Chapter 4
The Hardest Thing I’ll Ever Do Is Walk Away Still Loving You
Aria
A cloud of feathers drifts through the room when I shake out the pillow.
They hover for a few seconds, then come to rest on the wooden floor.
I palm the blanket of the king-sized bed flat, throw the coverlet over the top, and place a piece of Aspen’s famous nougat chocolate on the pillow.
I’m right about to go to the bathroom when the bedroom door swings open—right against my forehead.
For a moment I can’t see. I stagger, stretch my hand out, and try to balance myself on the rustic sideboard by the wall.
“Oh, shit. Did I hurt you?”
“Yeah.” I have to blink a few times before the stars disappear and a big, beautiful female being with fox-red hair, freckles, glacier-like eyes, and a cashmere coat appears before me.
Harper. My bestie since we were young and the most misunderstood person in Aspen.
She can seem off-putting and arrogant if you don’t know it’s just her way of protecting herself.
Harper is so afraid of friendships! She thinks everyone’s deceptive.
And I think that, over the two years I’ve been gone, her venomous behavior toward others has only grown more intense—because I know that she just hung around on her own the whole time I was away. Mom told me.
“Good,” she says, her little purse hanging off the crook of her arm. “Then you know how I felt when I was forced to find out you were back when I was at training.”
I sigh. “Sorry, Harp. Really. I wanted to write, but it all came together so quickly, and by that point I was already sitting on the plane.”
“It’s all good. ‘Oh, hey, I’m Aria. I just got up and was hit by a flash of inspiration.
I’m going to go back home. And with a snap of my fingers, I’m already on the plane.
And—oh! Man, all I did was blink, and here I am already!
Wild.’” She snorts. “I found out at training. Is what that means clear to you?”
I sigh again, walk past her to the bathroom, and spray the toilet with cleaning agent. “Yeah. You heard Gwendolyn and the others talking about it and felt like you’d been duped.”
Harper leans her shoulder against the doorframe. “You better not think you can score points with that crap now. Au contraire. You knew I’d find out about it there and didn’t call me all the same.”
“Harp, come on.” Frowning, I wipe the toilet clean, toss the rag back into the bucket, and stand up. “Yesterday there was just too much going on. I got here and everything was…”
“Wyatt,” she says. “Everything was Wyatt.”
I want to protest. So I raise my pink rubber-gloved hands but have to consider what to say. When nothing comes to mind, I let them sink back down. “Yeah.” Capitulating, I exhale. “Everything was Wyatt.”
For a moment Harper eyes me before pushing past, sitting down on the toilet seat, and watching me spray the sink. “Did you see him?”
I swallow. “Yeah. Yesterday.”
“Were you okay?”
“No.”
She twists her mouth. “You’ve got to forget all that, Aria. It’s been ages. Wyatt was with other women while you were away. A lot of them. It’s all over between you two.”
Got it. Wow, the world’s still spinning, but without me.
That’s how Harper rolls. She tells the truth.
She always has, and that’s actually what I like about her best. But at the moment it feels like she’s filleting my chest with a knife.
Beautiful little slices, real slow with those clean cuts that really hurt.
I take a sharp breath. The biting smell of the cleaning agent burns my lungs, and all I can think is, God, don’t breathe in too deep, pulmonary fibrosis, pulmonary fibrosis.
Harper leans her head back, pressing her red hair against the white tiles. “I’m sorry, A. I wish it were different. You didn’t deserve that.”
Feigning indifference, I wrinkle my nose and act like the conversation never happened.
Maybe my head will believe it. Maybe I can prevent it from stealing my sleep later by supplying me with images of Wyatt and other ladies.
But my head is a whirling mess, and I don’t think that someone like me can pull something like that off.
“I’m almost done,” I say, wiping the faucet before polishing it with a microfiber cloth. “Are we going to go to the town hall?”
Harper arches one of her perfectly tweezed brows. “You want to go to the town hall?”
“Yeah.”
“Wyatt will be there.”
“I don’t care.”
She laughs. “Yes, you do.”
I go into the hallway, take fresh hand towels off the cart, and shuffle back into the bathroom.
“Wyatt took away enough from me. It’s time for me to start reclaiming my life.
” I put the hand towels in the cabinet beneath the sink, pull off the rubber gloves, and grab the cleaning bucket. “Are you coming?”
Harper grins. “You can’t believe how happy I am to have you back.”
Everyone says that. And I believe them. Everyone but him. Maybe I should start being happy with that.
“Change of plans, Harp. I’m not going. I’m going to turn around right here and scale the highest point of the Aspen Highlands and go back down on the back of some skier if need be, but I’M. NOT. GOING. IN. THERE.”
My best friend’s grip grows tighter. She pulls me farther in the direction of the huge barn that at some point or another William chose for the town halls.
“And just a minute ago you were so brave. No use arguing, A. If we don’t go, we’re going to get a warning, and William will force us to prepare a PowerPoint presentation on how to make Aspen more attractive for the next one.
You know that’s how he makes those who skip his town halls pay.
Do you really want to go around decorating storm drains with artificial flowers, Aria?
Do you? Not me. Storm drains should remain storm drains. So, come on.”
“I feel sick. We’re too late. Everyone’s going to stare at us.”
Harper takes my statement with a skeptical side-eye. “You mean Wyatt’s going to stare at you.”
My silence is confirmation enough. She rolls her eyes. “Don’t worry. He won’t. He’s far too much of a pussy.”
As the door to the barn opens, my heart is pounding so loud that I don’t even notice the scratching sound the hinges make on the wood. All I can think is, I don’t want to see him. I want to see him. I don’t want to see him. I want to see him.
I don’t want to see him because I do.
We’re met by stuffy air. Heads turn. One after the other. The domino effect. I wonder if Wyatt is one of them, but I don’t think so because he was never the type for this kind of prodding and participation. Wyatt does his own thing.
There’s William on his podium above all the bales of hay.
Well, his rain barrel. A rotten, battered, old rain barrel sawed in half, both its sides patched together with hot glue.
It is covered by a crooked wood panel that wobbles dangerously whenever William shifts his weight.
Man, his throne is so ugly! So ugly, and yet it’s his pride and joy.
“Harper! Once again, too late.” He raises his index finger threateningly.
Harper spreads her arms wide in a bewildered gesture. “And Aria?”
“Shh,” I hiss. “Don’t say my name!”
“You’re not invisible, you know.”
“But when you say my name, it makes me present.”
“Your huge hat makes you present, Aria. Take that thing off. Everyone knows it’s you hiding underneath it anyway.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Aria?” William puts on his monocle. I don’t know why he does that. He’s got a pair of normal glasses. They’re hanging on a chain around his neck, but every single time he pulls out that old monocle. “Why are you wearing that hippie stuff?”
“Oh!” I hear Kate’s voice ring out from somewhere in the middle of the audience. “Is that from Target, Aria?”
No. Not my name. No, no, no.
Will rolls his eyes. “I don’t think Target carries hippie hats, Kate.”
“They do!” Spirit Susan, our spiritually tinged dance teacher, waves her violet-colored silk stole to draw attention to herself. “In the costume section, next to the athlete’s foot ointments.”
I’m starting to feel hot. Hotter than hot.
I’m burning. My ex-boyfriend’s somewhere in this barn, staring at me and my hat with his unbelievably warm honey-colored eyes and thinking of athlete’s foot.
A nervous wreck, I start balling my fists and shifting my weight from one leg to the other.
“Harp, if you don’t find a pair of empty seats immediately, I’m going to croak, really, just like that, right here. ”
“There are a couple over there,” she says calmly, grabbing my hand and dragging me past the various rows. Then she stops in her tracks. “Nope. Won’t work.”
“What?” I break out in a sweat. “You can’t be serious. Keep going, Harp!”
William hisses angrily. “Harper, you always interrupt my town halls!”
She uneasily bites her lower lip. Everyone is looking at us. And I mean everyone. And one of those pairs of eyes belongs to Wyatt. “We can’t sit there, A. Knox is there.”
Okay, that spells trouble for Harper. I get it.
Last year something happened between Knox and her, and my best friend, who never had feelings for anyone, who never let anyone but me get closer than six feet, suddenly started video calling me, her eyes full of stars, telling me far too many things I never wanted to know about Knox.
It lasted weeks—until he ditched her. That’s how Knox used to roll. Until Paisley, that is.
I force myself to scan the barn and beg my mind to automatically block out Wyatt’s face if it happens to appear. Thankfully, it works.
“Harp, please. Those are the only seats that are free. Please.”
Harper grinds her teeth and makes a move to simply walk back out of the town hall, but seeing my desperate expression beneath my huge, even more desperate-looking hippie hat, she lets out a loyal sigh. “Great. Great. But you’re sitting next to him.”