Page 43 of Neap & Spring

Like you did.

I can’t breathe.

My chest is tight, my hands are trembling, and I feel like I’m drowning. Like the ocean outside has somehow gotten in here and is pulling me under.

He was engaged. He built this whole life, this whole future, with someone who destroyed him and made him feel like he wasn’t enough.

And I didn’t know.

While I was thinking about him every day. Comparing every person I met to him, every kitchen I worked in to the ones we shared in Paris, every cup of coffee to the ones we drank at 3 a.m. while studying for exams, he had moved on. He’d found someone. He’d proposed. He’d built a life.

The jealousy hits me like a gut punch.

It’s completely unfair, and I hate myself for feeling it. I have no right. I left. I disappeared. I gave up any claim to his life and his heart.

His future.

But God, it hurts.

It hurts to know he was that lonely. While I was running from my own demons, he was fighting so hard to hold something together that he proposed to a woman he wasn’t even sure he loved. He was reaching for stability with both hands and calling it a future.

And then there’s the guilt.

The crushing, suffocating guilt that sits on me like a boulder.

She left him. Betrayed him. Took his money and his trust and walked away without looking back.

And I did the same thing.

Not with money. But with trust and friendship and everything we’d built together.

I disappeared. I left him wondering what he’d done wrong and whether he mattered to me at all.

I’m no better than she is.

Worse, maybe. Because Sarah was honest about leaving. She told him to his face. She at least gave him an explanation, even if it was a terrible one.

I just vanished.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, and my voice sounds so broken. “Callum, I’m so sorry.”

He’s watching me, his expression guarded.

“For what?” he asks quietly.

“For —” I gesture helplessly, my hands moving uselessly in the air between us. “For all of it. For what she did to you. For —”

I want to say it. I want to say For what I did to you. For leaving and making you feel like you weren’t enough when you were everything.

But the words stick in my throat.

“Yeah,” he says after a moment. “Well. Now you know why the debt exists. We’re drowning even though the restaurant should be fine.”

I nod, not trusting my voice.

“And now you know why I’m not exactly thrilled about trusting people.” He says it lightly, but there’s an edge underneath. “Especially people who’ve already left me once.”

I flinch back in my chair like I’ve been physically hit.