I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
My mouth wouldn’t work.
The machine breathed for me, indifferent to confession.
“I got the clean air,” she whispered. “I got the life. The school. The friends. The future. I got everything you thought you were giving me by staying away.”
Good, I thought.
Good.
That was the point.
“But I didn’t need you gone forever.”
The dark around me shuddered.
Her forehead rested near my hand. I felt the warmth. Or imagined it. Her tears maybe. Her breath. The impossible proof that she was not a dying dream but a woman sitting beside my bed after I had put a ring on someone else.
“I never stopped loving you,” she whispered.
If I had been alive enough, that would have killed me.
I floated there, trapped under sedation and grief, while the woman I had loved from a graveyard to a gunshot told me the truth I had spent years trying not to earn.
“I love you.”
Present tense.
Cruel tense.
Holy tense.
No.
No, Beautiful.
Don’t do that.
Don’t love me now.
Don’t love me with Georgia’s ring in the world and my blood still wet in your memory. Don’t make me the man who wakes up and ruins everyone. Don’t make me choose after I already chose wrong.
But some rotten, selfish, honest part of me curled around her words like they were the only warmth left in the universe.
Stay, she told me.
Not for me.
Then for Georgia.
Nate.
Callum.
The life I had built.
