Chapter Twenty Nine
Present Day
I was “cooking,” which meant staring into the abyss of my fridge, wondering if cereal for the third night in a row constituted a cry for help. I’d given up on the candles article. My brain was a stubborn, grief-shaped brick.
The sound—three solid, unfamiliar knocks—jolted me from my stupor. I wasn’t expecting anyone. A delivery would have been left at the main door. Chloe, the building manager would have texted.
A cold, illogical dread washed over me, followed immediately by a surge of something terrifyingly like hope. I shoved the hope down, hard.
I padded to the door, my socks silent on the floor. I didn’t look through the peephole. I was afraid of what I might see. Or what I might not see.
I took a deep, shaky breath and turned the lock.
The door swung open.
And there he was.
Theo.
He looked… wrecked. Jet-lagged shadows bruising the skin under his eyes, his hair a chaotic mess, like he’d been run through a storm, and he was drenched from head to toe.
I was so caught up in my own turmoil I hadn’t even realised it was raining.
He was wearing a simple black t-shirt and jeans, and he carried nothing but the smell of cold night air and a profound, palpable exhaustion.
I wasn’t even sure how he was here. His Instagram showed Milan just yesterday. He must have left right after that post, taken a red-eye across an ocean. Had he slept at all?
For a long, suspended moment, we just stared. The hallway’s fluorescent light cut across him, highlighting the new sharpness in his face. He looked at me like I was a mirage he’d been walking toward for days.
My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic, trapped bird.
All the carefully constructed numbness of the past four days shattered.
Every hurt, every angry word I’d rehearsed in the shower, every sad paragraph I’d written in my head—it all vanished, leaving only the raw, shocking fact of his presence.
“Gin.”
I felt it then—a dangerous, instant melting. My insides turned to warm, willing slush. He was here. He’d come. He’d chosen me.
Wedding convenience.
The words were a bucket of ice water. I stiffened, crossing my arms over my chest, letting the hurt crystallize into a shield.
“Theo.” My voice was flat, a stranger’s. “Why are you here?”
He swallowed hard, the sound audible in the quiet hall. He rubbed a hand over his face, a gesture of such pure fatigue it almost cracked my resolve. “Because I fucked up,” he said, the words raw. “I should have always been here. Right here.”
“Right,” I muttered, looking past him at the ugly hallway wallpaper.
“No, listen. Please.” He took a half-step forward, then stopped himself, as if remembering he had no right to cross the threshold.
“I know you heard me talking to the guys. Well… they were talking at me. I didn’t want to be there. I wanted Brad to shut up. I wanted them to stop talking about you, stop… degrading you. And I admit, I could have gone about it in about a thousand better ways,
but I thought if I made it sound like nothing, they’d drop it. I thought you didn’t care.”
I felt my brows knit together. “So this is all my fault?”
He let out a frustrated sigh, his shoulders slumping.
“Fuck. I’m fucking this up. No.” His eyes found mine, holding them with a desperate intensity.
“I overheard you at the salon. I was there early. I had flowers. I was going to ask you to be my… it doesn’t matter now. I heard what you said to your friends. And you were right. I was scared. I had been running. But I was ready to change that. Until I heard you say it was just fun while it lasted.
”
I remembered the conversation, the false bravado I’d used as armor. “It was self-preservation,” I whispered, the admission leaving me defenseless.
“I know that now.” A small, wistful smile touched his lips, not quite reaching his tired eyes. “Sloane told me. After you left… She helped me see a lot of things.”
He shoved his hand into his jeans pocket and pulled something out. He held it up between his thumb and forefinger. A single, silver bobby pin, glinting under the harsh light.
“I found this,” he said, his voice dropping, becoming intimately quiet.
“On the floor of the hotel room, after the wedding, when I came to find you and you were already gone. It’s been in my pocket since I left for Milan. I’ve been holding onto it like it’s some kind of… relic. Like it’s a piece of you. Proof it was real.”
He looked from the pin to me, his gaze unwavering.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you how I really felt. I’m sorry I didn’t kiss you on your prom night, or any of the hundred other times I thought about it. This last week…”
He stopped, his jaw clenching, and I saw the sheen of tears in his eyes.
It triggered my own; a hot tear escaped and traced a path down my cheek.
“This last week has been… fuck, Imogen. It’s been everything.”
The words burst from him, fervent and sure.
“I’m so in love with you that I need to be near you. I need to build my life by your side. Because being in Milan… I was just existing. It was all empty and hollow, and I couldn’t do it anymore. So I quit.”
“Theo—”
“I applied for the job at Heart and Soul on the plane ride over,” he barreled on, a man on a cliff edge confessing everything before he fell. “It was presumptuous, I know. But I need you to know how invested I am. In us. In a future. Imogen, I love you. So fucking much.”
He stood there, breathless, wrecked, beautiful, holding out his heart and a bobby pin on a threshold four days cold.
The tension that had coiled in me for weeks—years, really—suddenly snapped. A smile broke through my tears, then a grin, then a soft, disbelieving chuckle that was mostly relief.
“I love you, too.” The words escaped before I could stop them, automatic and true and devastating.
He moved like gravity had finally been switched back on, closing the distance between us in one stride.
But I held my hand up to stop him. If he kissed me, then I’d never say everything that I needed to.
“No, you don’t get to just— No.”
He froze mid-step. “Gin—”
““Do you know what it felt like?” I cut him off, the words spilling out now, hot and jagged. “Sitting behind that hedge, listening to you laugh with them? Hearing you reduce everything we’d shared to a hookup? Hearing you confirm that yes, you fucked me, and no, it didn’t mean anything?”
“I didn’t say that—”
““You let them think it! Your silence said it! And then—” My breath hitched. “And then you said it. Out loud. ‘Wedding convenience.’ Like I was a... a service. Like I was Uber Eats. Like I was just there and available and why not?”
“Gin, please—”
“I heard you.” The tears were coming now, hot and angry.
“I heard you and it broke me. It confirmed every single fear I’ve ever had about myself. That I’m too much. That I’m not enough. That I’m temporary. That no one would ever choose me when it mattered. And I get that you overheard me at the salon, and I’m sorry you thought I didn’t care.
But I have always cared. I always have.”
My voice caught in my throat and looked to the side in a futile effort to stop the tears begging to fall. They fell anyway. “I have always loved you. So I understand how words can hurt, and I forgive you, but you don’t get to make me feel small and then fix it with an apology.”
“I know.” He nodded and took a shaky breath, his lips were purple. It was starting to cool now, summer slowly turning into fall - and he was soaked. I sighed and stepped out of the doorframe.
“Come inside, I have some clothes you can borrow.”
I disappeared into my room and then returned with a pair of trackpants and a t-shirt that I knew would fit Theo. When I walked into the dining room he was standing by my opened laptop - reading.
I wanted to be mad that he was invading my privacy, my private thoughts. But then I remembered the gallery, the photos of me, the many photos of me caught at moments I’d never realized were captured. I walked across to him and handed him the clothes.
“The bathroom is the first door on the left. We can finish talking once you’re dry and I don’t have the weight of you getting sick on my shoulders.”
Theo didn’t say anything, he just took the clothes and walked down the hallway and into the bathroom. I turned my laptop and looked at my list, which had several additions over the last couple of days.
Things I Learned at the Wedding:
It’s okay to take up space.
Theo knows the words to “Bitch.”
Great sex is actually a thing.
I think it’s more than a crush now.
I need to go back to therapy.
Hindsight is 20/20.
Sometimes being seen is more terrifying than being invisible.
Asking for what you want is the hardest thing in the world.
Love isn’t always enough.
You can be someone’s ‘nothing’ and still have them be your everything.
Milan sucks.
I exist now only in the time of Before Theo and After Theo
Eating Ice cream doesn’t fix everything
I don’t know how to breathe anymore.
Theo returned with his wet clothes and I took them and put them in the laundry machine.
“I fucked up Imogen and for as long as I live, whether or not you want me in your life… I will love you. There won’t be a day where I’ll ever not love you. I’ve loved you since… fuck, longer than I care to admit. I’ve let you think I was indifferent for years, kept you at arms length for years,
because I knew the minute that this.”
He gestured between the two of us, his voice thick with emotion. “I’d never be able to get you out of my mind, or my heart or my soul. You’re not nothing, you’ve never been nothing. You are my everything.”
That was it, that was the catalyst that broke my resolve. Theo was my everything too - I felt light headed and unsteady on my feet, like cupid had shot an arrow directly into my heart and even though part of me still hurt, an even bigger part of me soared.
“I’m scared.” My voice was small and shaky.
Theo nodded and took a step forward, but still gave me distance. “Me too.”
“But I’m more terrified of not trying. Of not trying to prove to you how much I love you, or not being here…
of not waking up next to you, of not touching you, or kissing you, or making love to you…
Gin, I want it all… no fuck, I need it all and I need it all with you.
I choose you Imogen and I will choose you every single fucking day for as long as I live.
He held out his hand, not demanding or expectant, just there.
The choice was there, and maybe a wise person would have protected their heart from the possibility of more heartbreak. But Theo had been my protector, my friend, my family and my lover. It was why his words had hurt so much, but also it was why I could trust him.
I placed my hand in his and gave him a crooked smile.
His eyes were wet, same as mine but he smiled and closed the gap between us even more, until our bodies were flush against one another.
His arms came around me, strong and sure, and his mouth found mine.
It wasn’t a gentle kiss. It was desperate, grateful, a confession and an absolution all at once.
He kissed me like I was his oxygen after holding his breath for a lifetime.
I kissed him back, my hands fisting in his worn t-shirt, holding on as if he might vanish.
When we finally broke apart, breathless, I looked up at him. His eyes were clear now, the blue bright with a hope I’d only ever dreamed of putting there.
“Let’s talk. Properly.”
“I’d really like that.”