of my life, and I've had lessons.
Epilogue
ONE YEAR LATER, I'Mstanding on a red carpet in a dress that fits like it was scared not to, and my husband is trying very hard not to strangle a photographer.
