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“You would’ve done it eventually.”
“I would’ve,” he agreed. “But it might’ve taken longer. Much longer.” I saw him turn his head toward me in my periphery. “Years.”
Dread soaked through me like sticky tar, adhering to my veins. I’d known this was coming. I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t.
“I’m somewhat of an expert at hurting the person I love the most in this world because I think I’m protecting them,” he continued. “I didn’t want to sentence Stella to a life of darkness. Of violence.” His gaze turned back to the ocean. “I’m not a selfless man. But I was sure that hurting her, pushing her away would’ve been the one decent deed I did in my life. When, in reality, it was doing her a disservice. I was disrespecting her by thinking that she wasn’t up to making decisions about her future, even worse, taking a future away from her that she wanted. A future that scared the shit out of me. When it comes down to it, that’s why I hurt the person I love most in this world. That’s why I broke her. Because I was afraid.”
It was the longest Jay had spoken in one breath, without some kind of threat or underlying badassery. This was an emotional monologue. An exceptionally honest one. One that was serving as the mirror I really, really did not want to look into.
“I’d be doing you a disservice to insinuate that you don’t know yourself,” he added. “I’ve had the pleasure to get to know you over the past few years, and you are an exceptional woman who most definitely knows herself.”
He sipped his coffee. I did the same in an effort to chase away the chill of the truth.
“So if this is the future you want—sitting on the beach alone after partying all night with men whose names you don’t remember the names of—I will not judge.” Jay nodded. “No one will. Not for a second. But don’t you dare disrespect yourself by denying both you and a man I respect and admire a future just because you think you’re protecting him. Just because you’re afraid of what you may lose.”
There it was. The speech that everyone had been too afraid to give me since all of this happened. I knew that they did not want to rattle me, did not want to pierce the skin of mine that they perceived to be so fragile.
It wasn’t like I didn’t already know most of this. I’d buried the truth deep inside of me, pushed it away whenever it started to bubble up. But it was something entirely different when someone said it out loud, at five in the morning, with the sun rising over the ocean.
“Oh my god,” I whispered. “I’ve been doing the alpha male ‘I’m hurting you for your own good’ thing. I hate that thing. It’s my least favorite part of every rom-com ever made. And I’m doing it.”
Jay chuckled. Chuckled.
Since Stella and him got married, since Ruby was born, he was known to smirk, sometimes grin. But a chuckle? No, he did not do that. At least not in public. It would mess with his super villain street cred.
“You’re surviving,” he said, his voice suddenly serious. “You have been in survival mode. But now you need to live. For the people who love you. For yourself. You need to make a choice.”
He leaned in to kiss my forehead, lingering there a second.
I didn’t have siblings, not in this world at least, but the warmth of that gesture was what I imagined a loving brother might impart.
Jay stood then, staring down at me. “You need to make a choice, Wren,” he said again.
Then he left me staring at the waves, trying to figure out what to do.
“He will be your destruction.”
The words echoed.
I wondered if Karson had found that woman in Romania, if she would’ve said the same about me.
It didn’t much matter now.
All that mattered was my choice.
And so that’s how I found myself in LA roughly twenty-four hours later, in the same clothes I was wearing on that beach—the same clothes I’d worn to the wedding the day before—sitting on Karson’s porch, much like I had been the very first night we met.
That felt like a lifetime ago.
In a way, it was. I’d lived a lifetime of pain and trauma in that time. But also many lifetimes of happiness. Of love.
I had no idea what time Karson would come home. If he’d come home. He could be keeping different hours. He could be digging graves. He could be with another woman. Not that I had any right to be mad if he was.
Though I was mad.
Mad at myself.
For hurting him so deeply for so long. For denying us years.
