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My fiancée climbs over her friends to escape the booth. “I understand what you’ve been through,” she mutters when she stops in front of me. “But that doesn’t give you a free pass to arrange everything in the world the way you want it.” She shoves past me and makes a line for the door.
Before I can follow, slim fingers dig into my arm.
Annie.
“This way,” she says.
I follow Annie out to the dirty hallway, but she continues all the way to the parking lot behind what can only generously be called a restaurant.
“You need to chill out,” she murmurs, rounding to face me.
“So that my fiancée and her well-known friends can become publicly inebriated and nearly get killed in the street?”
She folds her arms. “Planning this wedding has been hard.”
“I told her I’d take care of everything.”
“You can’t ‘take care of everything.’ She’s not a deal. She’s the woman you love.” Hair blows in her face, and she shoves it away. “I know what it’s like to be thrust into the spotlight, to join a world you didn’t know was yours so fast it makes your head spin.”
“You think I’ve made it worse?” I challenge. “Our life is many things. Normal isn’t one of them.”
Annie chews on her lip, exasperated. “Like you, I grew up in a family where everyone knows your name and your face. The difference is we didn’t get to choose it, Harrison. She does.”
The words sting.
“If she doesn’t want this life, then she shouldn’t have chosen me.” My lungs constrict. “I can give her everything she could want, Annie. Except normal.”
Her eyes soften, and the expression on her face only makes the truth of it worse.
“It’s the only thing I can’t,” I say, turning back toward the restaurant.
