“You ambushed me.”
“I informed you of a situation.”
“By walking me into her flower shop with no warning?”
Dean shrugs and drops onto my couch like he owns the place. Which, in brother terms, he kind of does. “You knew she was in town.”
“Knowing and seeing are different things.”
“Are they?” He cracks open a beer and hands me one. “Because you’ve known for months and you’ve been hiding on the other side of the country writing sad songs about it.”
“They’re not all sad.”
“Name one happy song you’ve written in the past year.”
I open my mouth, close it, and take a long drink of beer instead of answering.
Dean grunts. It’s his version of “I told you so.”
We sit in silence for a while, watching the sun sink toward the ocean through the big windows. This is what I missed about Dean—he doesn’t need to fill every moment with words.Our dad was the same way. Comfortable in silence. Present without being pushy.
“She didn’t recognize me,” I finally say. “Back in the summer. On the beach.”
Dean’s eyebrows rise slightly. “How do you know?”
“Because of the way she looked at me today. Like she was seeing me for the first time.” I peel the label off my beer bottle, shredding it into little strips. “All this time I thought she saw me that night and just...didn’t care enough to talk. But that look in the shop? That was surprise. That was a woman who had no idea I’d been twenty feet away from her in the dark.”
“How does that feel?”
“Terrible.” I laugh, but there’s no humor in it. “It means she wasn’t ignoring me. It means she looked right at me, and her brain didn’t even register my face. Like I’ve been erased from her memory completely.”
“Or,” Dean says slowly, “it means she’s spent ten years training herself not to think about you. And she did such a good job that her own mind protected her from seeing what was right in front of her.”
I stare at him. “When did you get philosophical?”
“Jo makes me read romance novels.”
“Seriously?”
“Book club homework.” He takes a drink, stares at the ocean for a long time. Then, without looking at me: “You ever think maybe she didn’t forget you?”
“She looked right at me, Dean. Right at me.”
He shrugs. One shoulder. The way Dad used to when he was about to say something that would rearrange your entire understanding of a situation. “People don’t train themselves to forget things that don’t matter.”
He lets that sit. Doesn’t explain it. Doesn’t soften it. Just takes another drink and watches the waves like he’s said his piece and the rest is my problem.
Which it is.
Because what he’s really saying—what Dean Beckett would never actually spell out because he’d rather chew glass than have an emotional conversation—is that maybe she didn’t look through me. Maybe she looked so hard at not-me for so long that her own mind did the rest.
I don’t know what to do with that.
“She left me twice, Dean.”
“I know.”
“She never explained why. Just...gone. Bothtimes. I woke up, and she’d vanished like I dreamed her.”
