CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The big reveal hangs in the air between us, and Grant’s face is unreadable as he processes what I’ve just said. It’s the kind of taut, heated, rain-soaked moment any romance would be lucky to have.
It’s excruciating.
I’ve never felt so idiotic in my life. All those years of guarding my emotions and putting up walls to avoid heartbreak, and what do I do? Fall for a fictional character who will simply vanish at the story’s conclusion.
Worse than that, I’ve also shattered his reality by telling him the truth. But what was I supposed to do? Stay there and let him kiss me? Let him think there might be something real between us? Let myself keep wishing it were true?
Grant finally huffs out a humorless laugh.
“No, I’m not,” he says. “I’m not. It’s like the Gifter said; I just got dragged into the black hole by mistake. I’m a real person. I’ve had a whole life.”
“You only think you have,” I say, hating every word. “But it’s just backstory. Characters don’t know they’re characters. Look at Lissa and Lesley. Do you think they don’t feel real?”
I can see it flickering in his eyes—the truth sinking in.
“But … the love interest?” He shakes his head, eyeing me skeptically. “How could I be the love interest? We argue constantly. Half the time, you’re outright mean to me.”
“Okay, so you’ve clearly never read a romance novel,” I mutter.
“Well then, enlighten me,” he says, frustration crinkling his brow. “What makes you so sure?”
My heart twists into knots. “I’ve read a million of these books,” I say.
“I know all the signs. One bed at the inn, posing as a couple, a big revelation in the rain. It’s all pretty heavy-handed, actually.
” This last part I shout skyward, as if Anna Matthews were some kind of all-seeing god who might take a hint now and then.
Water droplets cascade down the sides of Grant’s face as he looks heavily at me. It’s that same loaded silence of the night we failed to meet Anna, only this time, he must be about to break. When you realize that everything you’ve ever known was a lie, it should shatter you into a thousand pieces.
He takes a breath.
“Okay,” he says.
I stare at him. “Okay?”
He nods. “Yeah. Okay. Okay, I’m a character, and nothing from before really happened, and this is the realest part of my life. On a certain level, it’s almost a relief.”
“A relief?” He’s reduced me to a disbelieving parrot.
He’s not real. Nothing from before—not his job, not his family, not his damn cat—actually exists.
It’s all just details, woven into the fibers of his fabricated being, and that’s a relief?
“Grant, I just told you your entire life is fiction. How are you not freaking out right now?”
His expression is clouded, as if he’s trying to figure that out too. But his stillness seems less like frozen short-circuiting and more like a genuine calm.
“It’s like … somehow, I already knew,” he says.
Clarity fills his gaze as he looks at me.
“That night at the beach house, I tried to escape.
I made a break for it as soon as you went upstairs.
I got as far as the kitchen, and when I opened the front door, I froze.
I started thinking about what I had to go back to, and it was just …
nothing. Even with family and friends and a good job, my life felt empty.
Like I was just sleepwalking through it.
“But when you jumped into my car, I swear, this voice in my head went, ‘Oh, thank God, finally, something’s happening.’ And every day since, I’ve felt more awake, more alive, than I can ever remember. So, yeah. It comes as a relief to find out I’m where I’m meant to be—with you.
“But let me ask you this,” he says, his eyes locked on mine. “You’re saying everything between us boils down to tropes and genre conventions?”
“Yes,” I say.
“And it’s just because it’s written that way. Because that’s the way the story’s supposed to go.”
I nod.
“So you don’t actually have the feelings. Right?”
Right, I should say. I do not have the feelings. Astute observation, Grant, you spectacular rain-soaked man who does nothing for me.
But I don’t. I don’t say any of that. I do try to say something, I think, but my mouth just hangs open with no words to form as I look at him.
His eyes narrow just a bit, burning through the freezing rain.
“Right?” he asks again.
And then it doesn’t even matter that I can’t think of what to say, because it’s too late. I see the moment he understands.
He takes a slow but decisive step toward me, and instinctively I take one back.
“Here’s the thing, though,” I say. “I don’t need a love interest. I don’t want one.”
“That’s not what it sounded like at the inn,” he says softly. “When you told me what you really wished for.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “I shouldn’t have made that wish. I didn’t know it would be like this, and I just … I can’t. This can’t happen.”
“Why not?”
“Why not? Grant, you don’t exist.”
“I do exist.” He says it with such clear-eyed certainty, I can’t help but envy him. I don’t feel certain of anything right now. “Maybe not the same way you do, fine. But I’m here in front of you, aren’t I?”
I watch his breath fog in the air, rain slipping down the slope of his neck as he stands in sharp relief under the streetlights.
That’s the thing. He is here. More palpably, undeniably here than anyone I’ve ever met.
It’s like his presence is the keystone that holds my reality together.
And when he goes—which he will—there will be nothing left but rubble.
He comes closer.
“Maybe I’m a secondary character in your story,” he says, “but in my own, I’m just a person. A person with memories, thoughts, feelings, everything. And lately, those feelings—when they’re not abject panic and dread—are all for you.”
“That’s only because you’re written that way!”
“So?” He has the gall to look exasperated. “Is that really so different from real life? I mean, some people believe in fate or destiny.”
“Some people believe in the capybara, too, Grant. That doesn’t make it real.”
“What I’m trying to—wait, the capybara?” His face has gone all scrunched again. “Are you maybe thinking of the chupacabra?”
“OH MY GOD,” I shriek to the stars above.
“Okay! Okay.” He runs a hand over his face before returning his gaze to mine, his jaw set.
“I’m just saying, the way this happened doesn’t make it all fake.
Lots of people with real feelings for each other believe some cosmic hand brought them together.
Theirs might be kismet or the Universe or God.
Ours just happens to be a fifty-something Londoner with several Goodreads Choice Awards and a terrifying personal assistant. So what?”
“So what? So many reasons what!” I just know the urge to correct my shrill disregard for grammar is clawing at him, and the fact that he keeps it at bay tells me how serious this is. “It’s going to end, for one thing, and we’ll never see each other again.”
“That could happen in real life too. It doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be worth it.”
“Well, I don’t like being manipulated,” I grit out.
“Who says you are?”
I don’t know which is worse: the idea that I’ve been tricked into having these feelings, or having no one to blame but myself.
“I know I am,” I decide. “Because I don’t do this. I don’t get carried away in real life. I don’t feel this much when left to my own devices.”
His gaze remains intense, but there’s a softness weaving itself into his features as he looks at me. “Aren’t you tired of being left to your own devices?”
I am tired. Exhausted to my core, to the brink of collapse.
And I can imagine it, giving in, letting myself sink into this part of the story like it’s a warm bath.
But isn’t that what a frog does right before it gets boiled alive?
Lesley’s words feel like a taunt now: Try not running and see what happens.
I know what would happen: a painful goodbye, a broken heart, an avalanche of regret. I’d be destroyed.
“I can’t,” I say. “I’m sorry. I can’t.” As if this weren’t enough of a disaster, tears are beginning to sting the edges of my vision.
I need to get away before Grant sees. But before I can try, he reaches out and catches my wrist with an agonizingly gentle touch.
His voice is so low it almost gets lost in the night.
“What are you afraid of?”
“Nothing,” I snap, wrenching my arm away from him.
His head tilts as if to say, Come on, Roxie.
“We both know that’s not true.”
Something in my chest tightens. I’ve read hundreds of romance heroes in my life; Grant is the only one who’s ever read me right back.
A million protests tumble through my head and each one dies on my lips. Where has all my fight gone? Who is this sad, broken-down version of me, getting pummeled by the rain while trying not to cry?
Grant steps closer, and this time I can’t move. “Forget that,” he says. “Let me ask the better question: What do you want?”
What a question. That’s exactly the thing: There is nothing to want.
There are no good options, just a dizzying carousel of lose-lose scenarios.
If I stop fighting this and say that I want him, I’ll be miserable when the story ends.
If I keep denying it, I’ll stay miserable until then.
Part of me wants to have never made that wish, to have never met him, and another part is flooded with grief at the thought.
What do I want?
I want him to convince me.
I want to believe, like he does, that this would be worth its inevitable ending. I want to have a stronger heart, one that can survive whatever happens to it. I want to be able to trust myself enough to try. To stay, for as long as we get. To say yes for once.
I want to be a different kind of person.
Grant waits patiently, searching my eyes for the answer. I don’t know if there is one. He’s half a breath away from me. If he comes any closer, that will be it. Everything will change, and I want it to and I don’t. I feel myself about to speak and I have no idea what the words will be.
“I—”
A sharp pain lances my arm.
Grant flinches at the same time.
I look down toward my side in confusion, stumbling as I pull the feathery red tuft from my skin, a small needle coming out with it.
The streetlights dance on the puddled pavement.
A thick heaviness is enfolding me, dragging me somewhere dark.
I reach out to where Grant should be, and I maybe feel my fingertips brush something, but it’s all too cloudy.
The last thing I see is a glimpse of men’s wingtip dress shoes stepping toward me before it all goes black.