Page 174 of Letters From A Stalker

His jaw tightens slightly, emotion moving behind his eyes.

“And then I found the Board order.” He looks away. “I didn’t know you would ever see that.”

“I know. That’s why it mattered.” His gaze returns to mine. “You could have waited to see if I reported you. You could have protected yourself, or minimized it, or found some way to make it sound less ugly than it was. Instead, you told them.”

“I had to.”

“No.” I shake my head. “You chose to. There’s a difference.”

“Julia, I don’t want you thinking that makes what I did better.”

“I don’t.” My voice comes out firm because I mean it. “I think it means you finally did the right thing when there was absolutely nothing in it for you.”

The wind moves through the bare branches beyond us while Kai watches me as if he’s afraid to breathe too deeply and disturb whatever is happening between us.

“I forgave you.” I say softly.

For several seconds, he doesn’t move. Not even slightly.

“Kai?”

His throat works before he manages, “I heard you.”

The roughness in his voice nearly undoes me.

“I’m not saying it’s all okay now. It isn’t. There are still things I hate when I think about them, and I might be angry again tomorrow or next week or six months from now.” I step closer without consciously deciding to. “But I stopped wanting you to hurt. Somewhere along the way, I stopped needing you to be punished forever just because I was hurt.”

His beautiful amber eyes shine, and this time he doesn’t look away quickly enough to hide it.

“I wanted that for you,” he says quietly. “Not forgiveness for me. Just… I wanted you to get to a place where what I did wasn’t something you had to carry every day.”

“I did.”

A breath leaves him slowly, almost like relief, but there is no hope attached to it. He doesn’t move toward me. Doesn’t ask what forgiveness means.

He glances back toward the house. “Then I’m glad. Really.” His voice softens. “And I should probably let you get back before somebody comes looking for you.”

The old version of me might have let him. I watch him pull one hand from his pocket and turn toward the garage, already giving me the distance he assumes I still want, and something in my chest twists hard enough that I speak before I can lose my nerve.

“Kai.”

He stops. Always. Then turns back slowly. There are a hundred things I could ask him, but only one has been sitting beneath all the others since the night I realized there had never been two men.

“Who fell in love with me?”

Confusion pulls his brows together.

“Ghost or you?”

For one long moment he simply looks at me, then something in his face changes. Not Dr. Blackwood, not quite Ghost either, just the man both of them had been hiding.

“Me.”

The answer is so immediate that my breath catches.

“Kai—”

“It was always me.” He steps closer, but only once, stopping well before he reaches me. His voice is lower now, rougher, carrying none of the careful distance he has been using since he walked outside. “Ghost wasn’t some other man who fell for you after I did. He was what happened when I stopped the pretense of not wanting you.”