I took a step closer. Tyler was shaking.
“Tell me,” I said, “what my mother did.”
He inhaled. He parted his lips to speak, but nothing came out. I took another step closer anyway.
“She made you go, didn’t she? After the funeral?”
He could barely look at me. Heat flew through my body.
“Did you tell her no?”
“I tried, Katie. I...”
“Tried?Tried! I waited for you for a fucking year! I checked the mailbox twenty times a day for a year! I saw your face everywhere! In strangers—in laundromats, in libraries. I was in love with you, and you knew it! And you didn’t have the decency to tell me goodbye!? I had to write a thousand stories in my head, explaining why you left! Why didn’t you explain it to me? Why didn’t you fight for me!?”
“She didn’t give me a choice! It wasn’t that simple! I didn’t want to take another child from her!”
“Were you ever going to tell me? Were you ever going to tell me that my fucking mother did this!?”
“No! That was the whole point! She wanted me to break your heart! She knew you would be like this—that you wouldn’t let me go! That was the deal! She wanted you to hate me! She wanted it to be all my fault!”
Everything was spinning. The past eight years, upside down. Tyler, a moron. My mother, the real villain. All of it, absolutely ridiculous. All of it, making perfect sense. Tyler, frozen at Mikey’s funeral, promising to meet me. Tyler, disappearing off the face of the earth. My mother, digging in her heels. My father, receding into nothing. My heartbreak, manufactured. My armor, a by-product. My whole life, somebody else’s handiwork. Somebody else’s payback.
I was a pawn, and everyone knew it but me.
“You could’ve told me,” I said. “You could’ve told me then, and you certainly could’ve told me this summer. You let me walk into this. We could’ve handled this, we—”
“I tried to tell you! I tried to tell you at the very beginning! You wouldn’t let me speak! You didn’t want to talk about Mikey! You didn’t want to talk about the past! You wanted to talk about Helen Hoang and Beverly Jenkins and I don’t even fucking know! You didn’t want to talk about what happened between us!”
“That was before you started fucking me! That was before you pulled me out of whatever the hell I was doing with Danny! No shit, I didn’t want to talk about my dead fucking brother! No shit, I didn’t want to talk about the way you humiliated me when I was a teenager! But if you knew, Tyler, you could’ve explained my pain away. You could’ve at least made it all make sense for me. Why didn’t you just tell me?”
He looked at me. It was that other look of his. The hospital. The pharmacy. And right now. The look of the love of my life, showing me who he really was.
“Because I’m a trope,” he said. “I’m a living, breathing trope. Because I wanted you, and I wanted a second chance at you, and I wanted to protect you, and I wanted to do it all in some parallel universe where I was a good person. Where I’d never broken your heart. Where I was never the kind of guy who had to make this sort of deal in the first place. I wanted to be somebody else. I wanted to be the kind of man who deserved you. I wanted a clean slate.”
I inhaled. I put my arms around him. I tried to slow the scene down.
“We can still have that,” I said. “We could start over. Just you and me. I love you. I’m always going to love you. I know who you really are. You’re good. I promise you, Tyler. You’re good.”
He shook his head and that was it.
The light in my heart went out.
I dropped my hands and walked toward the door.
“Do you know what she said to me?” I turned to face him one last time. “The day Mikey died? She said that her life was over. That she had no reason to go on. So if you’re wondering what she would’ve lost when you broke my heart into a million pieces, the answer is nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
Irrationally Time-Sensitive Inn Renovation
The Inn was nearly finished. It didn’t matter. It was never about the Inn. Never, in the history of a love story, has it ever been about the Inn.
78
Katie
I found myself at the edge of Meredith’s private drive, clutching my phone, listening to it ring. My hand was hot. The rest of my body, ice cold.
“Hello? Katie?”
