“You know what this place taught me?”Nick cuts in.“You don’t know what you can handle until you're in it.”
Then he leans forward, eyes locked with mine.
“And I need you back in Eden.I’m getting married and you’re my best man.”
“Me?”
Christ, I sound like a kid.
“Of course you,” he says, softer now.“You’re family.”
And then?—
“Besides, Nora’s gonna need someone to walk her down the aisle.”
Her name does something ugly and immediate to my chest.Like someone reached inside and twisted.I have to clench my fists just to stay upright.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.I might’ve fucked it up again,” I manage.
Nick just watches me for a long moment."I don't think she thinks that."
Nick’s smile shifts—small, knowing, the kind he gets when he’s holding more cards than he’s showing.“Actually, I think you’ve got more reasons than you realize to come home now.”
And that’s when the dam breaks.Everything I’ve been swallowing down—fear, self-loathing, the quiet terror that sits in my chest like a parasite feeding on anything good—spills out before I can stop it.
"I'm scared I'll hurt her again.You’ve seen what I’ve done, what Scott is like.I can’t?—"
“Then don’t be him,” Nick says simply.Like changing the wiring of my DNA is as easy as putting on a different shirt.“Change the outcome.”
I start pacing without meaning to, running both hands through my hair—a nervous habit I’ve never managed to break.
“Nick, she’s like a song stuck on repeat and it fucks with my head.I thought I was doing the right thing letting her move on with her life, start fresh in London, build a career.Then she shows up here and I put it in her head that we could be something more, but I don’t know if I can give her more.”
“Songs get stuck because they mean something,” he says, voice softening before he lets out a breath of a laugh.“You know what I’ve realized about people like us that carry the weight of every problem on our shoulders?We think we have way more power over other people’s lives than we actually do.Like we get to control their choices.Decide their outcomes.But we can’t.”
He leans forward, elbows on his knees.
“A person makes their own choices.Nora makes her own choices.And we both know that girl is more than capable of making her own decisions.”
“I know she is.”
God, I know.
“But I still feel like I’ve given her this false sense of hope that we’ll get some happily ever after.And I’m still walking on the edge of reason here.”
Nick tilts his head.“Have you heard of Pablo Neruda?”
I shake my head.
“There’s a line he wrote—‘Love is so short, forgetting is so long.’But I think he got it backwards.”
I stop pacing.“Yeah?How’s that?”
He sets down the water bottle he’s been turning in his hands, making sure he has my full attention.
“Forgetting isn’t long at all.It’s just the moment you realize the love didn’t disappear—it just changed shape”
“Into what, exactly?”I ask.
