57. Lily
LILY
Furiously, she pedaled home, ice pelting her face in needling barbs. She was glad for the pain; it was no less than she deserved. The whole skidding ride home, his words ricocheted around her skull.
“When you’re a million years old on your deathbed…”
“Our great-grandchildren…”
“Dammit!”
Her tire slipped, and the bike ejected her, slamming her into a mailbox. For a minute she sat in the sidewalk slush, clutching her head, until the water started to freeze her butt so badly that it hurt. She righted the frame with shaking hands that were shaking only in part because of the cold.
You have to tell him.
You have to tell him.
You have to tell him.
It was the smart thing, the right thing—the kinder of two hateful options. She needed to cut him loose, for his own sake. He deserved better, so much better, than what she could give him. All she had to offer was grief.
She’d been planning on doing it before they got in too far, too close, but the joke was on her. They’d skipped the shallow end, just gone straight for cliff diving into shimmering blue so deep it turned to black. It had always been too late, even before that first kiss.
She had to tell him.
She couldn’t tell him.
She had to tell him.
She couldn’t tell him, because she was completely, irrepressibly in love with him.
Lily didn’t want to hurt him. She didn’t want to hurt herself.
What about you? Don’t you deserve some happiness?
It would be better, probably, not to tell him.
If she told him, she burdened him with an impossible choice. Telling him would ruin his year, more than her involvement in his life already had. Who was she to destroy his Cert Year? This was supposed to be his victory lap.
They could be happy until June. Then he was graduating, going to Oxford or to play Cantrèa, and he’d meet someone else.
Someone who didn’t have secrets, someone who could love him the way he deserved.
Someone he could marry and build a family with.
Someone who would love him for life and not for seven months.
Lily Perkins was in love with Sebastian Allsaires, and she wanted to stay in love with him for as long as she was alive.
If she told him and he walked away, she was pretty sure it would decimate her, and she might as well just hurl herself off the library roof and get it over with.
She tried to imagine spring semester as lab partners with nothing to say. She couldn’t.
She was pretty sure she’d been in love with him for a while. Definitely before he kissed her. Definitely before he’d gone to Québec. It was the dam, she realized, looking back. The first time they’d really talked, literally turning their world upside down to see it better.
It had been at the winery, though, that she’d put a name to the swell of feelings cresting like waves inside her.
It had been crouching with him in a tunnel, trying to coax him out of the darkness, that she knew it was love.
Only love could break her heart that fiercely.
Only love could fill her with such incandescent rage at those who dared hurt him.
And now she knew that he loved her too, even if neither of them had said it aloud.
You didn’t think about great-grandchildren without it.
She stood on the covered porch in the sallow lamplight, dripping and shaking as she began to understand.
Secretly, Sebastian was imagining a future for them, one that spanned generations, completely unaware that Lily didn’t have a future beyond June.
“Lily?” Her mom cracked the front door. “What are you doing out there? You’re soaked.”
“Mom?” Her voice was scratchy. Water dripped down her neck from the ends of her hair as she turned. “I’ve ruined everything.”
She broke then, and her mother was there to catch her as she collapsed.