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“You’re enough like him that it’s making me project my feelings onto you,” she finally said. “You
talk like him. Act like him. Smell like him. Hell, you even dress like him. And… it’s driving me
insane. It’s making me chaotic. And it’s confusing, okay? Luca is gone. And you’re here.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“It’s been two years, and I still want him just as much now as I did the day he left,” she
whispered. “I pray for him to come home every night. I still check the news religiously. And, if I’m being honest, and I’m sorry if this hurts, I wish every day that it was him that came home and not you.
Which makes me a terrible person.”
Her blunt honesty was refreshing.
“There are days that I wish that I hadn’t come home at all,” I told her bluntly.
Her eyes flashed up to meet mine, shock written all over the beautiful curve of her lips.
“Riel…” she breathed. “That’s never a way to think.”
I shrugged.
“Doesn’t mean that I don’t think it, though,” I told her. “I do. If I could switch places with Luca, I would.”
Her eyes went soft.
“That makes me an asshole to say what I said earlier,” she told me. “It’s not nice. And I hate that I think it.” Her eyes studied my face. “I don’t ever want you to think that I’m not happy that you came home. I am. I just wish Luca had come home, too.”
I grabbed her hand and squeezed it lightly before letting it go.
“Want to grab some lunch?” I asked.
She narrowed her eyes. “Are you inviting me to lunch because you don’t want to eat by yourself
and I’ll hopefully deflect some of the town’s attention away from you?” she wondered. “Or do you
have ulterior motives?”
Ulterior motives for sure.
I wasn’t sure why I felt the way around her that I did.
But when she was near, the screaming emptiness in my head didn’t feel quite so debilitating as it
usually did.
I grinned. “Busted.”
She rolled her eyes.
“They’re just as infatuated with me as they are with you. Even more so, as a matter of fact.” She
paused. “The day after you and I had dinner with your crew, I got a call from Ember, Luca’s mom,
saying that she’d had several reports that we’d been seen out to dinner together.”
I frowned hard.
