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The sandwich was what I always ordered.

She’d stopped to get this. She’d ordered it for me. She knew what kind of state I’d be in and she’d come prepared.

Maddy was like a first responder for my soul.

She always had been. And even when I quit her, she didn’t quit me. This plucked at me. Tried to get in.

It did not.

She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees as I finished my food. “Better?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Good. Now I’m going to tell you something, and I really need you to hear it,” she said. “You can cut me off, cut Justin off, be so small no one can ever find you. Go ahead. Run like the wind, I won’t chase you. But you can’t escape yourself.”

I just stared at her.

“You are not what happened to you. You are what you do next.”

Something in her words finally got through, and I suddenly wanted to cry. A pinch of emotion in a dark, deep nothing.

“You turn around, you face it, and you fix it,” she said. “Or you’ll be running from what Amber did to you until the day you die.”

My chin quivered and she held my gaze.

I swallowed the lump in my throat. “How?”

“Do you trust me to help you?” she asked. “You’ll do whatever I say?”

“Yes,” I said, my voice thick.

“Can you let Justin help too?” she asked.

“I can’t,” I whispered. “I want to, but I can’t handle it.”

It was funny that in my state I was able to articulate this. A brief moment of clarity. But it was true. I couldn’t let Justin help me because he wasn’t just Justin. He was the kids too. And they weren’t mine. I couldn’t handle any more unstable relationships or situations where someone I cared about could be taken from me. And neither could they.

They needed people in their lives who will stay. People they can count on. I was the furthest thing from that to ever exist—but he deserved to hear that from me, not to be left the way I almost did. And even that just thrust me deeper into my belief that I wasn’t good for anyone. Not the way I currently was.

“I need to see him,” I said. “Before we go. I have to tell him in person.”

She nodded. “All right. We’ll take you there tomorrow.”

“And then what?”

“It’s my turn to pick,” she said. “I get to pick two times in a row. That was the deal.”

I wiped under my eyes. “Okay. So where are we going?”

“Somewhere you always should have been.”

CHAPTER 44

JUSTIN

I went home like Maddy said, and I waited. Emma texted me around 10:00 p.m. and told me she was coming to talk to me tomorrow morning.

I didn’t sleep all night.