Page 116 of All Our Nevers

But then I pause, Owen’s words echoing through my mind.

Let us in. Let us love you.

There’s so much they don’t know.

I never wanted to bother them with it at all. Never wanted to peel back my hard exoskeleton and expose the soft, damaged core of myself. Never wanted to be seen as weak.

All my nevers weigh down on me as I look across the table. To Andy, the stern furrow between his brows. To Sophie, hazel eyes wide with affection and concern. To my brother, the first best friend I ever had, the one I think always suspected more than he let on.

This is NASA. We’ve loved each other at our best and worst since we were teenagers. I genuinely don’t think there’s anything I could do or say that would make them love me less.

So what am I so scared of?

Just myself. The tight fist of my control clenched around my self-image—insisting I’m not the kind of woman who would ever let that happen.

It’s fucked up. I know it is. I would never think like that about someone else’s story. But I’ve never figured out how to be kind to myself about what happened. Not in all these years of trying.

Trying alone.

Let us in. Let us love you.

“Actually,” I amend, “can I tell you guys something?”

Then, I do.

I tell them everything. Every raw, unhealed wound I’ve bandaged over with rage for eight years, since I first met Connor. The way he was behind closed doors and the reasons I hid it. Then this year, the messages, the stalking, the letter, the fight. The fact that he’s back in Boston, that he works at Owen’s firm. My shame and fear around reporting it to authorities, the seeming impossibility of ever escaping him.

Sophie is crying when I finish. I know she doesn’t want to be, would stop it if she could, but she can’t. Andy is squeezing her hand under the table. Nolan’s head is in his hands, elbows pressed into the wood, processing with his eyes closed. They apologize for not realizing it sooner and I fucking hate that part. I want to rush past the sorry’s because that’s not the point. The past is the past but this is now. It’s getting in the way of my career, my relationships… my whole life.

I can’t live like this anymore, and I can’t solve it on my own either.

“And you know what’s really stupid?” I ask, rounding out my story with brutal honesty, proverbial armor scattered across the room. “I feel like the worst feminist in the world, because all I want is for someone else to handle it for me. I never want to speak to Connor again, even if I knew how it would go. Even if I knew I would win, I never, ever want to face him.” I force myself to look up from my hands, finding my brother’s face. “I think I need help.”

“We want to help,” Nolan says, light brown eyes that mirror mine pouring his heart onto the table.

“Anything, Lia,” Sophie says. “We’ll do anything. Whatever you want.”

Andy shakes his head down at the table. “This is what he meant.”

“What?” I ask.

He looks up at me. “I invited Owen to come tonight. I didn’t realize you guys were fighting. He said he didn’t want you to feel like he was closing in on you, and I told him that made no fucking sense but he was adamant he needed to give you space. He refused to come.”

The words have pressure building behind my eyes. That incredible, selfless man.

I thought he was disengaging—thought I finally pushed him overboard—when really his silence these last few days was evidence of just how well he knows me, how determined he is to make sure I’m comfortable and safe.

Parallel lines scrape down my heart, the shape of all the false parallels Owen draws; between himself and his father, himself and Connor, himself and all the ugliest shades of humanity that I never once saw in his springwater blue eyes.

I thought he was done with me, when really he’d cast himself as the villain. Again.

My heart is a puddle, pooling at the bottom of my gut.

Andy continues, “He didn’t think you’d want him here.”

“I want him here,” I say, immediate and firm.

Andy looks at his wife, a question in his eyes. She nods back at him. It’s a language I don’t quite speak, one I’m still fumbling to decipher when Andy says, “He’s upstairs.”