Page 120 of The Goat Next Door

“No, listen to me,” I say. “You looked me in the face and decided for both of us that I was too much risk for your life. You didn’t ask me what I wanted. You didn’t trust me to make my own choices.”

“I was scared.”

“I know you were scared.” My voice cracks. “Do you think I wasn’t?”

He opens his mouth to respond, then closes it again, silenced by the truth of it.

“I knew what your job was when I fell in love with you, Brooks.” The words come out rough, scraped raw from my throat. “I knew there’d be nights where the radio went off and I wouldn’t hear from you for hours. I knew there was a chance Sophie could get attached to me and I could still lose both of you someday anyway. I knew all of that.”

His eyes are locked on mine now. Completely wrecked.

“And I still stayed,” I finish.

“Emmy, I know—”

“No, you don’t.” I shake my head, the motion making me feel lightheaded. “Because if you understood that, you would’ve talked to me instead of shutting me out like I was a mistake.”

His shoulders drop another inch, his posture slumping as if the very air in the room is pushing down on him.

“That’s not how I see you,” he insists.

“Then why did you treat me like that?”

“I treated you like something important,” he says immediately. “Too important. That was the whole damn problem.”

I laugh, a sound devoid of humor. “That doesn’t make this romantic, Brooks. It makes it controlling.”

“I know that.” His voice finally rises, not with anger, but with a raw, jagged desperation. “Jesus Christ, Ember, I know I handled this wrong. I know I hurt you. I’ve been sick over it.”

“You don’t get it.” I point at my chest, right over my heart. “You made me feel stupid.”

That lands. It hits him hard, a physical impact that makes him flinch.

His entire expression changes, the desperation replaced by a fleeting, shattered realization.

“What?” he breathes.

“I felt stupid,” I repeat, tears burning hotter now, blurring the edges of the room. “I was over here building this whole life in my head. You and Sophie and breakfasts and holidays and stupid town festivals. I let myself believe you wanted me here as more than just a passing distraction.”

“I do want you here,” he says, his voice a low, urgent plea. “God, I do.”

“Then why did you make me feel like you don’t?”

“Because I panicked!”

The words crack out of him so fast they almost echo against the cabinets. He drags both hands through his hair, pacing once across my kitchen—a caged animal confined by his own mistakes—before turning back to me, eyes wide and searching.

“I panicked because I love you,” he says, his voice hoarse. “Because one second it was just flirting across the grass and the next second you were everywhere. In my house. In Sophie’s routines. In my head every five damn minutes. And I realized if something happened to me—if I didn’t come home—you’d be left with the wreckage. I couldn’t stand the thought of you being hurt.”

“That wasn’t your decision to make!”

“I know that now!” he bellows, his chest heaving with the effort.

Silence slams into the room, heavy and suffocating.

His chest is rising and falling in rapid, uneven intervals. Mine is too.

“I have never loved anybody the way I love you,” he says, his voice dropping back to a quiet sincerity. “And instead of handling that like a sane person, I tried to control it. I tried to manage the risk.”