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“You can’t show your true self to anyone,” I snap. “You have such an amazing story about forging your own path despite the person your father is, and you won’t even talk about it. You’d rather be a mystery than let anyone know a single thing about your life.”
He doesn’t soften. At this point, I didn’t expect him to. He’s entirely closed off, not even looking at me. He’s constructed a million walls between us just in the past five minutes, and I don’t think I could tear them down even if I had a hundred years to do it.
I stare at him for a long moment, willing him to turn toward me. To talk to me. To keep me from leaving.
But he doesn’t.
So I turn for the exit, the dull pain of heartbreak in my chest and tears staining my cheeks.
Chapter 50
Sophie
I’m all the way across the city, so I step to the curb and hail a taxi. It’s getting cold, and the last thing I want is to walk fifty blocks while crying on a night like this. I need to be home.
As soon as I get back to my place, I shut the door behind myself and crumple to the floor, leaning against it.
There are still a few unpacked bags around me in the entryway. I kick off my shoes—designer flats that Declan bought for me in Paris. I’m surrounded by nice things and completely alone. All of it feels so empty and meaningless now, even though I was dazzled by it at first.
Because none of it was real.
He’ll never let me be part of his life. He never intended to. There’s too much distance between him and everyone else. He can share a moment with me, but there will still be thousands of miles of ocean between us, space that I can’t traverse.
Especially not when he pulls away with every step I take.
He would never let me know him completely, and that’s all I really want.
I don’t care about the other stuff. I don’t care about the trips or the fancy clothes—none of it. I just care about Declan.
And he’s the one thing I can’t have.
I manage to make it to my couch, pulling myself onto the plump cushions and dragging a blanket around my shoulders. Sniffling, I sit alone for a few minutes, watching the rain drizzle outside and run down my window.
Eventually, the loneliness gets to be too much. It’s stifling. I think about trying to put away the bags—maybe it would help me to not have to see it, all of the material things that Declan hid behind—but I can’t bring myself to do it. It would just remind me of him, like rubbing salt in a wound.
So instead, I pull out my phone and text Reagan.
ME: Hey, are you home?
She answers almost immediately.
REAGAN: Yeah, what’s up?
ME: Can you come over? I need to be around someone right now.
For a few seconds, I watch the ellipses on her half of the screen. Then they stop moving, and thirty seconds later, there’s a knock at my door.
“It’s open,” I call out, unwilling to get up off the couch. I’m pretty sure I didn’t lock it when I came in, anyway.
Reagan lets herself inside, takes one look at me, and says, “Oh, honey.”
“It’s over,” I say. “We’re done.” Before I can finish those four words, I’m in a flood of tears all over again.
Reagan sits next to me on the couch and comforts me through the worst of the crying, eventually managing to coax an explanation out of me. I tell her everything about Nora, how worried I was, and about how angry Declan was when he finally showed up.
About our fight, and about how quickly he shut everything down. About how he pulled the plug on all that we were.
Reagan listens quietly, then gets up without a word and heads to my kitchen. I hear the sound of the freezer door and the rattle of the silverware drawer. When she returns, she’s holding two tubs of ice cream and a pair of spoons.
