23. Emma
CHAPTER 23
EMMA
W e sit down for lunch and Liam meets my smile with that classic stern expression that I’ve grown to know and love over the last two months.
“How’s it going?” I ask as we settle in to eat. He’s been quiet so far, so I think he must be having a tough week. He always takes a bit of prodding to open up, but I’ve been trying hard to get him to trust me more and rely on me. It’s shaky progress, but I’m proud of him every time he does it.
He shrugs. “Same old, same old, you know? Work is work.”
“I do.” I smile, turning on the charm. There is definitely something up with him. “I don’t know what’s been happening this last week, but it feels like we’ve had all the crazies in the whole city in.”
“Same for us,” he says, and I wait for him to say something else, but he doesn’t.
“Tough week, then?”
Before he can answer, the waiter comes back round to check on us. Liam grunts at him, and I tell him we’re fine.
We eat in silence for a while longer, and when it becomes clear that he’s not going to say anything else, I ask him outright. “What’s on your mind?” I know him well enough by now to know when he’s keeping something from me.
He shrugs again. “Nothing much. It’s just work getting to me, that’s all.”
The rest of our conversation is just as stilted. It’s clear that he’s not going to open up, so I pivot away from that. “Anything interesting coming up this weekend?”
“Work,” he says simply, not looking up from his plate. “I took an overtime shift.”
“I’ve barely been doing any overtime lately,” I say, and start rambling to fill the conversational void. “With Phoebe getting closer to her due date, I’ve been spending every extra second with her.”
He grunts in acknowledgment, and I keep going. “And, of course, I’ve been seeing you.”
“You shouldn’t skip work for me,” Liam snaps, looking up at me with his eyes blazing. “I’m not worth that.”
The outburst leaves me speechless. I’m sure he doesn’t want me to say You are to me because this hasn’t exactly been the lunch conversation of long-term lovers. But it’s not a lie. He’s worth more than he thinks he is.
It breaks my heart to think that he doesn’t see that.
“I don’t skip work for anyone. You know that work means everything to me. I just have other people I care about too.”
A grunt is the only response I get to that, and I feel my certainty in our relationship wavering a little more. To me, this could go the whole way. I’ve been trying not to imagine it too much so I don’t get ahead of myself, but I can’t control what my brain does when I dream at night.
I can’t stop it from picturing a white dress, bells.
That evening, I text him, telling him how nice it was to see him, how sad I am that he was too busy to hang out tonight. He replies with a thumbs-up, and though I might have liked words, he was clearly tired today, and at least he reacted quickly, which is more than he’s done lately.
Why don’t we meet again sometime this week? I type with a smiley face.
He reads the message and says nothing. Perhaps he’s just thinking. I decide to give him some time, and before I know it, Phoebe has distracted me into almost forgetting all about him. Almost. I sleep on her couch that night and look at my phone again.
I’ve been left on read. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, to believe that he might have just forgotten to reply or thought he already did. But between this and the way he was with me earlier — and the way he’s been evasive from going to lunch with me this week — none of that eases the anxiety in my mind.
The next day, when Liam still hasn’t said anything, I text him again before I start my shift. Hope work was okay last night. How are you looking for lunch tomorrow?
With that, I shove my phone in my bag and head off to do some work. I’m helping in the ICU today. I volunteered to, in large part because it’s always busy, and busy means my head will be full of thoughts that are about anything but Liam.
It almost works.
I have to force myself not to keep checking my notifications all day, and I almost succeed. I look twice, and he’s said nothing.
When we hit lunch, I feel sick, but it doesn’t stop me from checking. My heart pounds. I unlock the phone. One new message.
My heart soars.
Work’s fine.
I stare at it, waiting for the next part of the message to come. It doesn’t. I try not to read into the period. It feels more final than I would like it to.
I’m glad, I reply, deciding not to put pressure on him to give me a response about lunch.
From there, it doesn’t get better.
All week, he’s like this, not replying to my messages, not wanting to meet. Is everything okay? You seem distant, I ask him at one point, and he ignores me. I don’t know how else to show him that I care or to get him to open up to me.
It’s like all of a sudden, a shroud has fallen over him, and he’s gone back to being that ice-cold asshole I met in Saint Lucia. I send text after text after text, and I get nothing back. We don’t meet. We don’t chat.
In the end, he stops even reading my messages at all, and that’s the moment I decide to stop sending them.
I’m tired of putting in effort to get nothing back.
That weekend, I head to Phoebe’s and burst into tears the second I walk through the door.
Phoebe steers me into the living room and sits me down on the sofa, throwing a blanket over me and sliding a glass of wine into my hand. As she always does, she knows what I need better than I do.
“I don’t think he likes me anymore,” I sob as she sits beside me, taking me into her arms.
“What’s happened? Why do you think that?”
I tell her everything: about the way Liam’s been ignoring me, about how I don’t think I can keep doing this if he’s going to keep acting this way. About how I thought this was really something, but I was clearly worthless to him this whole time.
She holds me and rubs my back soothingly. She doesn’t have any words, just comfort and listening until the tears have lessened and I’ve stopped shaking. Eventually, she asks, “Has he actually broken up with you?”
“No,” I sniffle. “But I’m starting to think we might never have really been going out.”
“Of course you were,” says Phoebe, but the floodgates of doubt have opened in my mind now, and the waves are crashing down over me.
“Were we, though? We never talked about it. He never called me his girlfriend. Sure, we hung out together and we were intimate like lovers, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t casual. A lot of people these days have a casual thing with their friends. Maybe we were just being modern.”
“Maybe,” says Phoebe, cutting me off. “You should talk to him about it. I know you didn’t want to scare him off, but was that just to make him happy? Look at your broken heart now. If this wasn’t love, then he’s going to be in trouble with me.”
I laugh despite my tears. “It’s too late now. He isn’t talking to me, and asking him is just going to make it worse. I’ve lost him forever. You found me my dream guy, and I was too stupid to keep him.”
“Hey now,” says Phoebe sternly, taking hold of my hands. “Don’t you dare start talking like that. From everything you’re saying, all I’m hearing is a coward who’s decided that ghosting you is a better way to deal with his problems than actually talking to you.”
“I guess.”
“It’s okay to be upset by this. Anyone would be. But don’t you dare start blaming yourself for things you didn’t do. You can’t change other people.”
A cracked laugh escapes my lips. “No,” I say. “No, you can’t.”
And maybe that was my issue. I had a taste of a Liam who was kind and open and loving, but from the start, he showed me who he really was. The kind of guy who loves work and hates inconvenience. Someone who sees other people as beneath him and thinks that just because he has fought for his position, he’s better than everyone else.
I knew that from the start. And now I’m starting to see that I should have believed it.