“I know, Skye, I’m not trying to take over, I’m just trying to help.”
“That is what people say right before they take over,” I snapped, and winced at myself.
He studied me for a long beat. “Skye.”
“What?”
“How long have you been holding this together with duct tape and stubbornness?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I lied.
“Your boiler apologizes when it works. Your radiator sounds like an elderly pug. The wallpaper in the blue room has air bubbles. You’re doing the work of three people and eating toast standing up over the sink.”
“I …” I didn’t know what to say.
Noah looked back at me. “Let me help.”
“I don’t want you to see it,” I blurted. When his brow furrowed, I huffed out the rest. “The messy bits. The places where it’s threadbare. The places whereI’mthreadbare.”
His face did a thing that had nothing to do with pity and everything to do with recognition. “Skye.”
“Don’t,” I warned.
“I already see it,” he said gently. “I’m not here to be impressed. I’m here because being with you is the only place that’s every felt right to me.”
That ridiculous, unhelpful ache in my chest yawned open. I slammed the ledger shut before any actual feelings could escape and changed the subject, because it was the only defense I possessed.
“Why do you care if I’m still songwriting?” I asked, surprising myself, but desperate for a change of subject.
“Because you should be doing it,” he said simply, creases fanning out from the corner of his eyes as he studied me, trying to follow along with my erratic thoughts. “You always should have been. You were the best of us.”
“I run an inn now, Noah,” I said, again, like repetition could make truth into excuse. “I do laundry. I changesheets. I unclog showers. I don’t sit around waiting for a muse.”
“You used to write in laundromats,” he said. “On buses. In queues. Once on the back of my hand when you couldn’t find a notebook.”
“That was because you’d lost the notebook,” I said, stabbing a pencil into the jar.
“You married a man who didn’t mind that you worked yourself into the ground,” he said, too carefully neutral to be casual. “Why?”
“Do we have to?—”
“Yes.”
I stared across my small lobby until the room blurred. “He was…nice,” I said finally. “Safe. He thought love meant never raising your voice. He liked spreadsheets and new tires and the same toast every morning.”
“And you left,” Noah said, not a question.
“I left,” I said. “Because ‘safe’ started feeling like ‘silent.’ Because I forgot what my own voice sounded like unless I was telling someone about check-out time. Because he made me feel like a set of good habits and not a person. Because he wanted kids and I…” I cleared my throat. “I didn’t.”
“That’s perfectly fine to not want that, Skye. I never did either,” Noah reminded me. I’d forgotten that about him. “Though I’ll admit … a part of me broke when I heard you’d married.”
“I read the magazines at the hairdresser,” I said dryly, raising an eyebrow at him. “You dated many a famous woman, Noah. Was it an oil heiress? Or that producer who made a record that sounded like a migraine?”
“I loved two of them,” he said, and the honesty made me blink. “Not…well. Not in a grown way. I loved being loved. I loved not being alone on the road.”
“Honest,” I said, impressed and yet, so very irritated.
“I hate that I didn’t fight harder for us,” he said, the words dropping into the room like coins into a poor box. “I should have, Skye. You were worth it.”
