Chrissy studies me for a moment, far too perceptive for my liking. “You love him.”
It isn’t a question.
So I don’t treat it as one.
“Yup.” I sigh. “Both of them.”
She nods like she expected nothing else and silence falls as I watch a marshmallow slowly melt against the side of my mug.
Then she sighs. “Okay. Here’s the thing. I know you’re sad. And mad. And very likely prepared to swear off men for all eternity…or at least to commit a few years to a nunnery?—”
“I’m not?—”
“You are,” she says.
I press my lips together. Because…maybe just a little bit.
She grins but it’s only a flash of a smile before she sobers. “I know things are shit right now.” She finishes off her hot chocolate, puts her cup on the side table. “But I have a plan to cheer you up.”
“I don’t need?—”
“You need this one.” She takes my mug from me, sets it beside hers on the nightstand.
“Why’s that?”
“Because it might be the most important plan of your life.”
I close my eyes, exhale, open them. “What’s your plan exactly?” I whisper.
“To remind you that you still have a whole life waiting for you.”
I breathe, slow and steady.
Because that’s the problem, isn’t it?
Ihada life waiting for me—at the end of a trans-Atlantic flight.
Then somehow in the middle of making lunches and reading bedtime stories and chasing demon cats and sewing blankets and falling asleep beside a man who looked at me like I was everything he wanted…everything changed.
I began wanting something else.
Something different.
Somethingmore.
And now I don’t know which future belongs to me anymore.
Chrissy must see some of that on my face because her voice gentles. “It’s okay to be heartbroken, Finn.”
I blink hard.
“It’s also okay,” she says, “to still want the things you wanted before them.”
“What if…what if I don’t knowwhatI want anymore?”
Her smile turns soft. “Then you take your time figuring it out.”
She pulls me into a hug, orders me to get some sleep—we’ll see how that goes—and snags the mugs. Then she’s slipping out of my room as quietly as she walked in.
