Becausehepossessed a Goode tulip from the start. Instead, I was lured closer tohim.
Maybe… it’s my heart I can’t trust.
We’ve never known what would happen if a tulip was stolen, held,hidden, by someone who wasn’t a Goode. We’ve never known what would happen tousif we fell in love with someone who kept a tulip secreted away.
And now.
I was afraid that whatever Oak felt for me… was a lie.
But… what if my heart is the one in danger?
My heart is the one that felt what it shouldn’t.
Love is a mistress who will clench her fist around your heart until you bleed.
Mom warned us. But she never told us what might happen if someone else kept a tulip pressed inside the pages of a book and we let our hearts spill into theirs.
I’m starting to doubt everything.
My eyes begin to water, and the inside of the truck feels too hot. Too suffocating.
This thing I feel for Oak, this need, this longing I’ve felt for him from the start—a feeling I couldn’t quite pinpoint—was never real at all. It was a feeling that came on much too fast, burrowing under my skin, making it impossible to forget him.
I felt fascinated by him. Hypnotized. Entranced. Obsessed with finishing the sketch. With seeing him again.
I shake my head, the realization slamming against my skull.
It was the tulip—the one he kept hidden. Safe and preserved.
I never really loved him.
Ever.
I exhale, and it feels like a storm, a hurricane across a sea that will destroy everything in its path, and I snap my gaze away from him.
My heart was a lie, everything I felt… was a lie.
I clench down on the tulip, crushing it in my fist.
“Lark,” he says again. But I shrink away.
There’s nothing he can say. No words to put this right. Everything I’ve felt wasn’t real. Whether he meant to keep this from me or not. It doesn’t matter.
Everything he stirred up inside me only moments ago, with his mouth on mine,wasn’t real.
It was the tulip.
I reach for the door handle.
“Wait…,” he says. “Please… I didn’t know. It’s just a flower. It doesn’t mean anything.”
I can see the guilt, the regret, behind his eyes. While the sting of tears rises in mine. “It means everything.”
Our entire lives, others have been drawn to Archer and me like insects to lamplight. Dizzy and delirious. But I never considered what would happen if someone else possessed a tulip and I fell under the same spell.
I shake my head, the tulip still in my fist. “Like you said before. It was only a summer thing. And we can’t be sure if any of it was real. If you and I… were ever real.” I open the truck door and slide down to the pavement, the rain falling gently. I let myself look back at him. “Will you tell my brother that I’m okay? Tell him I left on the train.”
Oak nods, and we stare at each other one last time.
