Candice, Hailey, Folly, and Harry spend the day backstage with us before the first Chicago show. Harry and Misha gossip the whole time, and Hailey gets the Etta Girls to sign her forehead. They leave directly after the performance and are all sound asleep by the time Liam and I make it back to Lincoln Park around one in the morning.
He and I crawl close under the floral sheets and open the floodgates, at long last.
“Do you want to start?” he asks.
I nod. “I’m not sure where to.”
Memories of that day are flying through my brain Speed Racer style. I hardly recall the things we said. Only how I’d felt during, and after.
He waits.
“You broke my trust,” I say. “And I trusted you so deeply, Liam. I trusted you, knowing you’d only ever been casual with other girls. I had faith that you’d want me just the same once you had money. I shared my deepest insecurities with you because you’d done the same with me. You never gave me a single reason to doubt you. So I didn’t. I never, ever doubted you. And I guess it just really hurt me that in the end, the one thing I shouldn’t have trusted you with was my songs. Especially because the songs were the start of allof it,” I whisper softly, voice catching. “Part of the pact that made us friends in the first place. All the other pieces of trust came later. But you broke the first piece.”
He nods against the pillow. “For breaking your trust, Paige, I am so,sosorry. I couldn’t grasp how you felt at the time, or maybe I just didn’t want to, but I get it now. And I’m so incredibly sorry.”
“There’s something I didn’t tell you back then,” I go on.
“Okay,” he says, eyes nervous.
“When I was a senior in high school, I wrote this poem about my mom leaving our family that won an award, anonymously. I was proud of myself. But I was also young, and so confused by my own feelings, and I just… didn’t want any of my classmates knowing how abandoned and tossed aside I’d felt by my own mother. The only person I told about the poem and award was Maisy.”
His mouth pinches.
“She was on the newspaper committee. She announced it in print and shared the poem beneath it. When I confronted her about it, she said I needed help ripping off the Band-Aid. I know what you did isn’t the same as publicly sharing my work without my permission, but—”
“It still triggered you,” Liam says, thumb skimming my cheek. “I understand why. You don’t have to qualify it.”
I suck in my bottom lip. “I forgave Maisy for that. Because she was my best friend, and I loved her, and she promised me she did it because she was proud of me. But then she betrayed me a second time by lying to me about—about you.”
His eyes fall closed in understanding. “I see. You couldn’t forgive me because you didn’t want to give me a second chance to betray you.”
Or to leave my life after you did it.
I pull against Liam’s body, my nose by his shoulder. “What I’m trying to say is there was a lot going on in my head that day you weren’t exactly privy to. I was shutting down. I didn’t give you thespace or time you deserved, you’dearned, to explain yourself. I regret that, especially knowing how much you’d been hurting then too. And—you’re right, Liam.” I inhale, then shudder out a sigh. “It’s time I said thank you.”
Thank you.
I’d told Candice last night I didn’t have any anger left for Liam. As soon as I realized the last of it had evaporated, I knew it was time for these words.
“Don’t thank me, Paige,” Liam says. “You would have gotten there on your own eventually, and without me violating your trust.”
“Iwouldn’thave. I needed to be pushed.” I rest my forehead on his shoulder, swallowing back tears. “I can admit that. Admit that I needed that. I used to get so sick of other people thinking they knew what was better for me than I knew. But I was content not to challenge myself and that was the biggest shame of all.”
We’re quiet, heads lost in the past.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “Still, and anyway, and always. I am so sorry.”
I don’t want Liam to regret it. But hearing him apologize heals something inside me I hadn’t even known was still broken. And so, I have to assume that me expressing my gratitude for what it eventually meant to me healed the same broken thing for him.
“Ask me how in love today,” I say.
His voice is fathomless when he asks it. “How in love?”
“One hundred percent.”
His mouth lands on mine. We trade kisses that are salt tinged, messy, and slow.
Between them, he says, “I love you, too, Paige. Invariably. I have loved you like you were beside me, even when you weren’t.”
