Page 162 of Hometown Halftime

Fresh tears spill from my eyes.

“I love you too.”

His hand slides into my hair, holding my head to his chest while mine fist tightly in the back of his hoodie, both of us holding on like neither one wants to be the first to let go.

I don’t know how long we stood there. A minute. Maybe ten. Possibly an entire lifetime.

Eventually, Riley pulls back to look down at me. His eyes are red, which wrecks me even more.

“I hate this part,” he admits quietly.

A broken laugh escapes me. “Yeah. Me too.”

The silence stretches again before he brushes his thumb beneath my eye carefully.

“You’re going to do amazing things, Kitten.”

My throat tightens painfully.

“So are you, Rookie.”

Neither of us is asking the other to stay. Because we love each other too much for that.

Riley leans down and kisses me softly, and it’s full of love and grief and everything we never got enough time to figure out. When he pulls away, his forehead rests against mine for one last second.

Then, quietly, like it physically hurts him to say it, he whispers, “Go before I ask you not to.”

That completely shatters whatever control I had left. A sob escapes me, and Riley closes his eyes hard, like hearing it nearly breaks him too.

But after a second, I force myself to take a step back. Then another. Then another.

Riley stays exactly where he is, standing in the middle of the living room while I grab my keys with trembling hands.

I look at him one last time, and my heart nearly gives out completely.

He’s the perfect image of the Riley I fell in love with. He’s in sweatpants, his hair messy from running his hands through it all morning. Dark eyes that looked at me with so much adoration that they healed something inside me. The man I love is standing in the middle of the home we accidentally built together.

And suddenly every memory crashes through me at once.

Images of our kitchen dances at sunrise while coffee brewed in the background fill my mind. Then come the movie nights tangled together beneath blankets on the couch. Muddy rugby practices where he grinned at me across the field like I was his favorite person in the world. The sound of us yelling at the mountains. Christmas morning beside the tree. His arms around me after my diagnosis while I cried against his chest and he held me like I wasn’t too much to carry.

All of it hits me so hard that I can barely breathe around it.

“I love you, Riley.”

“I love you so much, Kinsey.”

I can’t survive hearing anything else. So, before I lose the ability to leave entirely, I turn and walk out the front door.

The frigid January air hits my face when I walk outside. Behind me, the duplex door shuts softly. And that quiet sound feels exactly like the sound of my heart breaking.

Chapter sixty-five

Riley

Two months later

Two months after leaving Cedar Falls, I still reach for the empty space beside me in bed every morning expecting to find Kinsey asleep beside me.