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“Will you tell me something about her?”
I blink twice, shaking off my thoughts. “Ave?”
“Waverley,” he corrects with a nod. “There are things I want to know. Things I’m dying to ask. I’m just not sure I deserve the answers…” He looks to the ground between us, and I can see it tearing him up inside. “Maybe I shouldn’t have asked at all. I’m sorry. You don’t owe me answers, and I lost the right to ask questions about her when—”
“What do you want to know?”
We’re too close.
I should step back.
“Her eyes?”
“Green.”
His brows twitch. “Hair?”
“Brown. More my natural colour than your dark.”
A thoughtful smile. “What’s her favourite food?”
“Pizza.”
“Pizza,” he repeats, his mind storing away every tiny piece. “And yours? Has it changed?”
An ache rattles through my chest, and I sigh, tilting my head. “Does it matter what my favourite food is?”
His jaw goes rigid, and then I lose his eyes to the ground between us again. “It’s always going to matter, Scar.”
I watch him, my heart in my throat. It shouldn’t hurt this much. I broke a long time ago and put myself back together all on my own. I worked so damn hard, and it takes nothing—a look, a comment, a single word, and everything I stuffed down inside, everything I faced and fixed, breaks open and rattles me to my core.
A love like ours is a once in a lifetime thing—I’d never survive it a second time. And I don’t want to.
Falling in love with a person, a friend, a job, or even the world we live in, it’s unappealing to me. It feels like a risk. I fell in love with my baby nine months after giving birth to her.
It took me nine months.
Before that, I could barely even look at her. Too afraid of what I’d find. Too afraid of what I could lose.
“Scarlet.”
I snap my eyes to his face, the ache in my throat still raging and threatening to break.
“Where did you go?”
To the very bottom… beyond the dust at my feet and then even deeper than that. “It doesn’t matter.”
I step up beside him and wait for him to take his first step forward. Wait for him to stop staring at the side of my head and get on with it before I stand here and cry like I want to.
It can’t be like this.
I’m at work. I don’t want to be sad. I want to make this work and move on from the bad stuff. The pain. That ache in my chest that’s never fully gone away since the day I lost Dad. I want it gone.
I want to be full of warmth and excitement and happiness.
I want my peace.
“Are you okay?”
