I opened my mouth, but no words came. It felt like I’d just been punched in the throat.
She seemed to gain power from my silence.
Her face twisted in pain, “I hated you, Grey. I truly hated you. You had no right. No right to take everything from me and say all that you did when everything we had was so empty. I was shattered when you left me. Is that what you wanted to hear? I was content on starting over and forgetting the past, but that’s the truth Grey. I hated you and the fact that you could say you loved me so often but then just forget about me and leave. What was I supposed to think?” She snapped.
I was stunned. I felt like I’d been slashed in the gut.
“I never. Julianna. You have got to believe me. I never in a million years would have sent that to you. I just asked you to move with me! I was in love with you!”
She stared at me blankly. She was done, and I felt helpless, but I couldn’t stop trying.
“I left so many messages your phone was full! I couldn’t leave anymore. I tried like hell to contact you and got nothing back. You just cut me out and left me high and dry. I went to Texas alone ready to murder someone out on the ice because I was so damn depressed.”
She covered her mouth with her hand, still staring blankly in front of her.
I reached for her hand and she flinched. That hurt.
“Babe-” I cut myself off. It felt so natural to call her that, it just slipped out. “Sorry.” I looked down at her retreating into her thoughts.
“Please, Jules. Ask Paige. She tried like hell to contact you too.”
I started to walk away, but I couldn’t leave her there in the kitchen staring like that.
“Jules, are you okay? I didn’t want-”
Canyon came running down then, and she ran her hands through her hair and gave me a tight-lipped fake smile like the ones she used to give her grandparents. It hurt like hell knowing that she felt the need to put up a front and be fake with me. We were never fake with each other before.
We bared our souls to each other.
How had everything gone so horrendously wrong for us?
“Goodbye, Grey,” she told me firmly.
The finality of her statement caused panic to course through me.
Chapter Twenty-five: Jules- 9 years ago
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Panic welled inside my chest like I'd never experienced before.
I sat there staring at myself in the bathroom mirror. It couldn’t be true. It just simply could not.
Looking back at me was a shell of who I used to be. Dark bags under my eyes, hair that needed attention stat, and ribs showing because I’d decided coffee and alcohol would be great staples for a diet. Forget working out or skating. Everything I used to do reminded me of him. I had to avoid it all. Except avoiding it all made me look and feel like absolute shit.
There was no way what I saw could be true.
What I saw came with “a glow,” and instead, it looked like someone stole any light I once had.
My vision blurred then from the tears that immediately came. I cried so hard my body was shaking.
This was not how it was supposed to go. I was supposed to be in Texas with Greyson. Not stuck at one of my grandparents’ houses and now crying and having absolutely no one to talk to.
How did Greyson just turn it off? How was he so fine? I streamed his first game tonight and it was torturous. He was playing better than he’d ever before. He looked like he was moving twice as fast as everyone else on the ice.
It was actually surreal. I’d been at almost every one of his important games since high school, and now he was making his AHL debut, a sure highlight in his life… while I was probably at my lowest.
Watching him celebrate with him teammates on my computer screen while I held a pregnancy test cemented that he was in an entirely different world than me now, and that realization made me cry the hardest.
