Chapter 19 #4
The implication that Mac has told her the real story about the night of the accident—that he's shared those intimate, painful details with his ex-girlfriend—hits me like a physical blow.
Maybe I'm not as special or as trusted as I thought I was.
Maybe I'm just the latest in a long line of women he's confided in when he needed comfort.
Before I can formulate any kind of response, Mac appears at my elbow like he's materialized out of thin air. "Everything okay over here, ladies?"
"Just getting to know Delaney better," Stephanie says brightly, her tone shifting into something artificially cheerful. "She's absolutely lovely, Mac. Very… authentic."
The word hangs in the air between us like an insult disguised as a compliment, dripping with implications about authenticity versus sophistication, small-town simplicity versus worldly experience.
"Ready to go?" Mac asks me, and I nod gratefully, desperate to escape this conversation and this room and the suffocating weight of feeling so completely out of place.
That night, lying in Mac's king-sized bed in his sterile Boston apartment while he tosses restlessly beside me, I stare at the ceiling and replay every single interaction from the day.
His teammates were polite, but clearly saw me as a temporary curiosity.
His family was kind in a distant way, but obviously viewed me as irrelevant to their son's real life.
And Stephanie... Stephanie saw right through me with the clarity of someone who knows exactly how this story ends.
"You're thinking too loud," Mac says, his voice cutting through the darkness.
"Sorry," I whisper back.
"Want to talk about it?"
I consider lying, deflecting, pretending everything is fine, but we're way past that point now. "Your ex-girlfriend thinks I'm just a temporary phase."
Mac releases a sound that might be a laugh if it wasn't so hollow. "Steph has always had a lot of opinions about my life choices. Most of them are wrong."
"But is she wrong about this?" I ask, turning onto my side to face his shadowy form in the darkness.
The silence stretches long enough that I start to think he's fallen asleep, and when he finally speaks, his voice is careful and measured.
"I don't know what I am right now, Delaney.
I don't know what I want or where I'll be in six months or whether I'll ever be whole enough for the kind of relationship you deserve. "
"That's not what I asked you."
"It's the only honest answer I have right now."
I close my eyes against the sting of tears that I refuse to let fall, and we sink back into silence.
Outside the bedroom windows, I can hear the sounds of Boston continuing its relentless existence—sirens and traffic and the kind of urban energy that never really stops.
It's so completely different from Millbrook Falls, where the loudest nighttime sound is usually wind rustling through trees or the occasional car driving past on Main Street.
"Mac?" I venture after several minutes of listening to him shift restlessly.
"Yeah?"
"Do you miss it? This life, this city, all of this?"
Another long pause, filled with the weight of everything he's not saying.
"Parts of it," he finally admits. "The game, mostly.
Being genuinely good at something, having a clear purpose every day.
" He shifts again, and I hear the whisper of fabric against skin.
"But not the rest of it. Not the constant pressure and media scrutiny and having to be 'Mac Sullivan, hockey star' every single minute I'm in public. "
"Who do you want to be instead?"
"I honestly don't know yet," he says, and his voice carries a vulnerability that makes my chest ache. "I'm still figuring that out, still trying to piece together who I am when everything else gets stripped away. But I'm getting used to the version of myself that exists when I'm with you."
I want to tell him that he can be whoever he wants to be in Millbrook Falls. That he can just be Mac—the guy who reads romance novels without shame and helps elderly customers reach books on high shelves and makes me laugh until my sides hurt. But Stephanie's words keep echoing in my head.
“When he's ready to come back to reality, where exactly do you fit?”
"Delaney?" Mac's voice cuts through my spiraling thoughts.
"Mmm?"
"Thank you," he says softly, his arm wrapping around my side to drag me across the mattress against him.
My back hits his chest, and his lips brush against my ear.
"For being here today, for making it less awful than it could have been.
For..." His voice catches slightly, and I hear him swallow hard. "For helping me get through it."
"That's what friends do for each other," I reply, though the words taste bitter in my mouth.
"Right," he agrees quietly. "Friends."
This time, neither of us mentions that friends don't usually sleep cuddled together in each other's beds.
That friends don't look at each other like they're drowning, and the other person represents their only source of oxygen.
That friends don't lie awake in the darkness thinking about how terrifying it is to want something this much when you're almost certain it's going to disappear.
But maybe that's a conversation for another day, another time when we're both brave enough to acknowledge what's really happening between us.
Tonight, I listen to Mac's breathing gradually even out and try to ignore how his bedroom feels like a museum display of someone he used to be—someone who might be ready to reclaim his old life any day now, leaving small-town bookshop owners exactly where they've always belonged.
In the past, where they can't complicate things or ask for more than he was able to give.
Before I drift off to sleep, I make a mental note to extend an invitation to his teammates to visit Millbrook Falls sometime.
Maybe seeing Mac in his element there, surrounded by people who care about him for who he is rather than what he does, will help them understand what I already know—that he's so much more than just his career, and he deserves people in his life who see that too.
Maybe if I'm lucky, they'll see it as well.