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“I told you the truth the other night at Remy’s,” he said. “I have thought about you almost every day for the past ten years.”
I licked my dry lips with a drier tongue, trying desperately to process all of this in a way that wouldn’t implode my life. But it didn’t seem possible. Nothing was ever going to be the same again, not after this conversation.
“But why did you leave that way?” I finally asked. “Without a word?” I could forgive so much, but that seemed too heartless. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Tyler flexed his fingers and made fists. I ached to touch those hands, to feel them against my skin again, the bite of them in my flesh.
“Because I knew you would have left with me,” he said, and that was the truth. But also not enough. Or not the right truth. “You would have thrown away law school and your future to be with me. And—” He shook his head. “That would have been your mistake.”
“So you made the decision for me?” I asked, anger overtaking sadness and disbelief. “It’s my life—you don’t get to make those kinds of decisions for me.”
“We were kids, and you had a future. I had a beat-up Chevy and some luck at cards.”
“That sounds like what my dad whispered in your ear while he let Owens beat you up.”
“Well,” he smiled, sadly, “you’re not wrong.”
“Your piano,” I whispered. “The music. You were going—”
“To support us by playing the piano?” he scoffed, and it felt like sandpaper over my heart.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Lying.”
“It’s not a lie.”
“But it’s not the truth.”
“Look, nothing changes the fact that it was better that I left. You may not see it, but that’s the only option we had then.”
“I don’t see it that way, Tyler. I would have stood up to my dad.”
“You said we weren’t doing what if’s.”
He was silent for a long time before responding. “You know it’s easy to say that, even to think it. But actually doing it?” He looked at me. “Putting aside your blood…it’s hard. It changes you, Juliette.”
“You did it,” I said. “Margot, Savannah. You walked away from them.”
“Which is why I can’t do it again,” he muttered. “My dad…” He shook his head and I understood why he kept the man around, despite the pain he’d caused. He was the only family Tyler had left—without Richard, he had no one.
“That’s why you’re staying,” I said. “Your dad?”
“Someone has to look after him.” He looked up at me. “But he’s only part of the reason.”
The question I didn’t want to ask ripped its way from my heart, leaving behind a thousand cuts that would never heal.
“Are you staying for me?” I asked.
Tyler looked up at the sun, over to Miguel in the distance, and all the while I held my breath, knowing the answer and not wanting to hear it.
Don’t say it, Tyler. Don’t make this happen. Don’t put us here.
“Would you have me?” he whispered.
I fumbled with the door, needing to be out of there before my heart spoke for me. “I need to go,” I said. “I need to get Miguel and pick up Louisa.”
His hand on the bare skin of my arm froze me. My entire body felt the press of those fingers, the heat of that palm. I closed my eyes, swamped, utterly overrun by sensation.
“You’re running,” he said. His thumb grazed the sensitive skin of my elbow. My body loosened its boundaries, relinquished its control. It’s what he always did to me. It’s what I’d always wanted him to do to me and I wanted it again. Now.
“Answer me, Jules.”
I couldn’t, afraid of what would spill out if I opened my lips.
“I know you feel something,” he murmured. His fingertips brushed my cheek, the corner of my lip, and I wanted to hoard the sensation, the electric pulses and shocks. “I know I’m not alone.”
You’re not, I thought. You never were.
“I don’t know,” I said, looking up at him with old eyes. I was no longer Chief Tremblant. I was Jules, a girl in love. “It still feels like you’re not telling me something.”
I charged past the white columns out front of my parents’ home. I knocked once on the big black door with the lion’s head knocker and then just went on in, powered by an engine of anger.
“Dad!” I yelled.
There was a thump upstairs and I walked across the checkered foyer to the bottom of the curving mahogany staircase. This house had been in Momma’s family for generations, and without her in it, the place seemed like a museum. Dad just didn’t have the power to fill it like Momma used to.
“What’s happening, Juliette?” Dad asked, coming to stand on the landing, his elegant face creased with worry.
The anger in me doubled at the sight of him.
