“Delilah.” I reach across the table and take her hands. She goes still, but she doesn’t pull away. “You want to know what really kept me in Twin Waves? When we were seventeen?”
She nods.
“My dad was sick. Sicker than anyone knew. He made me promise not to tell people how bad it was—he didn’t want to be the guy everyone pitied at the grocery store.” Levi’s jaw tightens. “Every open mic, every demo I recorded, every time someone said ‘you should get out there, send your stuff to alabel,’ I couldn’t. Because my father was dying, and he’d already lost one person who was supposed to love him enough to stay. I wasn’t going to be the second.”
Her face crumples. “Levi?—”
“Your mom didn’t know. Nobody knew. Dad didn’t want people treating him differently.” I squeeze her hands. “When you came back at twenty-seven, Dad had just died. I was grieving and lost and trying to figure out who I was without him. And then you showed up, and it was like?—”
“Like what?”
“Like the universe was finally giving me something good.” I shake my head. “I wasn’t staying for you, Delilah. I was staying because I didn’t have anywhere else to go. You were the first thing that made me want to stay for the right reasons.”
She’s crying now. Really crying. Michelle has completely abandoned any pretense of not watching, and I don’t even care.
“But you said you couldn’t leave while you had me?—”
“Because I didn’twantto. Not because you were holding me back.” I lift her hand and press my lips to her knuckles. Just briefly. Just enough. “You were the reason I started writing again after Dad died. You were the reason I had something to say. And yeah,when you left, I poured all that heartbreak into music. But I would’ve traded every single song to have you stay.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I mean every word.”
We sit there in the morning light, hands intertwined, twenty years of misunderstanding finally crumbling between us.
“There’s more in the box,” she finally says. “A tape. You wrote me a song when we were seventeen. I never heard it.”
I’d forgotten about the tape. Or maybe I’d made myself forget, like everything else.
“Do you have something to play it on?”
“My mom has an old boom box.” Delilah looks down at our hands. “I want to listen to it with you. Tonight. After I close the shop.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Seven o’clock? Mom’s house?”
“I’ll be there,” I say again, because apparently I’ve lost the ability to say anything else.
She squeezes my hands once, then lets go. “I have to open the shop.”
“I know.”
“We’ll talk moretonight.”
“Yeah.”
She gathers the box—carefully, like it’s precious now instead of dangerous—and stands, pauses, and looks back at me.
“Levi?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry. For all of it. For running. For not telling you why. For everything.”
“I know,” I say. “We’ll figure it out.”
She nods once, then walks out. The bell chimes behind her.
