Not about Miles.
Not about how lost I still felt, about how hard I was trying to feel whole again.
“Do you ever wish it was more?” I asked him after a beat.
I didn’t know much about Logan’s parents. Throughout our friendship, I met them a few times, exchanged some pleasantries, and with every interaction, they’d been kind. But I knew they didn’t have much of a part in his life even now.
He shrugged. “Maybe when I was a kid. Watching your family… it made me wish for more from mine. But now? I’m grown. I’ve got what I need.”
I finally turned to look at him. The sunlight cut across his face, outlining the sharp lines of his jaw and the subtle furrow in his brow. There was so much he wasn’t saying, but somehow, I still understood him completely.
“You’ll tell her when you’re ready,” he added, eyes back on the road.
He knew this was less about his relationship with his mom and more about mine. Hell, he spent practically his entire life growing used to the kind of relationship it was.
It was like he could hear the exact thoughts running through my head, that strange guilt I’d been carrying for keeping my mom in the dark, for shutting her out when all she’d ever done was try to be there for me.
“I just don’t know what to tell her,” I admitted.
Logan reached over, his hand brushing mine for just a second before returning to the wheel.
“Tell her everything,” he said. “Exactly how it is.”
“I feel bad for not keeping her in the loop. For keeping her in the dark about everything that was falling apart in my life.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t think she’d be understanding—my mom had always been the most empathetic person I knew. It was the shame. The embarrassment of admitting to a woman who always seemed to have it all together that I was barely holding myself upright. That I wasn’t anywhere close to being the woman she was.
I shifted slightly in my seat, wishing for his touch again. I ached for the familiar safety I felt in his presence, ached for the way just one brush of his fingers could quiet the noise inside me. Slowly, I rested my hand on the center console, pretending it was casual but secretly hoping he’d reach out, lace his fingers through mine, and remind me that I wasn’t alone.
I’d been blind. Naive, really. So caught up in my own chaos that I hadn’t seen the way Logan looked at me. The way he showed up. The way hestayed. Janet’s comment from last night still echoed in my mind, sticking to me like the humidity in the air.
Was it wrong to test that connection? To see if it could be something real, something worth holding on to?
But was this just me misreading someoneagain? For the third time in my life, and I wasn’t even thirty yet.
A thousand thoughts raced through my head, crashing into one another like waves.
Was what I felt real?
Was it Logan, or was it just the distance from Faircloud that made everything seem softer, easier?
And even if I was right… who was to say I could trust myself not to get hurt again?
Was I even ready to explore something like this?
God, who was I kidding? I was still spiraling.
“Sure,” Logan said gently, “but that doesn’t mean you can’t talk to her about it now.”
Like I'd hoped, his hand reached out, arm brushing gently against mine as we shared the space across the center console, his voice anchoring me.
“Where would I even start?” I asked, my voice quiet.
“Start with why you ran.”
I let that settle, and I extended my pinky, wrapping it around his in a desperate reach for connection.
“I was going through it mentally, my world was pretty much ripped out from underneath me.”
