"What?"
"You've got a good life up there. Clean. Simple. This." I gesture at the room. The walls. Texas. "This is twelve years of garbage. You don't need to be standing in it."
"Aiden, that's not?—"
"I shouldn't have brought you."
"Stop."
"You stood in a yard and told a woman you were mine." My voice sounds dead. I hear it from far away. "But that was for show. We both know what that was."
She pulls back. Slowly. Her hands slide off my knees.
The look on her face is something I'll carry for a long time. Not anger. Something quieter. Something that breaks underneath without making a sound.
"Is that what you think," she says. "That I've been pretending."
"I think you saw a broken man in a parking lot and you did what you always do. You problem-solved. You brought coffee. You fixed it." My hands grip the edge of the mattress. "And I let you, because it felt good, and I wanted it, and I'm selfish enough to take something I've got no right to."
"You've got every right. I told you that."
"You told me a lot of things." The trap door in my chest is shut. Sealed. Twelve years of scar tissue holding it down. "And Ibelieved them because I wanted to. But my mother's dying in a bed down the road and she still thinks I'm the one who needs to come around, and Delaney looked you in the face and called me a liar, and I sat there and let it happen. Same as always. Same as twelve years ago."
Paige stands up.
She's shaking. Not crying. Shaking. Her jaw is set and her fists are tight at her sides.
"You're not the same as twelve years ago," she says. "You're a man who's spent one day with people who broke him and is letting them do it again. And I'm standing right here telling you I'm not them. But you've gotta hear me, Aiden. You've gotta let yourself hear me."
"Go home, Paige."
"No."
"Go back to Wild Peak. Go back to the ranch. I'll fly home when I'm done here."
"You're pushing me out because it's easier than letting me in."
"I'm pushing you out because you deserve better than a man whose own family thinks he's the villain."
Her eyes go bright. She blinks once. Hard.
"Fine," she says. Quiet. Steady. "Fine. You want to sit in this hotel room and let Delaney Harrison win twelve years after the fact, you go ahead. But I'm not getting on a plane tonight, and I'm not pretending this morning in that hospital room didn't happen, and I'm sure as hell not pretending Tuesday in your loft didn't happen."
She grabs her jacket off the chair.
"I'm going for a walk. When I come back, you can decide if you want to keep being Aiden Harrison who hides in the timber, or if you want to be the man who kissed me on a kitchen tableand told me he'd been carving spoons at three in the morning because he couldn't stop thinking about my face."
The door closes behind her.
Quiet.
The AC clicks on. The bed sags. Through the thin wall, a TV's playing.
I stare at the carpet, and the carpet doesn't care about me any more than the creek does, and for the first time in twelve years, the silence I've built my whole life around feels exactly like what it is.
Empty.
Chapter Nine
