Chapter 31
Seventeen years ago
Aubrey was fresh out of firsts. Losing her virginity had been one thing, but everything that had come with it had only piled
more bitterness into the empty chasm now gaping inside her. She’d also lied to her dad for the first time. Gotten cheated
on. And had her heart broken—if that’s what this even was, because it felt more like having the thing ripped from her chest, then
standing there stunned while it convulsed at her feet.
And now, for the first time, she was screaming in her dad’s face.
He faced her from across the living room, legs braced, arms folded over his chest.
“How could you?” she shouted, even though he would only give the same answer he had the last five times. Still, she needed
to ask, because if she didn’t give voice to the agony stabbing at her ribs, she might crumple to the floor and never get up.
“I did it for you. For your own good.” His answer held no compassion. Just solid, bone-deep self-assurance. “Him getting some
girl pregnant inside of two weeks was all him. Just be glad you know, now. At least you understand what kind of person he
is.”
Aubrey bit back a scream. She wanted to throw her keys, except she’d done that already. Her dad hadn’t even flinched when they’d hit him in the shoulder and gone clattering to the floor. “I hate you.”
“For now, yes. But once you’ve had time to think, you’ll realize this was necessary.”
Bile gushed up her throat, burning her sinuses. “No. You ruined my life. I’ll never forgive you. Ever.”
“You will,” he said. “I give it a year. Then you’ll see I’ve done you a favor.”
A hiss erupted from her. “A year? Fuck off, try a lifetime.”
Pity flashed in his eyes.
Aubrey jerked back as if struck. She could handle misguided resolve. Bullheaded confidence, even. Those, she could rail against,
meet force with force. But pity?
“Fuck you,” she bit out, then turned on her heel and staggered toward the haven of her room, slamming the door so hard one
of her math trophies rattled off its shelf and rolled underneath the dresser.
Her father didn’t follow, thankfully, and Aubrey threw herself onto her bed and sobbed. She wanted to be anywhere but inside
her own skin. Anyone but this person who’d had their innards crushed by betrayal. Right now, she wanted to be . . . who knew?
Tansy Burroughs, probably, which was so pathetic she could barely acknowledge the thought, or maybe she wanted to be someone
who’d never met Nick Thacker at all, some na?ve person who’d never entrusted her heart to hands that would smash it so unceremoniously
to pieces.
She measured the minutes in pain. Agony piled atop misery, followed by woe.
She almost missed the scratch at the window, consumed as she was by the sound of her own breaking. But when she uncurled her aching body and went to the pane, there he stood, the architect of her anguish and yet somehow the only person she wanted to see.
She raised the window. Nick stared up from the yard, his beauty so brutal that she wondered how she’d ever existed without
him. Whether she ever could again.
“Fuck you,” she said.
He flinched.
“Fuck my dad, yes, but fuck you, too. Two weeks, Nick. I was gone for two weeks.”
“I know.” Where his voice had once been so smoky, now dead ash collected in the spaces between words. “But your dad told me—”
“I know. But how could you not have realized I’d never do that? You didn’t trust me that much? You didn’t trust us?”
He blanched.
“Were you even going to fight for it, Nick? Or were you so ready to let me go that you just hopped into bed with Tansy the
moment you thought you were free of me?”
His eyes flashed, a black lightning crack. “Are you kidding? Are you fucking kidding me? I thought I’d lost you. And I was
so fucking wrecked about it that when Tansy asked me—”
“Don’t.” A white-hot arrow raced down her throat. “Don’t you dare describe it. I’d rather drown in my own blood than hear
the details.”
He swallowed hard. “Fine. I get it. And I wish I knew what to say. But I don’t, Aubs. I don’t know what I can say, except that I hate myself and I hate what I’ve done and I hate the way you’re looking at me right now, and I’d do anything
to change it.”
A corner of her mutilated heart lifted. She tried to command it into quiet, but it strained toward him, ignoring logic. “Anything?”
“Anything.”
The moment cracked around her. She wanted to throw up.
Purge herself of the sharpness slicing at her insides, then army-crawl her way back to yesterday, when the future had lain before them, still.
When she’d only had to apply pressure to ensure life followed the course she’d laid out for it.
“Does ‘anything’ mean you’d still go to New York? ”
He had never stood so motionless. “What?”
She stared him down. Her eyes ached from crying and someone had clearly pulled her stomach out through her throat, but somewhere
amid all that destruction, an eternal candle flickered. Because she loved him. Still. Of course she did. What they had together
didn’t just vanish with a single snip of the scissors.
No, once her rage cooled, she could find her way to forgiveness. Maybe. Probably. When life knocks you down, get right back up.
Because her dad had done this to them. He’d admitted as much without blinking, and she saw no better way to throw his deception
in his face than to survive it. The effort would be hard and horrible and leave her with permanent scars, but that was life,
wasn’t it? And she’d already decided Nick was worth it. Worth anything.
He only had to commit to this, body and soul. Fight for it as hard as she planned to.
“I’m not asking if you’d leave your kid.” Her voice warbled, but she ironed out the ripples. “You have a responsibility, I
get that. But being a good dad doesn’t mean you have to marry Tansy. I mean, what if you did half your time in New York? Half
your time here?”
He retreated a step. “What? What’re you talking about?”
“After I graduate, we could come back to Henderson, maybe.” Her voice stabilized. If life sticks you between a rock and a hard place, split the difference and aim straight down the middle. “I could teach, at least until your kid goes off to—”
Horror overtook his expression. “You don’t want to teach. You’ve never wanted to teach.”
“No, but—”
“You don’t want to teach,” he repeated, his tone laced with desperation. “And I can’t just . . . bounce back and forth between two places. I have
to work. Find some way to pay for this whole new person. I . . . I don’t even understand what you’re saying.”
She clamped her teeth over her lip to keep from screaming. “No? Then what’s your solution?”
He looked stricken. “I don’t have one. There isn’t one, this time.”
“Nick. You said you’d do anything. You just said that. Four seconds ago.”
“Yeah.” He gazed up, agonized. “Anything except drag you down with me.”
Despite her earlier waterfall of tears, hot prickles stabbed at her eyes all over again. “What?”
He hesitated. The moment lifted and held, a sword primed to fall. His expression collapsed on itself. “I didn’t come here
to beg, Aubs. I came here to tell you goodbye. And to say I’m sorry. And that I love you. I’ll love you for fucking ever,
and I’ll never forgive myself, but I’m not going to rip away your dream because I turned out to be just like the asshole who
raised me.”
She’d thought nothing could hurt worse than him proposing to Tansy Burroughs. And she’d been very, very wrong, because Nick
might as well have leveled the words against her chest like a gun, then pulled the trigger.
She stared at the boy she loved, the one she would have taken herself apart for if only he’d let her.
Anguish swam in his eyes, and hers must have cast back the same, amplifying his pain with her own, some logarithmic function that never ended.
An image flashed—of distorted funhouse mirrors, reflecting each other, duplicating heartbreak into eternity.
“There has to be a way,” she whispered. “There has to.”
Nick broke in that moment. She saw it. Felt it in her own bones. “There isn’t,” he said. “Not this time. I know you didn’t
believe me before, but life doesn’t work that way.”
“Only if you don’t make it work that way.”
He shook his head and stepped back. Shadows curtained his face, but the darkness couldn’t cloak the glitter of grief coursing
down his cheeks. “I can’t leave, Aubs. Not now. But I do love you. Forever. And I’m sorry. Sorrier than I have words for.”
She stood there and watched him go, too gutted to cry or call out or even move. Long after the yard had settled into stillness,
she pulled the curtains shut, then stared at the fabric’s weft as if into an infinite distance, where that intolerable candle
still glowed, the one she’d thought would light her way until the world went dark.
How long, she wondered—how many years—until it would finally burn itself out?