“Were you and Caitlin serious?”
I nodded, still not looking at her. “Yeah. We’d been together a couple of years. Since high school. We always just figured… you know. We’d end up together. We thought we had all the time in the world, so what was the rush?”
“I’m so sorry, Austin. For everything you lost. If you ever need to talk about it… or if you don’t. Whatever you need. I’m here for you.”
“Thank you, sweetness.” Her support and her gentle strength were the final push I needed to tell her the rest. I met her gaze. “That’s what the argument with Eli and Braden was about. At the brewpub.”
Confusion clouded her eyes.
“They were worried.” The words came out slowly, reluctantly, each one a stone in my mouth. “They think you look like her. Like Caitlin.”
I saw it then. The subtle shift. The way her eyes went from pure empathy to something else. Uncertainty. A flicker of doubt.
“Blonde, blue eyes. Similar personality. They were worried about what I was doing.”
I rushed on, desperate to fix it, to explain before the doubt could take root. “Iris, I told them they were wrong. I told them in no uncertain terms that I never once compared you two. That I care about you. For who you are. The sunny, noisy, amazing woman who has completely turned my life upside down.”
I reached for her and pulled her tightly against my chest as if I could physically shield her from the poison of the thought I had just planted. I wanted her to feel my sincerity, to believe me. I had just taken an enormous leap of faith, sharing the source of my deepest pain.
The tragedy that had defined my entire adult existence.
And in the same breath—in an attempt to be honest—I had handed her a perfectly valid reason to doubt everything.
To doubt me.
To doubt us.
A frigid, sinking sensation washed over me as I held her. I had finally opened the door to that bolted room in my mind, hoping to let in the light. I had an awful feeling that in doing so, I might have just plunged us both into a whole new kind of darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Five
IRIS
At last,the Sand Dollar Suite was starting to look like a suite. One that a guest might enjoy staying in. The new drywall was up and textured, waiting for its first coat of primer. The elegant lines of the future en-suite bathroom were framed in, a promise of claw-foot tubs and gleaming tile. Sunlight, no longer choked by dust, streamed through the newly installed hurricane-resistant windows and illuminated the space with a clean, hopeful light. A week ago, this progress would have filled me with a giddy, triumphant joy.
Today, I was just numb.
I stood in the center of the room, but my mind was a million miles away. In the tiny cabin ofLine Dancer, listening to the story that had reshaped my entire understanding of the man next door.
Three days had passed since Austin laid his soul bare. Three days where he had been… carefully tender. We’d talked about it more, of course, in quiet, halting conversations that were both heavy and hopeful. This wasn’t something to be solved in a single night. It was a wound that would need time, patience, and air to heal. So he'd show up at my porch in the evenings, his presence a quiet promise. We’d share a meal, the conversation carefully skirting the rawest edges of what he had exposed, giving us both room to breathe. He’d hold me secure in his arms while we watched the sun set into the distant horizon.
And every time he looked at me, every time he touched me, my heart would break a little. For the twenty-one-year-old boy who had survived when his world had been ripped apart. For the thirty-four-year-old man who was still paying the price. My love for him, a feeling I could no longer deny, was a fierce, protective ache in my chest.
But beneath the love, beneath the profound empathy, a new and insidious fear had taken root. A cold, slick tendril of doubt had wrapped itself around my heart.
“They think you look like her. Like Caitlin.”
I believed him. That was the honest, terrible truth. I believed with every fiber of my being that when Austin looked at me, he saw me. I believed he thought his feelings were genuine. That his desire was for Iris Holloway, the chaotic, pastry-peddling woman who had blown into his life. I didn’t think for a second that he was consciously deceiving me.
But what if he was deceiving himself?
That question was the poison that seeped into still moments, the one that cast a long shadow over the warmth of his body next to mine in the dark. What if, after thirteen years of lonely, tortured grief, his wounded heart had simply seen a ghost and latched on? What if this intense connection we shared wasn’t a new beginning for us, but just his subconscious attempt to write a happier ending to the saddest story I had ever heard?
The thought made me feel hollow. It cheapened everything we had built, and the knot in my stomach tightened. I couldn’t untangle it on my own. I needed another sounding board besides Austin. And I couldn’t talk to Liv, as much as I’d come to value her friendship. This was a Coleridge issue. A deep, complicated, family-sized wound.
There was only one person who knew him, loved him, and had welcomed me with an open heart.
I pulled out my phone, my thumb hovering over Brenna’s contact. She had said the story was Austin’s to tell me, and he had. But now I was left with the reaction. The fear and doubt were a living thing inside me, and if I didn’t find some perspective, they might eat me alive. I typed out a message, my words clumsy and inadequate.
