I open my mouth and feel tears prick my eyes. I try to swallow them down, but it’s no use. “Going to need you to press the button on the invisible wall now,” I tell him in a small, cracking voice. “Because I was wrong, and I need to tell you I’m sorry.”
He huffs out a breath through his nostrils and looks at the water as his small black dog sniffs around the gray rocks lining the edge of the shore. “No.”
“No?”
“You do it. I don’t own the wall.”
“We both own the wall,” I say, crying around my words. “Both of us. If we want to talk to each other, we can. But it’s not just talking and being teeth-gratingly honest. It’s listening, too—and that’s partly where I screwed up.”
“Is it?”
I nod, swiping away tears, but they’re coming too fast. “If you don’t want to listen to me, then you don’t have to. And if I don’t want to listen to you, then I can be a fool and talk over you when you’re trying to tell me that you didn’t give Adrian that photo.”
“I tried to tell you,” he says in a soft, emphatic voice.
“I’m so sorry. He told me it was you, and I made connections that weren’t there. I jumped to conclusions. I stumbled over my own feet. Everything I knew was turned upside down in oneday’s time with my family, and it felt like nothing I knew was right, and … I just got scrambled.”
He exhales a long breath, jaw working to one side. I can’t tell if I’ve hurt him more or if he just can’t forgive me. That thought makes me feel empty and hopeless.
“Josie?”
“Yes?”
“Can I be teeth-gratingly honest with you?”
“Yes,” I say, bracing myself. “Please, Lucky. I wish you would.”
For better or worse, I would rather him be honest than not talk to me.
Bean sits near a dilapidated dock post as Lucky’s gaze shifts from the shoreline to my face. His eyes are glossy, and his brow lined and tense. “When I saw you in the car driving away from the bookshop that night with your family, I was already having a nervous breakdown that you might be leaving town—I didn’t know what was going to happen. My parents were furious about us taking the boat out so far to the island, and everything was completely chaotic, and all I wanted was for you to tell me everything was going to be okay. That’s all I wanted. But instead …”
“I raged out on you,” I say, slumping.
“In the heat of the moment, I didn’t fully grasp what you were going through with your father.”
“I don’t want to use him as an excuse. I don’t want anything to do with him right now. Maybe one day I’ll feel differently, but right now, I think he’s wasted too much of me and my mom’senergy. I wish I’d never bought into his lies, but I did. I bought into his, and I bought into Adrian’s, too.”
“Right, Adrian.” Lucky scratches his clenched jaw. “After our fight, well …Iknew I didn’t give Adrian that photo. And it made me mad that you’d listen to him, but okay. I can understand it, I guess. Maybe? The thing that really hurt me in my bones was that you didn’t trust me when I asked you to.” He makes a fist and taps his chest with his free hand. “I’m talking deep.”
“I am so sorry,” I whisper. “I’m ashamed.”
“Never,” he says, taking a step closer to duck his head and catch my gaze with his. “None of this is anyone’s fault. Okay, maybe your father can take some of the blame.”
“And Adrian.”
“And Adrian,” he agrees. “And mistakes were definitely made by several parties, myself included. But what I’m trying to say is that there’s room for a lot of things between us, but not shame.”
My heart lifts and catches in my throat. “What about forgiveness? Is there room for that?”
“You told me to trust you. That was the last thing you told me when you were leaving in the car that night with your mom.”
“I remember.”
“No one hurts me like you do.”
A knife-like pain stabs my heart. “I’ve never wanted to hurt anyone less.”
“Josie?”
