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“I’m calling this over.”
“What do you mean by over?”
“It’s a two dollar word.”
“No, no, no, no.” She stood and flung her hand out, the surprise of that sending Martha jogging into the bedroom. “You don’t get to push me
away because you’ve had a setback.”
“It’s not a setback.” It was a natural disaster. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take to find another job. I don’t know where I’ll need to move to. Keepsafe is suing me for reputation damage. If the Courier doesn’t support me, they will have me in court for years, no employer is going to want to touch me, and I’ll be bankrupt with legal fees. Meanwhile, you get attacked in the street for the crime of being with me.”
“But we’ll work it out.”
“There’s no we.”
“But—”
“You’re not in Orderly now.” Derelie flinched, but it didn’t stop him. “Life isn’t neat and things don’t just work out because you want them to.” Thousands of Keepsafe victims almost didn’t get justice.
“And all that adds up to you not loving me anymore.”
It was because he loved her. “Your career is only just taking off. You need to stay at the Courier and cement it. You don’t need me.”
“You think I value my career ahead of you?”
“You should.”
“Because you value yours ahead of me.”
This was his moment to hesitate. He saw it, like he could see a punch coming through an opponent’s change of weight. A woman choosing to squander her life and talents by tying herself to deadweight was unforgivable. And he couldn’t let Derelie make that mistake.
“Yes.” It was a lie because the chances of rebuilding his career were slim, and because he loved this woman with tears glittering in her pale, otherworldly eyes, with a generous heart he was willfully breaking.
She backed up, shaking her head.
“You’ve always known that about me. You knew it before you ever asked me a question, before you wanted me to kiss you. My job is who I am. I live to chase a story. My first love is a great headline. My identity is in my dinkus.”
“No, Jack, no. That’s an excuse. That’s you pushing me away because you’re having a hard time right now. Because you’ve never had people to stand by you.”
He didn’t want her standing by to watch him flail, be defeated. She would leave in increments, a thousand cuts, it was better to concentrate on one fatal wound. “It’s me telling you we’re over.”
“You love me. I know you do.”
Some truths he would always defend, and this was one of them. “I love you. I always will.”
Her shoulders sagged with relief. “Then we—”
“It’s not enough.”
“Loving you is first for me. It’s top of the tree, that bright star to the left of loving my family. Everything else comes second.”
There was a moment in every fight where you knew you could turn it, deliver a crushing blow, win. This was the moment of no return for him and Derelie. The love experiment was bad science. A manipulation that didn’t allow for changing circumstances. There was no happy ending here.
“Not for me.”
She backed up again and sat. Her hands shook and her face contorted, but she would not give in to sobbing in front of him. He stayed where he was half a room away, a whole different lifetime only glimpsed, now exploded into sharp pieces of pain, regret and loneliness. Before Derelie he didn’t know agony like this existed.
She put her hand on the throw rug, bunched at the end of the couch. “You want me to leave?” She’d take the concept of home with her.
