“She loves him.”
“I’m sure she does.”
“She was crying. She was terrified. She looked at me like I had answers that could keep her world from ending.”
Regan’s voice softened. “And you did.”
“I don’t want to be like her.”
“Georgia?”
“No.” The word scraped out of me. “Mandy.”
Regan went still on the other end.
The night air moved cold over my wet cheeks.
“I don’t want to become some villain in another woman’s love story,” I whispered. “I don’t want to be the girl who shows up and ruins everything because she thinks fate owes her a man. I don’t want to take what isn’t mine. I don’t want to be the ghost in someone else’s engagement.”
“Oh, Destiny.”
“I mean it.” My voice shook. “I’ve spent years trying not to become the worst version of the stories people told about my mother.”
“You are not Mandy.”
“But what if this is how it starts?” I asked. “Wanting what belongs to someone else. Telling yourself your love is bigger. Telling yourself destiny matters more than decency.”
Regan exhaled.
When she spoke again, her voice had changed.
Lower.
Rawer.
“What if I’m the villain?”
I froze.
“What?”
“What if I was the villain for keeping you apart?” she asked. “What if I looked at an eighteen-year-old girl, freshly minted and bleeding from every place life had cut her, and decided I knew better than fate? What if I thought I was saving you, and all I did was teach both of you how to suffer politely?”
My breath caught.
“Regan.”
“No. Listen to me.” Her voice trembled now, but there was steel inside it too. Always steel. “You were eighteen. Barely. You had just survived hell. How could I have known? How could I have looked at Dylan, a patched man with blood on his hands and want in his eyes, and said, yes, go ahead, take my girl’s heart? I couldn’t. I did what I thought a mother should do.”
“You were protecting me.”
“I was. And maybe I was wrong anyway.”
I pressed my fist against my mouth.
Lily stood beside me silently, close enough that her shoulder touched mine.
“What if Dylan is the villain?” Regan said.
