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“You can’t know that,” she’d said.
He had pulled himself back and looked at her, his eyes ice rock.
“I want you, too, Finn. But I can’t be with you. You’re having a baby with my cousin. I know it was all an accident, a mistake, but I can’t announce to the world that we’re in love and sleeping together, and that you’d still father Avery’s child.”
“I don’t care. I’ll announce it,” he’d said.
“No. Her parents will go crazy. Mine will die. My mother and aunt will be torn apart. And if she knows about me, you might not see that child of yours—trust Avery for that—and you wouldn’t survive it. So, either way, we can’t be together. There’s no way this is going to work. You might just as well do the right thing. If it wasn’t someone from my family …” She hadn’t been accusing, she’d just tried to explain.
“I can’t change what happened, so tell me what to do.”
“We already know what to do.”
“No.” He’d held her by her biceps and shaken her a little. “Tell me, Jane.”
“We’ll just have to unlove each other.” It had felt like empty words, but she wanted them to be true.
“Fuck, I can’t ever unlove you,” he’d said.
At the wedding, Finn looked at her. His eyes were glazed. He had told her not to come, but her mother wouldn’t let her miss it.
“If I can’t have you, then I don’t want you to see this,” he had said.
“Congratulations. On the baby and … everything,” she said as soon as the short ceremony was over. The bride was in a baby-blue dress and held a small bouquet of pink flowers.
“It matches our cake,” an excited Linda whispered to Anne. “And look, she’s not even showing yet.”
The groom was in black jeans, a short-sleeved, buttoned-down shirt that hung over it, and a jacket that looked like an afterthought.
“I hope he kisses her more passionately when the family isn’t watching,” Bert joked in a quiet aside to his wife and daughter. “He calls that peck a kiss?”
No one of the handful of guests knew that, inside, she wanted to throw up or die, whichever came first. No, that is not how Finn kisses, she wanted to scream. That is not who he loves.
“I hope we get to dance at your wedding soon,” Avery said when Anne congratulated them. For once, her cousin sounded sincere. Probably the effect of happiness and having a one-up over Noah, who stood there with his beaming wife.
Finn looked at her like he wanted to throw up or die, too.
In the midst of the excited chatter, handshakes, and congratulations that surrounded them, he grabbed her hand and slipped a piece of paper into her palm. She opened it alone, outside town hall, in the unused car that she had borrowed from her parents. There were four lines handwritten on it. The first two were quoted from the only lines in their song that somehow made sense:
And although my eyes were open,
They might just as well have been closed.
I love you.
Finn
She threw it out the car’s window when she drove along the coast, hoping the wind would carry and drown it in the ocean, along with her love for him.
