“I’m a ghost, Jude. I can never go back. I can’t do that to them. Tell me you understand. This is about them. Not me.”
Every instinct I have starts waking up, goosebumps peppering up my arms. “What do they think you did?”
“It’s not what theythink. It’s what Ididdo. I’m guilty of all of it.”
He screws his face up, kissing my stomach again before he sits back on his heels and gently smooths his T-shirt back down my body, covering me. His eyes track it inch by inch, like he’s committing this moment to memory.
He gives my waist a final squeeze between his large, warm palms, then removes all physical contact from me.
I rush up to a sitting position, staring into his eyes.
“Don’t make me tell you, New York City,” he whispers. “Let me remember you looking at me like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m someone you could actually love.”
“What?” I sob.
What could he possibly have done that he thinks is so awful? For his family to tell the world he’s dead, and for him to say he should be in jail? My head knows the truth must be terrible. But my heart refuses to listen.
“How am I supposed to leave knowing something, but also not knowinganything?”
“You just do it. You pack your suitcase, and you get on your flight to New York.”
“What will you be doing?”
“What I said I would.”
“Not think about each other again?” I choke out. My throat thickens until it’s painful and my eyes brim with tears. “You think we can both do that?”
“I know I can.”
“You’re a liar.”
“I’m a lot of things, Jude, none of them good.”
“I don’t understand. What did you do?”
“Don’t.” His voice takes on a low warning, and he stands and storms to the edge of the deck.
I jump to my feet behind him, marching over to where he’s standing with his hands wrapped around the steel guardrail like he’s strangling it, the muscles in his arms straining like they’re about to pop.
“Tell me!” I cry. “You can’t do this. You can’t give me all this time with you, make me start falling in…” I swallow, forcing away what I could so easily say. “You can’t do this. Please. I need to understand, otherwise how do you expect me to get on that plane and never think of you again? How?”
“I can’t,” he grits.
“Please!”
“No!”
“PLEASE!” I sob.
He snaps his head around.
“I killed her! I killed my own mother.”
I stumble backward.
