“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing.” The word breaks out of me.
“Nothing?” She sounds incredulous. “You fall in love for the first time, and you’ll do nothing?”
“What can I do?” I retort, frustrated. “I can’t possibly go tell her, hey, I’m in love, wanna fuck?”
“Ugh!” Daisy’s disdain comes through, loud and clear. “You don’t have to be crude about it.”
“What can I offer her?” I snap. “I can’t say let’s get married and have babies.”
Daisy doesn’t respond right away. I hear her swallow. “Do you…uh…want to do that? Get married to her and have babies?”
I don’t reply. The words won’t come—not when I know some dreams are never meant to survive reality.
Yes, I want it all with Enya. I want the life I never thought I’d have—the one I never believed was possible for a man like me. Falling in love with her means wanting everything my job taught me to avoid—permanence, truth, vulnerability. And thanks to that effective training, I have lost the best thing in my life.
“Does she know how you feel?” my sister muses.
“She knows what I did, and I think that has more believability than my fucking feelings, don’t you think?”
Silence stretches for several long seconds.
Then Daisy says, “Dom…it might be time.”
“For what?”
“To quit,” she says.
The shock makes us both reel.
She’s never said this to me. Not once. No matter how dangerous the situation, not even after I was shot in Paris. But she’s saying it now. I’m thinking it now.
What does that mean?
“Look, Dom, you’re good at what you do, but it might be time to leave the job before it eats you alive. You’ve sounded off for months…since…Paris.”
She’s not wrong.
I let out a long exhale. “Do you know where I am right now?”
“Where?”
“Outside her place. She’s a florist, and she has an apartment above her shop. I’ve been here for a couple of hours.”
A laugh bursts out of my sister. “The cool Dominic Delacour is sitting in a car outside his woman’s house like a sad, morally conflicted stalker—no offense.”
“Some offense.”
“But true,” she insists. “You got shot last year. You nearly died in Paris, and you didn’t even take a break. You just kept running as if nothing happened.”
At her words, my shoulder aches as if it remembers.
“You deserve a life that doesn’t make you feel like you’re hurting people,” my sister continues. “You can’t just live as a legend, Dom, you deserve something real.”
I look up at the soft light glowing from Enya’s apartment window.
Real….
