His face changed. "What?"
"You've been waiting for it to fall apart since the day we started. You don't think you get to keep this." I was looking at him and seeing everything—the boy from the south side of the lake, the kid who watched rich families come and go every summer, the person who'd learned that good things were temporary because they always had been. "You don't think you get to keep me. So you're trying to control how you lose me."
The words landed. I saw them hit. Watched his expression go from confusion to something raw and exposed—the look of someone who'd been cut in a place they didn't know was unprotected.
"That's bullshit," he said.
"Is it?"
"I was the one who wanted to stay together at the lake." His voice was shaking. "You ended it. Not me. You."
"Liam—"
"I threw away my relationship with Emily. For you." His chest rising and falling too fast. "I broke into a building for you. I drove across town tonight to carry you off a couch."
Each word landed like a stone. Because they were true. Every one of them. He had chosen me. Again and again and again. Atcost. At risk. With everything to lose and nothing to gain except me.
"So don't tell me I've already decided this ends." His voice broke. "I've chosen you every single time. Every time."
The silence that followed was unbearable.
"And the one person in this room who keeps deciding it's over," he said. Quiet now. "Isn't me."
I couldn't breathe.
Because he was right. Every exit had been mine. Every time we got close to something real, I was the one who flinched. Who shut the door.
"An hour ago you were in my arms," Liam said. "Telling me I was the best thing that ever happened to you."
My shoulders tightened. The shame flooding back. Hot and total.
"Now there's something wrong with me?"
"I was drunk."
"You were honest."
"I was drunk, Liam."
"Those aren't different things and you know it."
I turned away. Walked to the window. Put my hand on the glass. The cold seeped into my palm—grounding, real, the only solid thing in a room that wasn't spinning.
What am I doing?
"That's what you do," he said behind me. "You let me in and then you shut the door. Every time. And I'm left standing trying to figure out which version is real."
"Both of them." Barely a whisper. "Both of them are real."
"Then stop choosing the one that pushes me away."
I closed my eyes. My reflection in the glass was a ghost—transparent, hollow. The version of me that existed at 4 AM in a dorm room with the person I wanted more than anything standing behind me, asking me to give up control.
And I couldn't do it.
The walls were already up. I could feel them—solid, familiar, the architecture of twenty years of training.Harringtons don't lose control. Harringtons don't break. Harringtons don't want things that could destroy the family name.
The drunk version of me had been free and said what he felt.
