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Briggs’s gaze falls.
“You don’t have to stop loving her so you leave,” Cade tells him. “Sometimes leaving is the only loving thing you can still do for yourself.”
The words move through the room and enter every place Ryan opened last night.
He sits completely still. He doesn’t look at me, but he doesn’t have to. I hear his voice instead.
I am leaving you.
The understanding hurts differently in the daylight. Ryan hadn’t left because he stopped loving me. He left because loving me had become the most dangerous thing in his life, and I had taught him that protecting himself required removing me from it.
Briggs rubs beneath his uninjured eye. “I thought loving her harder would make her feel safe enough to stop.”
Ryan releases a humorless laugh. “Yeah. That plan never fails.”
Their eyes meet across the table.
Something passes between them that belongs to the cabin, Milwaukee, and every night Briggs remained in Ryan’s apartment until Ryan received enough human interaction to survive another one.
Briggs glances between Ryan and me. “This feels hypocritical.”
“It isn’t,” Ryan says. “Charm didn’t throw a bottle at my face.”
“You broke your hand because leaving her destroyed you.”
I can see how much Ryan hates that being announced. “Self inflicted. Not the same.”
His answer is immediate enough to silence everyone.
“What Charm did to me belongs to her,” Ryan continues. “What I did afterward belongs to me. Lyric throwing that bottle belongs entirely to Lyric. Don’t pick it up because you think loving her means carrying whatever she refuses to own.”
The words aren’t directed at me not on purpose anyway.
What I did to Ryan belongs to me. His leaving, the women, the anger, and every brutal choice he made afterward belong to him. Understanding the illness that weakened me doesn’t require him to carry the consequences of how I used it against us.
He told me to find the part of myself that confused regret with accountability. For the first time, I begin to understand where it might be hiding.
Briggs looks into his coffee. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.”
“You stand beside me today,” Cade says. “You eat enough food to alarm the kitchen staff, make inappropriate comments during photographs, and watch me marry Bliss.”
“And tomorrow?”
“You fly home and I’ll repay an overdue favor.” Ryan says.
Bliss should’ve been sitting beside him for this conversation. Their friendship created the bridge that brought every person in this room together. She would’ve climbed into Briggs’s lap, wrapped both arms around his neck, and refused to let him joke until he admitted how badly Lyric hurt him.
Instead, she is having her last breakfast as a Bennett with Daniel and her brothers.
I move around the table and crouch beside Briggs. His swollen eye prevents him from looking at me fully, so I place one hand over his where it grips the coffee mug.
“Temple was right last night.”
His brows pull together. “About what?”
“You make people feel less alone.”
Briggs looks down at our hands.
