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My head hung.
A cry worked its way up my throat, and I had to focus to force it down again.
“Because every time I tried to tell you, I lost my nerve.” My voice cracked. “And then it got worse, because the longer I waited, the bigger it became. And then suddenly, there was no version of the truth that didn’t end with you hating me.”
I sniffed hard.
“So I kept promising myself I’d tell you tomorrow. Then the next day. And the next. After one more smile, one more conversation, one more time of you looking at me like I was something, like I was something that mattered.”
I shook my head.
“But by then it was too late. I was so in love with you it hurt to breathe. And it stopped feeling like it was a lie I was managing and more like a bomb strapped to my chest. Ready to detonate. And blow everything good up with it.”
Silence swallowed the stairwell.
For one moment, I thought I saw it.
Understanding.
Not absolution. I wasn’t sure I could ever hope for that.
But the horrible recognition of what had become of us. Rubble.
“And then it went off anyway,” he said.
Silas dragged a hand over his mouth, looking as wrecked as I felt.
“Yes,” I whispered. “It did.”
His eyes searched mine, like he was still trying to find the line where performance ended and the real thing began.
“Were you going to tell me the truth?” he asked, voice fractured around the edges. “Or were you just going to let me keep loving you until the lie buried us both?”
The words hit me so hard my breath caught.
Loving.
Not wanting. Not falling.
Loving.
I stared at him through the blur of tears, my heartbeat hammering beneath my ribs. Because somewhere in all that devastation and anger, he’d confessed it so naturally he probably didn’t even realize he had.
As if it had already become a fact.
Something cracked open in my chest.
He laughed once, but there was nothing amused in it.
“You know what the cruelest part is?” he asked.
Fresh tears spilled down my cheeks.
His gaze met mine again.
“I believed you.”
My tears burned my cheeks.
