Page 29 of You Can Run

The words came out too quickly, like she needed them to be true.

Dante let out a laugh that had no humor in it. “He loves himself. If he loved you, he wouldn’t have given you up. You fit into his life without asking questions or giving answers.”

“You think you know me now because you knew me once?” she shot back.

“I know what you do when things get bad, you run toward whatever feels safe.”

Her head snapped toward him. “Is that what you think this is?”

“I think you moved in with a man who makes you feel like you don’t have to look over your shoulder.”

“And what do you have?” she snapped, her voice finally rising. “You have a car and a gun and a brother who looks at me like I’m a cancer. You don’t get to talk to me about love when you’ve spent the last two years hiding in a garage while I was out there trying to build something.”

“You weren't building something!” Dante roared, his foot hitting the floor. The ’Cuda surged forward, the speedometer needle jumping. “You were hiding too. Only you were doing it in a thong with a man who couldn't protect you from a rainy fucking day!”

“You don’t get to stand there and act like I’m the one who walked away from something perfect.”

Dante’s jaw flexed. “That’s not what I said.”

“It’s what you meant.”

He exhaled slowly, forcing himself to keep his voice level. “You left.”

“Because I couldn’t breathe,” she snapped.

The car seemed to tighten around them.

“I couldn’t breathe in that house,” she went on. “Every time you changed a plan, every time you told me where not to go, who not to talk to, it felt like I was right back where I started. Different walls, but the same cage.”

“That’s not what it was.”

“It felt like it,” she said. “And you never listened when I tried to tell you that.”

Dante’s chest tightened. “I was trying to keep you alive,” he said.

“I know,” she replied, and for a second there was something softer in it, something that almost hurt more. “That’s the problem.”

He frowned. “How is that a problem?”

“Because I didn’t need you to decide everything for me. I needed you to trust that I could survive it, too.”

He shook his head slightly. “That’s not how this works.”

“That’s exactly how it works. Or it’s not a real life, Dante. It’s just waiting for something to go wrong.”

Something in him snapped a little then. “Something did go wrong. You left.”

“I had to.”

“You didn’t have to go back to this—” his hand lifted briefly, gesturing at her, at the dress, at everything he hated about where she’d ended up.

Her expression hardened. “Don’t,” she said.

“You think this is better?” he pushed. “You think this is what you deserved after everything?”

“At least it was my choice,” she fired back. “At least no one was making decisions for me.”

The words hung there, sharp and final.