Hate that my heart is doing this.
No.
I straighten, forcing steel back into my spine. This doesn’t mean anything. It can’t mean anything. People cling to memories all the time. Regret has a way of masquerading as devotion.
He hurt me.
He walked away.
He shattered me—and no amount of charcoal and shadow rewrites that truth.
I step back from the easel, dragging my gaze away as if it’s a living thing with claws in my skin.
It means nothing, I tell myself again.
But the echo in the room doesn’t believe me.
“You weren’t supposed to see that.”
His voice comes from the doorway.
I turn sharply.
Sebastian stands there barefoot, shirt unbuttoned, hair still tousled from sleep. He looks softer like this—unguarded in a way that makes my chest tighten—but his eyes give him away. They flick to the easel, tense, as if he’s bracing for impact. As if he expects me to tear the painting down and walk out with it in flames behind me.
I swallow. Hard.
“You painted me?” I ask, even though the answer is right there, staring back at us.
“I tried to forget you,” he says quietly. “This was the closest I got.”
My heart stumbles. Actually stumbles. I feel it in my throat, in my palms, in the way my breath turns uneven. I shove the reaction down ruthlessly.
“It doesn’t change anything,” I murmur.
“No,” he says. “But it should.”
He moves closer, slow, careful, like I’m something wild and wounded that might lash out if he makes the wrong move. The distance between us shrinks until I can smell cologne and clean skin and something unmistakably him.
“Sienna,” he says, voice low, rough around the edges. “I was a coward. That night we met…I wasn’t ready for something real. And you terrified me.”
My jaw tightens. Anger rises fast, sharp, familiar.
“You used me.”
“I did.” He doesn’t look away. Doesn’t flinch. “And I’m sorry.”
The word lands harder than any excuse could have.
Sorry.
I laugh softly, bitter. “That’s it? Five years of silence, humiliation, rebuilding myself from ash, and you’re sorry?”
“I know it’s not enough,” he says immediately. “I know it doesn’t fix what I broke. But I need you to know it wasn’t nothing. You were never nothing to me.”
I shake my head, stepping back, putting space between us before my resolve cracks. “You don’t get to rewrite history because you regret it now.”
“I’m not trying to rewrite it,” he says. “I’m trying to face it.”
