Page 24 of While You Were Trending

“Why would I pity you?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer, and this time, when I glance back at her, she’s not squinting like she’s studying me.

She has her head lowered, her shoulders sagging, and she looks so fucking sad.

“Because I made a complete fool of myself, and anyone who’d do something that stupid deserves to be pitied for how pathetic it was,” she says.

“Your mother isn’t your fault.”

“I wasn’t talking aboutthatwedding.”

“Ah.”

She snorts softly.

“People do crazy shit for love,” I say.

“I sent a letter apologizing to Alex and his—his wife. It wasn’t enough, but I know what I did was wrong, and I’ve been sorry about it for years.”

I swallow hard.

She wasn’t wrong when she said that Alex was making a mistake. He went from brokenhearted over Ginny dumping him to standing at the altar with his high school sweetheart in three months. They didn’t make it to their first anniversary.

Not because of what Ginny did.

But because it was a rebound for both of them, and they’d both grown and changed since their high school dating days, and they were more in love with the idea of reuniting than they were with each other.

“When I knew you, I never saw your heart in the wrong place,” I say.

She snorts again, this time like she doesn’t believe me, then falls silent.

I finish with the stockpot while second-guessing if I’m saying the right things. Hell, I’m second-guessing if I’m breathing right.

Being around Ginny—it makes my pulse race and my knees go weak and my lungs malfunction.

If anyone else is still in the building, I can’t hear them.

It’d be like Ginny to send them away so they wouldn’t witness her telling me to eat dirt and get the hell out of here.

Still being as nice as she can be when she doesn’t owe me shit after the way I treated her in college and those years after.

“When you film here?—”

I jerk around, almost dropping the pot instead of setting it on the drying rack, and she pauses.

Shouldn’t be surprised at thewhen you film here. This is exactly what the Ginny I used to know would do.

Always trying to do what’s right, until the one time she didn’t.

She pushes her sunglasses back up her nose. “I’d intended to be gone before you arrived to make us both more comfortable, but whatever. I don’t want to leave. So when you film here, I have my own additional requests.”

She lives here.

I knew it.

And she has requests.

Not restrictions and rules. Not contract add-ons.