For a week, he’d known that we were mathematical soulmates while I’d been stumbling and fumbling through each of our interactions, trying to figure out if what I was feeling was legitimate or if I was projecting my desperate need for connection onto the first decent guy who’d shown interest in me since my humiliating breakup.
As if this wasn’t mind-boggling enough, in the middle of his confession, he’d told me he loved me. Just blurted it out.
I pulled the blankets tighter around myself, but I still couldn’t stop shivering, and it didn’t have much to do with the temperature.
Did hereallylove me? Or did he love what his algorithm told him he should love?
And how was I supposed to know the difference?
He’d made decisions about us, about pursuing me, based on something I’d never consented to. Every conversation we’d had, every moment we’d shared, he’d known something I didn’t.
That wasn’t fair, and it certainly wasn’t right.
But underneath my anger was something else. Something that felt uncomfortably like understanding.
Because while I hadn’t known this man for long, Ididknow him.
I’d wager that I probably knew him better than anyone else in Mistletoe Bay, save perhaps his cousin, Nathan.
I knew that Luke approached everything in life like a problem to be solved. That was just who he was—analytical, methodical, and desperate to get things right. So, it made perfect sense that he’d turn to the algorithm he’d created to obtain mathematical proof that what he was feeling wasn’t just wishful thinking.
It was invasive and wrong and also … stupidly sweet?
God, I was a mess.
I pulled my phone out and checked the time, my thumb hovering over my best friend’s name. But what would I even say to her? The truth was, long conversations where we laid our hearts bare weren’t what our relationship was about these days. If I was being completely honest with myself, we didn’t actually have much of a relationship at all anymore.
Logically, I understood why she’d chosen to be Switzerland about Eric and me—her brother had married Eric’s brother, after all. But it had hurt. Badly. I’d been her best friend fortwenty years. That was supposed to count for something. Instead, she’d made me feel like a situation—a ticking time bomb—that needed to be handled with care. And now that she was living in Barcelona, her calls and texts had grown less frequent until our friendship felt more like polite acquaintances whose Instagram posts you liked without comment.
No. I couldn’t call her. Not about this.
But I desperately needed to talk through my confused, jumbled thoughts about life and love and why I was so torn up about Luke withsomeone. Because I was self-aware enough to realize that my difficulty accepting him at his word wasn’t really about him.
Well, not entirely.
It was about men lying to me. Telling what I wanted to hear—or what they thought I wanted to hear—and then breaking my heart.
Eric had told me he loved me right up until I was standing in that church, waiting for the wedding march to begin and those heavy double doors to open, when in reality he’d been in love with someone else the entire time.
The landlord who bought the building that housed my floral shop had assured me nothing would change with my lease. Fourmonths later, he tripled my rent. Two months after that, he kicked me out entirely.
Men lied.
That was the story of my life.
So was Luke just the latest chapter?
Except … Lukehadn’tlied. Not exactly. He’d … delayed telling me a difficult truth. That wasn’t the same thing.
Was it?
My phone buzzed. I pulled it out, irrationally hoping it might be him, but it was just a notification from the power company estimating service restoration by six o’clock instead of tomorrow morning as initially predicted.
At least I wouldn’t freeze to death overnight.
Small victories.
I set the phone down and pulled the blankets tighter, trying to will my brain to stop its endless loop because I’d been sitting here for over an hour, and I was no closer to an answer than when Luke had dropped me off.
