Page 64 of Ex Somnis

Worse, somehow.

“She loved me very much,” he adds quietly. “And I her.”

“But?”

“But she couldn’t commit elsewhere and chose something else.”

“And you just let her?”

He huffs out a laugh. “She wasn’t the kind of woman you fight for against her will.”

“But Tessa is?”

He doesn’t answer, and I look back at the path ahead.

“So the moral is that you’re still in love with someone else, and you and Tessa have both just settled. Which is…” I consider the word. “Sad. She deserves so much better than that.”

“Don’t act as if you wouldn’t know loneliness, Lennon Maes. I can read it written all over you. Every conversation we’ve had, I can feel it mirroring back.” He gives me a sidelong glance. “We aren’t so different.”

I scoff. “We’re nothing alike.”

He smiles, and I find this significantly more irritating than any argument he could have made.

“Elsewhere,” he says. “Is a place where you never have to feel it again. The loneliness. You aren’t alone here. You’re simply not. You’re part of something larger than what waking life can offer, and you can have anyone you want here.” He stops, making me stop too. “Are you missing your writer? The good doctor? Your young friend?”

The light behind me disappears, and my breath catches as shadows stretch over the gravel path. I turn, and they’re standing there.

Ridge is closest to me, dressed in black, shoulders loose in that careless way that somehow still looks guarded. Dark hair falling into his eyes. Mouth already halfway to a smirk like he’s about to say something annoying.

Paul is beside him in his green cardigan, glasses slightly askew, hands folded neatly like he’s trying very hard not to reach for me.

Nevan, with paint-stained hands, a wide grin, and his soft flannel that has been washed too many times.

For one terrible second, relief floods me so hard I nearly move toward them.

Because it’s them.

It’s…

No.

Nevan’s freckles are off. Paul’s beard has no gray threading through it at the jaw, and Ridge’s eyes are half a shade too light.

They are close, close enough to feel cruel.

But they’re not them.

God.

That’s actually so fucking mean.

“I already told Tessa I don’t want copies.”

Lucien’s eyes narrow slightly, enough that I know I hit something, then he flicks two fingers lazily through the air, and they vanish. The space they occupied feels emptier, somehow.

“You could make them better,” he offers. “Everyone can be as good as the memory you hold of them.”

I laugh once. “That’s the creepiest sentence anyone has ever said to me.”