Chapter Twenty-Seven
"YOU THINK I WANT YOU?"
The words hit the marble and come back at me from three directions.
We're barely through the door. My bag is still on my shoulder, one heel half off, the party still glittering on my skin, and the man I love is looking at me the way you look at something you scraped off your life.
"That's not—"
"You think any of this was about you." It isn't a question. He says it low and terrible, closing the distance I spent a whole week trying to close, except now I want it back, now I want a wall. "Let me help you. I only ever wanted one thing in this apartment. It was never the girl."
"Maximo, you're scaring me—" I say his name like it can call him back because surely the man who handed it to me is still somewhere inside this one.
He isn't.
"I only wanted Mary's heart!"
The name goes into the room like a stone down a well.
Mary.
The girl behind the locked door. The gap-toothed girl in every photograph. The made bed nobody sleeps in. The grave with the too-neat flowers, where I crouched with my blurry eyes and thanked a stranger for the rest of my life.
Mary.
And all at once it makes a terrible kind of sense.
Because a man doesn't come apart like this over a sister. He doesn't look at the girl living in his home like she's forbidden, like wanting her is a crime he can't stop committing, over a sister's heart alone.
It wouldn't be this if I just had his sister's heart. Oh, if only it were that simple.
So she couldn't have only been his sister. Stepsister, maybe, or no blood at all, but more than that, she was the girl he loved. The one he lost. And I've been living in his home wearing her heart, laughing with it, flirting with it, falling for the one man on earth it used to beat for.
"Everything inside your chest belongs to her."
And all I can do is bite down hard while Maximo breaks my heart—no, while he breaks hers, the heart I only ever borrowed, and that makes it so, so much worse.
"You exist because she died. You've been living in my home laughing with her heart, flirting with her heart, and I let you. I let you."
Maximo picks up his coat, and all I can do is just stand there.
He walks out of his own home, and it's only when the door closes behind him with the small, final click of every good thing leaving at the same time—
That's when my knees buckle.
And I crash to the floor.
And I can no longer keep the tears from falling.
I loved him. I love him still. But now I know I have to stop.
I have to.
There's no way I can keep loving him when his heart...and my heart...
It all belongs to Mary.
I'm so, so sorry.
Never mine.
I'm sorry, Mary. Never will be.