It sounded so pedestrian. So high school. It didn’t encompass the excruciating pain that would be my reality if Beau ended things like he looked like he was going to.
“Can I ask you a question, then?” Beau sounded tired. It scared the shit out of me. Because he didn’t say he wasn’t breaking up with me.
I nodded, standing rooted to the spot, agony already spreading through my body like poison.
“Have you been with anyone except for that piece of…?” He took a deep breath. “Other than yourex-husband.”
He spat the word with more hatred for Waylon than even I carried.
Yes. There had been someone else. Him. But he knew that. That wasn’t what he was asking.
“No,” I replied quietly. “I haven’t.”
I shouldn’t have felt shame in the admission. The Beau I knew, the Beau I loved, would never make me ashamed of anything I had or hadn’t done.
But this version, this closed-off, foreign version of him did. He made me feel embarrassed, young, and inexperienced. Broken.
He nodded at my response, the one that, apparently, cemented plans for him. Dirt on our grave.
“Your life has been a collection of people who hurt you. Older men, stealing things from you that should’ve been precious. Sacred. You deserve to find them again. Find yourself.”
He pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose.
“I will not be another man who hurts you, Hannah.”
His words were a goodbye. I could see it in his face, the curve in his lips, the strain in his eyes.
He’d given up. On us. Me.
Normally, that would’ve been enough to bring me to my knees. And I felt the pain, square in my chest like broken glass shredding me.
But I didn’t let it take me down.
I stepped forward, grasping the edges of Beau’s shirt. “If you don’t want to hurt me, thendon’t hurt me.” There was steel in my voice I didn’t recognize. Steel I’d forged in this house. With Beau. Clara.
And not just forged by the way he looked at me, uplifted my confidence, believed in me, made me feel worthy.
But also from the beginning of us, when he was mean, cruel, dismissive. He’d helped me find my backbone. He’d shown me my worth in some warped way. He’d also shown me his cards. When Beau got scared of his feelings—or more specifically, if he was under the mistaken impression that he was doing the right thing—he pushed me away.
I wasn’t going to let him. I couldn’t.
“I’m trying.” He was tortured. In pain. It was visceral, how much this was hurting him. And I didn’t care.
“No, you’re not,” I hissed. “You’re running. You’re being a coward. Youpromised. You promised I was safe with you. You made me safe with you, and now, what? You’re ending this because … why?”
I was hammering him with words, questions filled with an aggression I hadn’t known I was capable of. But I was terrified. Hurt beyond measure. And I was mad.
Furious.
Beau didn’t meet my fury; he looked rightly defeated, chastised.
“Because I will not be another man who takes advantage of you, Hannah.” He didn’t meet my gaze, looking somewhere over my head while speaking softly yet firmly.
“You dismiss my agency and insult my intelligence by insinuating that I can’t tell whether or not you’re taking advantage of me.” I clutched his shirt tighter.
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re right. I’m insulting you by taking your power away here, and I fucking hate myself for it, Hannah. But I’m only the second man you’ve been with in your entire life. And you only got divorced from the older man who took you out ofhigh school, who you thought was saving you but hurt you instead.”
My brother.
