"And then what?"
"We talked. The next morning, on the rooftop. We were both confused and exhausted and trying to make sense of what it meant."
"What it meant." Maya's voice had gone hollow. "Waking up holding your ex-wife. You needed to figure out what that meant."
"I know how it sounds?—"
Her eyes were bright with tears gathering along her lower lashes. But she blinked them back, refusing to let them fall. "It sounds like you've been having some kind of emotional affair with your ex-wife while I've been here making you dinner and buying your favorite beer and telling myself that the distance I was feeling wasn't real."
"Maya, that's not?—"
"How did it make you feel?"
The question stopped me cold.
"When she told you she loves you in that stairwell,” Maya continued. "When your ex-wife looked you in the eye and confessed that she never stopped having feelings for you." Her voice cracked, but she pushed through it. "How did that make you feel?"
I opened my mouth.
But nothing came out.
Because the truth was a knot I couldn't untangle. Relief and terror and longing and guilt, all twisted together into something I didn't have words for. My heart had lurched when she'd said it. I'd asked for time because I was too much of a coward to admit that I already knew the answer.
Maya watched me struggle with the silence, failing to give her the reassurance she was asking for.
A single tear slipped down her cheek.
"Do you still love her?" The words came out broken, barely above a whisper. "Just like that, Cassian. Yes or no. Do you still love Calla?"
I wanted to say no.
I wanted to give her the answer that would fix this and let us go back to five minutes ago when she was humming at the stove and everything was simple.
But the word wouldn't come.
"I don't know," I said instead. "I thought I was over her. I thought five years was enough time?—"
"But it wasn't." Maya finished the sentence, and her voice shattered on the last word. "Oh god! It wasn't."
"Maya, please. It's not that simple?—"
"Yes, it is!" Her tears fell freely, streaming down her cheeks. "It is that simple! I asked you a yes or no question, and you couldn't say no. You couldn't even give me that!”
"I care about you. What we have?—"
"What we have?" She laughed, and the sound was so raw it made my chest ache. "What we have is me loving you sincerely while you've been keeping a piece of yourself somewhere else. What we have is eight months of me thinking we have something real while you were still hung up on your ex-wife."
"That's not fair."
"No, it's not!" She grabbed her purse from the counter, her movements jerky. "None of this is fair! I didn't do anything wrong, Cassian! I loved you. I showed up for you every single day. I held you when you had bad days and told myself that the way you sometimes looked right through me didn't mean anything."
"Maya—"
"But it did mean something, didn't it?" She turned to face me, and the devastation in her eyes was almost unbearable. "All those times I felt like you were somewhere else. All those moments when I'd catch you staring at nothing with this look on your face like you were recalling something I wasn't part of. It was her! It was always her…"
I couldn't deny it.
I couldn't give her the lie that would make this easier.
