I’m driving to the beach when every instinct tells me not to. But Nico wouldn’t have pushed me to see those photographs if it didn’t matter.
My mind is a chaotic jumble of images. The ugly, performative photo of Wyatt and Jade — a glossy lie that feels like a punch to the gut. And next to it, the breathtaking photo of me laughing, my joy captured and held safe by his lens. The words from his artist’s statement echo in my head:“This is my apology. This is my truth.”
The white-hot anger is gone, the blind panic has subsided, but the hurt is still there. It’s a different kind of hurt now — not the sharp pain of betrayal, but something quieter. The ache of wanting to believe but being afraid to trust.
I told him the beach, one hour. I know with absolute certainty that he’ll be there waiting. He’s not Preston. He wouldn’t stand me up. He wouldn’t play games or make me wait to teach me a lesson. He’ll be there because that’s who he is.
I pull up to the entrance of the beach and put the car in neutral. I turn to Nico, my loyal, wonderful friend who has been my shield and my sword through all of this. “I need to do this alone,” I tell her, my voice quiet but firm.
She just nods, her dark eyes full of a fierce, proud love that makes my own eyes burn. “Marco lives five minutes from here,” she says, pulling out her phone. “I’ll text him to come get me. Call me when you’re done. I don’t care what time it is. Okay?”
“Okay,” I say, my throat tight. “Thank you.”
“Always,” she says, squeezing my hand before she gets out of the car.
I walk down the familiar sandy path, the air growing cooler, smelling of salt and damp earth. The beach is deserted, bathed in moonlight. The only sound is the rhythmic crash of the waves.
I find a spot near the dunes and sink down into the cold sand, wrapping my arms around my knees. I have time before Wyatt arrives. Time to think. Time to remember.
I think about the good moments — the way he built me that bookshelf, spending weeks getting every detail perfect. The Sunday mornings with coffee and crosswords. The way he looked at me like I was the most fascinating person in the world. The night he told me he loved me, his voice so steady and sure, like it was the easiest truth he’d ever spoken.
But I also think about how he looked tonight at the bookstore. His beard unkempt, dark circles under his eyes. He looked broken. He looked the way I’ve felt.
I check my phone. It’s been forty minutes. Time to go.
I stand, brushing sand from my jeans, and continue down the path toward our spot. And that’s when I see him. He’salready here, sitting on the sand, his back to me, staring out at the water. He’s not pacing, not checking his phone. He’s just sitting, waiting.
He hears me and turns his head. He looks exhausted, his eyes shadowed with pain. He doesn’t stand up. He doesn’t rush toward me. He just waits, giving me the space, the power to decide.
I stop about ten feet away. We just look at each other, the sound of the waves filling the space between us. I’m the one who breaks the silence. “Your photographs,” I say, my voice quiet, fragile, almost carried away by the breeze. “They’re beautiful.”
He lets out a long, shaky breath. “I’m so sorry, Snow,” he says, his voice hoarse. “For the pain I caused you. For not understanding how it would look. For my own stupidity.”
I want to hear what he has to say, but I need him to hear me out first. He needs to know just how hurt I was. And why. Because I know it wasn’t just about him. I’d projected all my anger and hurt at Preston onto him.
“When I saw that picture,” I begin, my voice trembling slightly, “it wasn’t you I saw. It was him. It was every lie he ever told me. It was the humiliation, the feeling of being a fool, all over again. My brain knew you weren’t him, and there had to be more to it. But my heart was louder as it remembered the pain. It’s an echo, a ghost in the machine. And I couldn’t get it out of my head.”
He listens, his face a mask of anguish in the pale moonlight. He doesn’t interrupt. He doesn’t defend himself. He just absorbs my words, my pain, and in doing so, he validates it.
“You had every right to feel that way,” he says when I’m done. “I was careless with your trust. It’s the most valuable thing you could have given me, and I wasn’t careful enough with it.”
He runs a hand through his hair, a gesture of pure frustration with himself. “I should have told you more about the shootbeforehand. I should have prepared you. I was so caught up in my own happiness, in how real things felt with you, that I forgot how unreal my world must look from the outside. It was a blind spot, and it was my fault.”
He takes a shaky breath. “But I need you to know what actually happened. The dinner — that was a setup. Leo and Delilah staged it. They wanted publicity photos for the book launch, and Jade and I walked right into it. We thought it was a group dinner to celebrate the end of the shoot, but when we arrived, there was only a table set for two. Leo and Delilah laughed it off, said it was fine, that they’d just gotten pulled into a last-minute conference call with the marketing team. We had no idea there was a photographer hiding in the shadows until the photos went live.”
I watch him, my heart aching at the raw honesty in his voice.
“And the photo of me leaving her room—” He shakes his head, a bitter laugh escaping. “I’d gone back to my room after dinner, was getting ready for bed, when Jade called. Her zipper was stuck. That’s it. Five minutes of me fumbling with a stuck zipper on her dress while she called her wife, Clara, to laugh about it. Jade’s been married to Clara for three years. I was at their wedding.”
“I tried to call you,” he continues, his voice breaking slightly. “When you called me at the airport, I didn’t understand what you were upset about. I was dealing with luggage, and Leo was yelling, and I just—I didn’t get it. And then when you called back, Jade answered my phone because I’d asked her to grab it. I didn’t know what you’d seen, what it looked like.”
The pain in his eyes is so genuine, so raw, that something inside me cracks open.
His apology is so complete, so devoid of excuses, that it makes my own defensiveness crumble. “I should have asked,” I hear myself say. “I should have come to you, screamed at you,demanded an explanation. Instead, I shut down. That’s what I do. It’s my coping mechanism. I build a wall and I hide behind it. It’s not fair to you.”
The apologies have been made. The wounds have been exposed. Now, a choice must be made.
Trusting him is a risk. It means accepting that I could be hurt again. But not trusting him feels like a different kind of death — a life of loneliness, ruled by the ghost of Preston, letting my past steal my future.
