Page 68

And terror hit him so fast it was almost physical.

Not doubt. Not hesitation. Panic. Old and deep and immediate as fire.

"I can't," he said.

He felt her flinch before he saw it. Just a tiny movement of her fingers against his jaw.

"Dean —"

"I can't, Lara." His voice sounded rough even to himself. "I can't give you that."

She was quiet a moment. When she spoke again it was smaller, stripped down, the whole of it narrowed to the only question that mattered.

"Do you love me?"

Not the marriage. Not the kids. Not the whole life. Just that. The one thing that would have cost him nothing to say, the one word she could have carried out the door and lived on for a while.

"I can't," he said again.

Silence. Her hands stayed on his face another second. Then she took them away slowly, and the cold rushed in where they'd been.

Dean sat up hard, like he couldn't breathe lying there anymore. He put his feet on the floor and bent forward with his elbows on his knees, both hands locked behind his neck for a second, before he stood and dragged his jeans on in the dark.

Behind him Lara said nothing. That was somehow worse than if she'd cried. He could hear her breathing, though. Too careful. Too even.

At the bedroom door he stopped. Didn't turn around fully. Couldn't. He stood there with one hand braced against the frame and the woman he loved silent behind him in his bed.

"If I could do it with anyone," he said roughly, staring out into the dark hallway, "it would've been you."

The room stayed silent behind him.

"It was never because you weren't enough." His throat tightened hard around the words. "Jesus, Lara. You're the most..." He stopped and swallowed it back down. "It would've been you. Only you."

A long silence. Then, very quietly behind him:

"Then have it in you."

Dean shut his eyes. Because he loved her. Because she was asking him for happiness with both hands open. Because some broken part of him still couldn't reach for it even now.

He stood there one more second. Then he said, so quietly he barely heard himself say it:

"I'm sorry."

And he walked out of his own bedroom and left her in it, down the dark hallway, without looking back at the thin line of light under his own door.

She was gone by the time the work was done the next afternoon.

Not snuck-off. Lara didn't do that either. She did it in daylight, the slow visible way, and made herself do all of it, and he made himself stand there and let her.

He found her loading the truck when he came in off the south sections. Two suitcases, a jacket off the kitchen hook, a pair of boots by the door. She was doing it calmly, competent and unhurried, packing her car the way she did everything, a woman who'd decided a thing and was carrying it out.

"You don't have to go today," he said. "You could… take some time. Think about it."

"I've done all my thinking, Dean." She set the box in the bed of the truck and turned to face him, dry-eyed and clear and steady. "I'm not going to stand here and have the long version of last night. You said what's true. I believe you. There's no argument left to have, and I'm not going to insult either of us by having it anyway. I will leave the truck at Elena’s."

"Lara —"

"I left a man once who wanted me small," she said. "Took me years to do it. I swore when I got in the car that I would never again make myself smaller to keep somebody, not for anybody, not ever again, no matter how much it cost." She looked at him, and there was no anger in it, which was the hardest part of all. "I love you more than I loved him. By a mile. By a country mile. And that's exactly why I have to go now, today, while I can still do it — because if I stay I'll start shrinking around the edges of what you can give me, a little at a time, telling myself it's enough, and one morning I'll wake up forty years old and folded up small in a house where I'm a guest in my own life. I know how it goes. I've done it. I'm not doing it again." She shut the tailgate. "Not even for you. Especially not for you, because you're the only one who could actually make me want to."