For one terrible moment, I felt tears threaten, sharp and sudden. Because there he was, alive and familiar in ways that hurt,different in ways that hurt worse and my heart twisted with the knowledge of everything we had been and everything we would never be.
I had missed him.
God help me, I had missed him.
And that realization felt like betrayal, to Brandon, to my growth, to the woman I’d fought so damn hard to become.
The young girl I had once been, the girl who had loved him with a blinding, reckless faith, rose for a heartbeat, starry-eyed and breathless.
But she disappeared just as quickly.
I exhaled slowly, letting the years settle back into my bones, the failure, the lessons carved into me through disappointment and healing, the steadiness I’d earned through sheer stubbornness.
I was not that girl anymore.
“I didn’t know you were still here,” Ethan said softly, almost cautiously.
His voice was deeper now. Rougher. Weathered by time in a way that sent an unwelcome shiver down my spine.
I straightened, shifting Lily to my hip. “I was just heading out.”
Lily twisted to look at him. “We bought snacks! Lots!”
Ethan managed a small smile. “We did.”
Our eyes met again over her shoulder, brief but enough to punch the air from my lungs. His gaze swept over me, slow and almost stunned. My dress, my cardigan, my braid, the freckles across my cheeks, details he used to know.
And for a moment, just one, fleeting moment, something flickered in his expression.
Recognition. Regret. Longing.
But I forced my shoulders back.
I refused to let old ghosts dictate the way I held myself.
“Lily,” I said gently, brushing a curl away from her forehead, “go tell your grandma I’m leaving, okay?”
She nodded, sliding down with a soft thump before dashing out of the kitchen. Silence settled in her wake, thick and stretched tight.
Ethan didn’t speak. Neither did I.
It felt strange, standing across from a man I had once known like the back of my hand. Stranger still that all I felt was a hurricane of contradiction inside me, wanting and resenting, remembering and resisting.
“You… look good, Claire,” he said finally.
I held his gaze. “I am good.”
He knew exactly what I meant.
I had built myself back up after the mess he had left. After betrayal and disillusionment. After every scar life had thrown at me.
I was not a girl shaped by fantasies anymore. I was a woman who lived in reality.
And Ethan Walker, this beautiful, complicated, destructive man, had no place in the person I had fought to become.
Even if some traitorous, buried part of me still clenched at the sight of him.
“You’re staying for a while?” I asked, keeping my voice level.
