"She's not going to forgive either of us," I said.
"Not yet," he said, looking at her window for a long moment. "I think she's lying in that room right now trying to convince herself she's done with all of it and failing."
I thought about the café. Her smile through the window. The way it hit me in the chest from across a parking lot.
"Beckett," I said, but it wasn’t a question.
"He's in."
I looked at him. "In what?"
"He's been in since the beginning," Theo said.
I sat with that, watching him closely. And then I realized that this asshole was out here because he’s been watching her too. I don’t know why I didn’t bother to see if I was the only one.
Then it hits me that the three men who had been circling the same girl from different directions had arrived at the same point.
The war between them and me felt very far away in that moment.
Not forgotten — I don't forget things, I'm not built for forgetting things — but irrelevant in the way things become irrelevant when something larger has swallowed them whole. We had put each other in hospital beds and stolen from each other and lied to each other and run an operation together and destroyed it together. None of that — none of it — was larger than the fact that we had both lost the same girl to our own stupidity and were sitting in a parking lot at midnight because neither of us could stay away.
"She gets to choose," I said.
He looked at me.
"She doesn't get to walk away with no solution," I said. "But she gets to choose. That's the condition."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Agreed," he said. "She already knows everything."
"Then she chooses with full knowledge." I looked at him. "No more lying. No more managing what she knows. Everything is on the table, and she decides what she does with it."
Theo looked at Adela's window one more time.
"Agreed," he said again.
He got back in his car.
I sat in the lot for another hour.
I thought about it for two years. About an innocent girl in a blue dress two years ago, and how she packed a suitcase just for me. She did that for me. And I fucked it all up.
I thought about Theo and his chances. And Beckett’s.
What are mine?
I had her and fucked it all up.
I started my car and went home.
I waited three more weeks.
Now she's in my lake house.
I give her the night.
That's not nothing for me. Giving her anything — time, space, silence, restraint of staying on the other side of a locked door when every instinct I have is telling me to go back in there — is not nothing.
