Page 227 of Wild Card 13

For half a second, I was there again. The porch boards. The morning light. Her bare feet. The old sweatshirt swallowing her frame. The way she had looked at me like I was the last door in a burning house and she was still begging me to open.

Maybe this is for the best.The worst sentence I had ever said.The biggest lie I had ever made sound reasonable.

“I thought it would be easier,” I admitted.

Lucy went quiet. The kind of quiet that made every sound in the house seem too loud. The fire. The furnace. The soft click of Dottie’s nails as she shifted on the couch.

“Easier,” Lucy repeated.

“That’s not what I mean,” I stammered quickly, because I heard how it sounded. Like I was trying to rescue myself from responsibility. Like I wanted credit for suffering from the wound I made. “I mean, I thought if you hated me then, if you left for Aldenmere angry enough, it would be easier for you than months of trying to hold on while I was in Fargo and you were in Boston and everything kept hurting worse. I thought we were going to break anyway.”

Her hand left the island as if the surface had burned her. “So you broke us first.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You didn’t give us the chance to try,” she whispered.

“I know.”

“No.” She shook her head once, curls shifting around her face. “No, I don’t think you do. Because you got to turn it into some terrible, noble thing in your head. You got to decide it would hurt less if I hated you. You got to decide that breaking my heart was better than waiting to see if I would survive loving you from far away.”

“You’re right,” I sighed. “I don’t get to decide what hurts less for you. I don’t get to decide what you can handle. I don’t get to make walking away sound like love because I was too much of a coward to stay in the fight.”

A tear slid down her cheek. This time she did not wipe it away.

The firelight caught in her glasses, hiding her eyes for one second, then revealing them again. Wet. Devastated. Still standing.

My girl had always been small enough that people underestimated the amount of strength packed into her bones.

She had been strong that morning too. I was the one who had not been.

“I should have told you about Samantha,” I stammered on. “I should have pushed past you cutting me off. I should have said her name. I should have explained the migraine and the room and the meds and every single part of it until you believed me or didn’t. But even if you had believed me then, I still would have had to answer for the rest.”

Lucy drew a shaky breath.

“I let you walk away,” I whispered. “That is the part I don’t know how to forgive myself for.”

Her face crumpled for one second before she caught it. “You said you loved me.”

“I did love you.”

“That’s not enough.” She sounded eighteen again when she said it.

“I know.”

“No, Ty.” Her voice broke this time. Fully. The sound hit the kitchen and seemed to make the whole house bow around it. “I believed you. That was the part that broke me. I believed you loved me, and you still left. Do you understand what that did to me?”

Standing here with the years between us finally stripped of all the excuses I had built around them, I understood more than I had ever let myself understand. Not all of it. But I understood enough to know that loving her had not protected her from me.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. The words were too small. I knew that. But they were the only ones I had that did not try to dress the wound in something prettier. “I’m so damn sorry, Luce.”

She covered her mouth with one hand. Her shoulders shook once, hard. Not a sob. Not yet. Something quieter and worse, like her body had taken a hit and refused to go down.

I wanted to walk around the island.

She lowered her hand. “I hate that it was your cousin.”

That startled a breath out of me. “What?”