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“I take the blame for the choice I made,” I said. “I left. I have regretted it every day since. But I will not take the blame for this. What did you expect me to do? When you wouldn’t even speak to me?”

Her chin quivered. “If you loved me, you could have never kissed someone else.”

I looked at her, my eyes sad. “If you loved me, you could have never broken up with me in the first place.”

I turned and left her standing there.

10

ANNA

“JEREMY!”

He ignored me and went out onto the four-season porch.

“Jeremy, don’t ignore me!”

“So you admit you don’t like how it feels.” He turned to me. The look on his face was pure heartache.

I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to ward off the pain I felt rolling off him, or to keep the pain from rolling off me or to just keep myself together when I felt like I might fall apart.

He shook his head. “I thought it was hopeless. I thought it was done, that you were done, and I wasn’t getting you back. All you had to do was let me know there was a chance. I would have waited forever if I thought there was a chance.”

Tears pricked my eyes. “You should have waited anyway. Even if there wasn’t a chance. You broke my heart and you did it twice.”

He took a step toward me. “If you think for one second that I would have gone to that school all over again knowing what it would cost me…”

He put his palms to his forehead and squeezed his hair. “I never got over you,” he said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear him.

The words made a lump bolt to my throat. “I never got over you either,” I whispered.

He dropped his hands and looked at me, his eyes red, and my heart was crushed all over again.

“You’re right,” I said, my voice thick. “I should have never broken up with you. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you what I saw and I just left you wondering. I should have fought with you. Cussed you out—anything but cut you off. You deserved at least that.”

He studied me for a long time. Then he sat heavily on the foot of a green velvet chaise.

“It’s okay,” he said finally. “We were kids. We made mistakes.”

I stood there for a moment before I went to sit next to him. I leaned forward and put my face into my hands. “I guess we weren’t the best communicators, were we?” I said into the darkness.

He laughed a little. “No.”

“It’s not that I didn’t understand how special that school was for you. I did—”

“You don’t have to explain it—”

I sat up and wiped under my eyes. “I want to. I was just so overwhelmed with everything. I was scared my mom was going to die. I was angry that you chose to leave me, that you weren’t there for me physically while I was going through that. After a few months, I still missed you so much, but I had calmed down a little. I told myself that I was being selfish, that I should be happy and proud you were smart enough to get into a college like that. I just couldn’t stay mad at you, even though I wanted to and I was so, so hurt. So I went to California and… seeing you with someone else was the final straw. I couldn’t turn the mad off after that.”

He stared blankly at his hands clasped in front of him.

“Maybe we were supposed to break up,” I said. “Go out in the world, try other things. Try other people,” I said, not believing one word of it.

“The only thing the world taught me is there’s nothing and nobody as good as you.”

I swallowed the knot in my throat. “It taught me the same thing. And maybe that was the lesson.”

We sat there in silence. The minutes ticked by like they always did. Only it was okay because this time at least it was time together.