Page 228 of Wild Card 13

“I hate that some part of me feels foolish now.” Her eyes squeezed shut. “I hate that my brain wants to go back and replay all of it like I should have known. Like I should have stayed. Like I should have opened the door again.”

“No.” I shook my head. “You saw what you saw. You came to me. You asked me. I’m the one who didn’t answer right. I’m the one who stopped fighting. You don’t get to carry my part because the facts changed.”

Lucy looked at me for a long time.

The quiet did something different then. It did not soften exactly. Nothing about the room felt soft. But the air shifted. Like something true had finally been set in the correct place.

She looked away first, toward the dark windows beyond me. From where she stood, she could probably see my reflection again. Maybe hers too. Two people separated by a kitchen island and a frozen lake and a history neither of us had known how to bury. “I left too,” she said.

My chest tightened. “Lucy.”

“I did.” Her voice stayed thin, but steady enough to scare me. “I saw something terrible and I ran. I didn’t answer your calls. I didn’t ask who she was. I didn’t let you explain at first.”

“You were hurt.”

“I know that.” She swallowed. “But I keep thinking maybe if I had just?—”

“No.” The word came out before I could soften it.

Lucy’s eyes snapped back to mine.

I took a breath, slower this time. “No,” I said again, quieter. “I’m not letting you do that. Not because I’m trying to be noble. Not because I get to tell you how to feel. But because the partwhere I failed you is mine. I can own that without making you carry it.”

The tears spilled over then. She stood behind the island in my kitchen and cried like someone whose body had finally been given permission to admit the past had not stopped hurting.

I stayed still. It might have been the hardest thing I had ever done off the ice.

On the couch, Dottie lifted her head fully now. Her ears perked. She looked between us, then slid off the cushion with a heavy thump. She crossed to Lucy without hesitation, nails clicking against the wood floor, and pressed her body against Lucy’s leg.

I looked at them, and something warm and unbearable moved through me.

The dog had no idea what had happened eight years ago. No idea what Samantha’s name meant, or Fargo, or Aldenmere, or the way a sentence said on a porch could build itself into the architecture of a woman’s heart.

Dottie only knew Lucy was hurting. So she showed up.

The simplicity of it made my throat burn.

Lucy rested one hand on Dottie’s head. Her fingers sank into the fur behind one floppy ear. She breathed in. Out. Once. Twice. When she looked at me again, her eyes were red, her lashes wet, her face stripped of so much armor I almost looked away to protect her privacy.

“I don’t know what to do with this,” she said. “I don’t know how to reorganize eight years of thinking one thing and suddenly knowing another.”

“You don’t have to do it tonight.”

Her mouth tightened.

“I mean that.” I shifted my weight, then stopped again before the movement became a step. “You don’t have to decide anything tonight. You don’t have to forgive me because I finally told you something I should have said when we were eighteen. You don’t have to make me feel better. You don’t have to tell me this changes anything.”

She wiped beneath one lens carefully. “That sounds very mature.”

I huffed once, not quite a laugh. “Don’t sound so suspicious.”

“I am suspicious.”

I glanced down at my hands. They were shaking faintly. The leftover want. The fear. The grief. The awful, clean knowledge that one kiss had not fixed anything and one truth had not earned me the right to ask for another.

“When I asked if I could kiss you,” I said slowly, “you said yes.”

“I kissed you,” she said.