“As silly as it sounds, aspatheticas it sounds, I think a part of me just kept looking for the boy next door.”
“Detective Williams,” Winnie expounded.
Eve nodded.
“Before I left, we were best friends with just a pure, innocent friendship. And yet I think Darius somehow became my standard for everything.” It was true, Eve realized. Now more than ever. Sure, she’d had her first kiss. Her first time. Her first boyfriend in name and then her first breakup. She had experienced different dates and men and had tried her best to…care. But none of them had stuck. Not like the boy next door had. “I had a coworker who was a little too invested in my lack of love life and would try every day to sell me on the ideal of true love and soul mates. One day she was really, really insistent on me putting myself out there so I’d find a half.”
“Find a half,” Winnie repeated.
“Everyone is out there in the world looking for their other half, so when they find them they can finally feel whole,” Eve said. “She said no matter how hard I was faking it, no one can be happy as a half.”
Eve raised her hand to stop whatever feelings Winnie might have had about that.
“I don’t think that’s true,” Eve added quickly. “I think people can be whole all by themselves, and if they want to be with someone, that someone can add on to their lives and be just as meaningful—”
Winnie was quick. “But?” she ventured.
Eve knew she should have felt embarrassed or shy or something at what she said next. She didn’t, though.
“Since the days when Darius let me in through his bedroom window as kids, I’ve never been able to move on from him.” No heat ran up her neck or pooled in her cheeks. No warmth surrounded her heart or flooded her belly. She felt completely unchanged. What she was saying was just a fact. “And I know it’s wild to say that some boy I knew as a kid—the same boy I didn’t see for over twenty years—completely changed me, but he did. Ithink that’s why I’ve never really settled, at least when it comes to relationships. Part of me just…”
Eve tilted her head to side, as if movement would make it easier to find the right words.
She wasn’t sure if it worked.
She simply said what she now knew as true.
“Part of me just never forgot that window. Never forgot the boy sitting inside that room.” Eve ran a thumb across the side of her hand. The one she had gotten at the warehouse all those years ago. Their first matching scar. She lowered her voice, tired for the woman who had gone on those dates, trying to figure out why she couldn’t make her heart move at all. Trying to find her other half but eventually giving up when she couldn’t.
Now Eve understood why it had never worked.
Why it never would.
It was such a jolting revelation, and yet it didn’t really feel like anything all that new.
Eve looked at Winnie and told her straight and true.
“I’ve never been able to find my other half out there because I’ve never been a half myself. Not since I met Darius. Without trying to, without meaning to, and I guess without me realizing it either,hemade me whole.”
That was the long and short of it.
The damn ridiculous truth.
Eve had grown up loving Darius Williams without reservation, without any doubt and without knowing it. And after seeing him again on the county road, her wearing a wedding dress and him wearing a badge, that love had stretched its legs and decided to walk somewhere it hadn’t yet walked before.
“I guess I’m in love with him,” Eve admitted. She nodded once to herself to confirm it. “And I suppose I always have been. Maybe that’s why I never noticed. Like one day you open yourcloset and all your clothes are blue. You never realized it was your favorite color, but the evidence sure is clear once you look close enough.”
Eve watched as the younger girl’s gaze widened.
She couldn’t help but laugh a little.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to have such a personal epiphany right in front of you,” she said. “Probably not what you expected to hear.”
Despite the potential awkwardness, Winnie collected herself well. She showed a smile that felt as genuine as every smile Eve had seen the girl make since they had met.
“I’ll take a beautiful epiphany over drama-filled gossip any day, so don’t worry. I’m actually grateful you told me. I feel honored.” Her smile grew until her eyes wrinkled a little. Eve mimicked the growth. Just as she let it drop as Winnie’s started to fade.
“Are you going to tell Darius?” she asked.
