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“Have you not answered yet?” he asked, lowering his voice a touch.
“I haven’t. They’re being very patient, though,” she said.
“Why haven’t you?” William sounded genuinely curious.
She didn’t answer. At least not out loud.
William kept talking. “Remember me telling you about that couple I met downtown?”
“Yeah, from the east side of the state; they had the Gothic Revival cottage.”
“That’s the one,” he said. “They decided to do a renovation after we talked. I think I’m gonna take it.”
“That’s great, William.”
He paused. “If you wanted to stay closer for your next job ... I may have told them they’d be fools not to reach out to you.” Silence pulsed through the room. “It’s not as big of a job as the Des Moines mansion, but the house is amazing.”
Still, Charlotte said nothing.
“I ... I can’t wait to hear from them,” she said after another beat. “Thank you, William.”
I couldn’t read her voice, not without being able to see her face. So much of what she thought about everything was in her face.
Her eyes.
Her mouth.
My heart went cold, tight and hard in my chest, at the ramifications of her ensuing silence.
The thought that she’d ever put her future on hold because of us, because we hadn’t laid out what all these new changes in our relationship meant ... it was too much.
William was already acting like I was staying.
It’s what she’d always wanted, even if her reasons had changed. I had no doubt her feelings were real, and that’s what made everything seem so much worse.
I pinched my eyes shut, ruthlessly yanking up memories of my dad.
Angela.
Chris.
Reminders of all the hard things, the things that made me who I was, for good or for bad.
The ways I’d fucked up with Charlotte—my inability to say what I was feeling, thinking that I could cross any line with her and not end up wanting more and more and more.
“You okay?”
Her voice came from the doorway. When I pried my eyes open, she was studying me with concern.
“Tired,” I told her.
Her gaze moved to the letter. “What was it?”
“I haven’t read it yet.” The truth.
And the only one that I was capable of uttering.
If she had even the slightest hint of the self-flagellation brewing underneath the surface, she’d stop at nothing to disrupt it.
