Nash walked over carrying two plates full of eggs and set them on the table. “You sure you want to do this?”
“Eat these eggs? No, I already told you that.”
“Fucking hell, Natalie. You are the biggest pain in my ass.”
My mouth dropped open on an incredulous huff. “Did you justNatalieme?”
“Damn fucking right, I did. Quit bein’ so obtuse. You know I’m talkin’ about you and Asher and what a mistake y’all’re makin’.”
I blew out a breath, my shoulders sagging as I rubbed the heels of my hands against my eyes. “Rory already tried this this mornin’, you know.”
“Oh, this mornin’ when she was off and runnin’ before six?”
“Yes…?”
“You have no problem sleepin’ the night before a flight and hate wakin’ up before noon.”
“I hate scrambled eggs, and yet you insist on feedin’ them to me. What’s your point?”
“Some reason you couldn’t sleep?”
“I slept just fine.” If crying into my pillow could be counted as sleep. “I’m finally goin’ to Ireland. Why wouldn’t I be thrilled?”
“I don’t know, but you’re clearly not, so you should probably ask yourself that question.”
I was just rusty, was all. Because it’d been so long since I’d traveled, I needed to get back in the swing of things. It had nothing to do with the gigantic Asher-shaped hole in my heart I was going to have to walk around with for the rest of my life. I needed to get used to it, so I might as well start now.
“Nash, please. Can we just go?”
He looked at his phone one more time, his eyes lighting up briefly before he tamped it down, and then he nodded. “Fine. Let me just eat both of these,” he said, scraping the contents of my plate onto his own. “And then we will.”
Fifteen minutes later—I’d never seen a grown man eat so fucking slowly in all my life—he grabbed my bags and held the screen door open for me. I shuffled my way down the porch steps and to the gravel driveway where Nash’s old truck was parked. It felt like I was walking through quicksand, each step a little harder than the previous. But I intended to keep that to myself. Nash didn’t need to know how much I didn’t want to go.
No, that wasn’t quite true. While I’d grown to like Havenbrook much more than I’d ever thought possible, it wasn’t the town I was desperate to stay in. I was certain I’d be feeling the same way if we’d lived in San Francisco or Miami or Atlanta.
Nash carried my bags to the truck, then placed them on the gravel instead of tossing them in the back. He pulled out his phone once more.
“Seriously, Nash, I’m tired of this.Whathas you stallin’?”
He glanced up at me, and then his gaze fell on something just over my right shoulder, a smile sweeping across his face. “That,” he said, tipping his head toward whatever was behind me.
I turned around, lifting my hand to shield my eyes from the sun, and looked in the direction Nash had gestured. I’d filled my life with the kind of adrenaline-seeking that meant I’d experienced nearly every kind of high there was—some illegal varieties included—but none of them compared to how I felt in that moment when my eyes connected with Asher’s.
He stepped out of the car and walked toward me, carrying something in his hand. His eyes darted over my face, his brow pinching at whatever he saw. He swept his gaze over the rest of me and to the bags at my feet that Nash still hadn’t put in the truck.
“Delayed flight?” he asked.
Well, I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him that my big plan was to sit at the airport for half a day until I qualified to flystandby on my original flight just to get out of there earlier. So instead, I just nodded.
“What’re you doin’ here?” I glanced down at the book he carried—it was fairly large, maybe twelve-by-twelve, an album of some sort.
“If you’re gonna go, I wanted to make sure you saw this before you did.”
I took the album with shaky hands and opened it, my eyes welling up at the first photo inside—Asher and me on our wedding day, the two of us laughing, our heads close together, our eyes sparkling as we regarded each other. As if we already knew the crazy journey we were about to embark on—the laughter and the tears, the late nights and early mornings. Cleaning up vomit and reading approximately twelve hundred bedtime stories and making memories through just living.
I stared at the image until I could no longer see it through my tears. I’d managed not to cry more than a handful of times in my adult years, and yet I couldn’t seem to stop now. Maybe that was because I’d never had something like Asher on the line.
I’d spent my life fleeing from place to place, escaping everything before it got too hard. Before I got too attached. Before I fell in love. All the while, pretending like that was some great life.
