Page 126 of Before You Fell

“He transformed into someone who only knew how to take.” I stare down at my notebook as my fingers curl around the corner of the page. “Songs. Attention. Women.” A breath catches in my throat. “Me.”

The word falls between us.

“I kept giving because now and then he’d stare at me the way he used to, and I’d convince myself that version of him was still the real him.” I laugh but there is no humor in it. “Turns out hope is a hell of a drug, too.”

Goldie lowers her sunglasses back over her eyes.

“I kept thinking if he chose me enough little times...” My throat tightens. “...eventually it’d add up to one big time.”

The silence answers for her.

“How pathetic is that?”

“It isn’t.”

I glance at her.

“It isn’t pathetic to want the person you love to choose you.” Her voice is quiet. “It’s heartbreaking when they keep showing you they won’t.”

“Yeah, but I kept pretending crumbs were a meal.”

Goldie gives a slight nod. “Now that is the kind of lie that’ll starve a woman of affection.”

The wind drifts through the courtyard, lifting the corner of the page in my notebook. I smooth it flat.

“I don’t know how to stop loving him,” I admit.

“Then don’t.”

I look up and see her shrug.

“Love isn’t the problem, darling. You realize you love him. The problem is every excuse you stitched onto it to survive him. That doesn’t mean he gets to keep hurting you, Willow.”

My chest pulls tight. “I know.”

Goldie studies me for a long moment. “Do you?”

“I think so,” I say, the truth slipping out, quieter than I intend. “I can’t imagine a life where he never happened to me.”

Her gaze holds mine. “Then don’t. People are always desperate to make healing appear clean. They tell you to cut them out, forget them, burn the photos, and throw away the songs. But life doesn’t work like that.”

The wind stirs and I push back a strand of hair that has fallen across my face.

“Some people get threaded through you,” she says quietly. “You can spend the rest of your life trying to pull them out, but all you end up doing is tearing yourself apart. Adrian is everywhere. He’s in my favorite city. The way I take my coffee. He’s in half my bad habits. He’s in every song I can’t listen to and every song I can’t stop.”

Her thumb finds the little gold A again. “I used to think healing meant getting him out of me. Now I think healing is deciding which parts of him to hold onto and which to finally let go. But I am aware he loved me with everything he had.”

A staff member named Leah appears at the courtyard entrance.

“Willow?” she says.

I lift my head.

“You have phone time available now if you would like to make your first call.”

For two weeks, the outside world has been a locked door. I could hear breathing from the other side. Now someone has handed me the key.

“Remember, romance is a disease,” Goldie says, her mouth curving into a smile.