“Do you…” She trailed off, inhaling a deep breath before she tried again. “Do you like her better?”
It took me a second to understand what she meant.Emma. She’s talking about Emma. She’s asking if I like her better as Emma.
As soon as realization dawned, I shook my head. “No.”
Her eyebrows pulled together. “But?—”
“I was going to break up with her today,” I said quietly, looking right into those whiskey eyes that had been haunting me for months. “When I went to Central Park to meet her, it was only so I could tell her face to face that it was over. I felt like I owed her that.”
She frowned. “Why?”
Because I couldn’t stop thinking about you. Because kissing you ruined me for anyone else. Because somewhere along the way, you stopped being the woman I hated and became the only one I wanted.
I exhaled slowly, choosing to tell her the simpler, less intense version of the truth. “Because I want you, Kate.” Her breath caught, but I had to be sure that she understood what I was saying. “You’re all I want. However you want me. Whether our marriage is just convenient for our businesses and we don’t speak otherwise, or if we just casually hook up when we’re forced to make appearances.”
I inhaled a deep breath, my hands sliding to her hips as I finally came out with it. “I realized I’d take that over not having you at all, but yeah, I wasn’t going to share my feelings with Emma because it wasn’t fair toyou.”
That was the truth of it. The ugly, stripped-down truth. I would’ve taken scraps. Occasional proximity. Anything she was willing to give.
Kate looked down at the carpet, her shoulders drawing in slightly before she spoke again, her voice coming out small. “I was going to break up with CB in the park too.”
My eyebrows shot up, my heart suddenly thumping against my ribs. “Yeah?”
“Not because I wanted to. I mean, I did, but…” She trailed off for a beat, exhaling shakily. “God, this is hard, but I couldn’t hurt you, Nate. That was the thing. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, but especially not you. I kept thinking…” She shook her head. “If I married you, I couldn’t keep him. I wouldn’t be able to give him what he deserved if I was married to someone else, so I had to let CB go.”
The name sounded strange now. Distant. Like it belonged to someone else entirely.
“I loved him,” she said after a quiet moment and it slayed me that it was past tense, but still. “And I don’t—” She stopped, cutting herself off with frustration radiating from her. “I don’t talk about feelings like this. I’m bad at it.”
“I’ve noticed,” I said gently.
She let out the slightest huff of a laugh before she shook her head. “But I loved him. So does that mean I loveyou? Or is that just… another version of you?”
It was a fair question. One that had no easy answer. Emma had been real. Those years we’d spent talking had been real. The feelings had been real.
But so was this. So was Kate, standing in front of me with her hair a mess from the rain, her eyes too bright, and her whole world just as shaken as mine.
“Hey,” I said softly. She looked up. “Everything is fine, Kate.”
It wasn’t, obviously. Nothing about this was fine, but the words seemed to steady her anyway.
“We just…” I searched for the right way to put it. “We just found out something huge. That’s all.”
She nodded faintly. “It feels like…”
“Like grieving?” I suggested when she stopped talking in the middle of the sentence.
Her eyes widened slightly. “Yes. Exactly that.”
“Well, the way I see it, wearegrieving. Somethinghasended. Something that was a huge part of our lives for a really long time. Emma and CB aren’t real anymore. Not in the way we knew them, anyway. Those people are gone, but we’re still here.”
As soon as the words were all out, I pulled her into a hug and she came easily, folding into me like she belonged there. My arms wrapped around her shoulders, holding her close as she curled against my chest.
I pressed a kiss into the top of her head, breathing in the faint scent of her shampoo and rain. Outside, the storm was still raging, but I was barely even aware of it.
I kept circling back to one thought over and over again: Emma had been right here the whole time. Every late-night message. Every joke. Every confession. Every time I’d needed someone andshe’dbeen there.Katehad been there.
She shifted slightly, her hands resting against my shirt. When she looked up at me again, her eyes were softer than I’d ever seen them and I lifted one hand to run the backs of my knuckles gently across her cheek.
