Page 78 of Waiting for You

Still, why hadn't he believed me? I stood in that dim corridor, told him my father had sworn to burn his whole life to the ground, and watched his face turn to stone. He dismissed it as movie-villain fiction. I didn't know how to make him see the truth. I'd sacrificed our whole future to keep him safe, and he called me a liar for it.

Why couldn't he trust the depth of what I'd felt? You don't walk away from a years-long relationship and a marriage proposal on a whim. Why didn't he look at our history and conclude I'd had a catastrophic reason? Even after I handed him the ugly truth, he refused to sit with it. He refused to try. I didn't know how to live with that.

I laid all my cards on the table. He walked away. I cut ties with Andrew. Then I spent two days staring at my apartment ceiling, crushed by the exhaustion of a woman who'd played every hand wrong and run out of moves.

I sat with that until the story I'd been telling myself rearranged itself. For eight years I'd cast my father as the villain and me as the girl who'd had no other move. But I'd always had a move. I just kept making the same one, dressed two different ways. With him, I surrendered every choice and called it survival. With Xavier, I tore every choice out of his hands and called it protection.

The giving up and the taking over looked like opposites, but they grew out of the same scared place. If I decided how things ended before anyone else got a say, then no one ever got the chance to see the whole of me and stay, or not. That was the hard thing I'd spent my life walking the long way around. Standing still with my hands at my sides, letting someone I loved weigh me and choose, knowing the answer might gut me. I'd never once been brave enough to find out.

Knowing it didn't make me ready to do anything about it. So I did what I'd done for eight years. I locked up the studio, went home, and let the ordinary days fold back over the thought until it almost stayed buried.

Walking toward the shop on Wednesday morning, I nearly collided with someone rounding the corner.

It was Eliza.

We both went still. Her dark eyes widened before smoothing into something composed. We stood on the pavement, neither of us speaking.

"Are you okay?" she asked. "Your last day at the estate seemed rough."

"I'm fine."

Eliza tilted her head, her mouth pressing into a thin line. "I don't buy that. Come sit with me. There's a coffee shop right here."

I almost declined, then gave in, leading her to an espresso bar half a block from my studio. We grabbed a corner table. The chatter muffled the traffic outside.

She set her mug down.

"I knew about you before Hawaii," she said. "Not your name, obviously. But when you date someone, even casually, you sense when their mind is elsewhere. Xavier was checked out most of the time. I knew there was a ghost. I just didn't know whose."

I stared down at my black coffee.

"The trip filled in the blanks."

"Did you hate that I was there?" I asked. "That we kept ending up in the same orbit?"

She turned her mug. "Honestly? I told myself I should. But it was hard to hold a grudge when the dynamic was so obvious. Can I tell you the truth about Xavier and me?"

I looked up.

"It was never a real relationship. Xavier refused to fall in love again, and I didn't want the burden of a commitment either. We settled for comfortable company. It was just an arrangement—an agreement—with no romance, zero expectations."

Xavier had gone looking for something that couldn't wound him. He'd built a fortress with no feeling in it, and I'd spent the whole week assuming he'd cleanly moved on. He hadn't rebuilt his life. He'd barricaded it.

And I was the architect of that.

"Meeting you in Hawaii cleared a few things up." Eliza's gaze dropped to the ink at my wrists. "You aren't someone a man easily forgets. Kind of like a tattoo."

I traced the linework on my skin. A tight knot in my chest loosened.

"Once ink settles in the skin, it's permanent," she said. "Xavier loved you. He tried burying it for years." She offered a wry smile. "He failed, and badly."

He was surviving the same grief in a different room. We'd been mirroring each other's misery without knowing it.

Eliza said their arrangement had no romance in it, but it had still cost a year of her life. She'd chosen him. And now she sat across from the woman who'd haunted her ex's thoughts, telling me to fight for him.

"I'm sorry," I murmured. "I never wanted to be the collateral damage that cost you a year."

"Don't apologize. We're grown women. There's no bad blood here, and we shouldn't hate each other over a man."