I pressed both palms against the edge of the sink and lowered my head, breathing the way Lily had taught anxious patients to breathe when panic tried to climb out of their throats.
In through the nose.
Hold.
Out through the mouth.
Again.
Again.
It did not help.
Because breathing did not fix the fact that Dylan Degan had come back into my life with bullets in his body and my name on his lips.
Breathing did not fix Georgia.
Georgia with her blonde hair, terrified eyes, cardigan buttoned wrong, and that ring on her finger.
His ring.
His promise.
The life he had apparently chosen while I was out there building mine.
I stared at myself until the girl in the mirror blurred.
“You are not Mandy,” I whispered.
The words sounded thin in the empty locker room.
I said them again anyway.
“You are not Mandy.”
I was not going to become the woman in someone else’s love story who mistook longing for permission. I was not going to take a man because I had loved him first. I was not going to romanticize pain until it justified cruelty.
Georgia loved him.
Georgia had the ring.
Georgia had the right to sit beside his bed and cry over him.
Not me.
I had the past.
That was all.
A graveyard kiss.
A bracelet.
A sidewalk rescue.
A name breathed through blood loss.
A collection of almosts so bright and painful they had tricked my heart into thinking they were vows.
