When I pulled back, I rested my forehead against hers. “I love you.”
“I love you too,” she replied.
Then she stepped away, and I reluctantly released her, watching as she drove away, not going back inside until her taillights had disappeared around the bend of my driveway.
The last thing I wanted to do was go back into that empty house, now filled with nothing but memories of us. Instead, I armed the house’s security system, got in my truck, and headed for Trey’s.
“You look like shit,” he said when I walked into his kitchen, where he was in the middle of making dinner.
All my older brother ever did was eat, work, and sleep. Every time I came over, he was either here or in his batcave.
“You need to get out more,” I quipped.
He held his hands up. “Not arguing with you there.”
Beelining for his fridge, I grabbed a beer, then walked around and dropped onto a stool. Twisting the cap off, I lifted the bottle to my lips and drank deeply, draining half of it in one go.
“Fuck, I needed that.”
“Rough day?”
“Sutton left,” I admitted.
“Like…for good?”
Hitching a shoulder in anI don’t knowgesture, I laid it all out for him. Her questions and concerns about Addie. Her insistence that I was willfully ignorant of the situation and Addie’s likely involvement because I was…what? Harboring feelings for her still? Hardly.
“I donotthink of Addie like that,” I told Trey.
“Of course not.”
His tone suggested he thought I was full of shit, and I glared at him. “You don’t believe me.”
“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” he said, his focus sticking to the stove in front of him, where he was sauteing vegetables in garlic and oil. Something was in the oven too. Salmon, if I had to guess based on the scent wafting through the air. “It’s that I can’t understand why you’re so adamant Addie has nothing to do with this. What are you clinging to? Why are you holding Addie on this pedestal? You got your girl, Lane. Sutton isyours. But you’re going to fucking lose her if you keep this shit up.”
I shifted back, the legs of the stool scraping against the floor, my head falling to the countertop with athunk.
He was right, of course. WhatwasI clinging to?
“Maybe,” I started, my words a bit muffled by the angle of my head, “I’m afraid.”
“Of what?” he asked.
Lifting my head, I said, “Of being wrong. Of having completely misread her and this entire situation.”
“There’s nothingwrongwith being wrong, Lane. It happens. Now that you’ve realized it, you can work on fixing it.”
“And how do you suggest I do that? How do we prove…anything? Actually, what are we even trying to prove?”
Trey grinned, like I’d just asked a question only he had the answer for, and he was going to deeply enjoy schooling me. Before he could, though, the oven timer went off, and he withdrew the fish, turned off the burner, and began plating everything.
“First, we eat. And then, we get to work.”
thirty-eight
. . .
Across the room,a phone buzzed on her desk. Not Addie’s, though. This was coming from the clone she’d made of Lane’s all those months ago when she’d got to visit him in the hospital. Though she’d been hoping for a vastly different outcome that day, she was glad she’d had the foresight to make the clone, because she never would’ve gotten another chance.
