Whatever Finn trusted me with in that parking lot—his pain raw in his eyes, his voice honest for the first time since I've known him—it's his. Not mine to spend. Not even on my best friend. Not even to explain the guilt that has been pressing on my lungs since he drove away yesterday afternoon.
"I think I went too far." It comes out before I've organized it, heavy and plain. "This weekend. I was cruel, Annie. And he didn't deserve it."
She stares at me.
"I'm sorry." She sets down her coffee. "Did you just say you feel bad? About Finn Bardot? The man you have despised since the seventh grade?"
"I didn't want to destroy him."
She frowns. "You bought him at auction with your dream-fund money, Darce. You marched him through a tango class, a vet clinic, and a drama room, on purpose. You were servingsome well-deserved, overdue, perfectly righteous justice." She stops herself. "And now you feel guilty?"
"I was wrong about him."
The sentence sits between us on the table, taking up more room than five words should.
I give her the one piece I can. The remorse is mine; I'm allowed to spend that. What I can't give her is why it runs so deep. Can't explain that the whole weekend I designed to crack Finn's polish never cracked it. He outlasted the tango, the teenagers with power tools, the animal clinic—all of it without complaint and most of it with grace. The thing that finally broke him wasn't anything on my itinerary. It was me being careless with the one wound that was never supposed to be part of the game.
He endured everything I did on purpose. It took me being unknowingly thoughtless to actually hurt him.
"Wrong about him, how?" Annie asks, quieter now.
I run my thumb along the edge of the closed laptop. Beneath it, a tab full of accommodation strategies waits for the bruised man who drove away yesterday and likely isn't coming back. "He isn't the villain I thought he was when I saw him at the auction. And the version of him I punished all weekend is one I built, not who he actually is."
Annie is quiet, studying me the way she studies a student who has finally dropped the rehearsed monologue and started talking.
"You're not telling me everything."
"No."
"And you're not going to, are you?"
I shake my head. "No."
She nods slowly. I can see her choosing not to push, despite that Annie Felder has never once met a closed door she didn't consider a personal invitation. But she reads people better thananyone I know, and whatever she finds in my face right now, the protectiveness in it, she's choosing to trust.
"So the marble statue of vengeance you've been cosplaying since you raised that bidding paddle," she says. "She's retired now?"
"She's having a crisis of conscience."
Annie sighs. "Those are the worst. Much harder to accessorize."
The laugh that comes out of me is small and tired and real, and Annie catches it.
"Can I say one thing?" She waits, hands around her cup. "The Darcy who planned that weekend wanted him to hurt. The Darcy sitting in front of me apparently can't sleep because she won. Both of those are you." She pauses. "And nobody lies awake over somebody who doesn't matter to them."
She's right. The truth lands inside my rib cage, in the place where his voice keeps living, the quiet one, the one that saidthe disappointmentlike he'd been reading his own verdict since the fourth grade. And underneath the voice, with my palm on his forearm, the pulse I felt answer mine. I touched him to tell a man who was hurting that none of it was his fault. My hand didn't get the message. My hand stayed warm all the way home, and the rest of me has been trying and failing to catch up ever since.
Here's the part I can't say to Annie, the part I can barely get my own brain to hold still long enough to look at. I don't think this is new. The guilt is new. The remorse is new. But this feeling underneath it, the one that put my hand on his arm in the first place and didn't want to take it back, the one that has been pulling me toward that man since I watched him sit in a folding chair and stop pretending? I think I've been calling that feeling hatred since I was thirteen years old because hatred was something I knew how to carry.
Hatred made sense then. Hatred kept me safe. And I am starting to suspect that I have been wrong about what I feel for Finn Bardot for a lot longer than one weekend.
"I have to get back." Annie gathers herself. "My freshmen are assassinatingOur Townat one-fifteen and I promised the stage manager I'd be there to mitigate the carnage." She stands, then pauses at the table's edge. "Don't forget, trivia night on Thursday this week. The pub. Eight o'clock."
I start to shake my head, but she cuts my refusal short.
"Don't say no. We need you. You're the reigning champion, Darce. Besides, it'll do you good to get away from your lesson plans and whatever you're trying to hide from me on your laptop. Put the weekend and your crisis of conscience in your rearview mirror and move on, Darce."
"I'll think about it."
