"There's something else," Evan says.
I look at him.
"I was trying to explain to Annie how torn up you are over having to leave, and I sort of... used the bet you and the guys made back at The Retreat as an example. Of the guy you used to be. The one who'd never let himself get tied down." He finally looks up, miserable.
The ground opens up beneath me. "You told Annie about the bet."
"I'm really sorry, Finn."
I don't say anything for long enough that Evan starts talking again, faster, something about context and how he was defending me, and I hold up a hand and he stops.
On a curse, I pick up the phone and call her right there, with Evan watching, because everything in me says do it now, fix this now, and that maybe this is still a problem a conversation can solve.
I tap her number but it doesn't ring. It goes straight to voicemail, her voice bright and ordinary, recorded on some better day, telling me she can't take my call right now and to leave a message.
"Fuck." I hang up before the tone. What I have to say doesn't survive a machine.
Straight to voicemail. Not a missed call. A declined one, or a phone shut off, which is a wall with a decision behind it. And that's the part I can't make fit, because I know this woman. She hears people out for a living. She has more patience for other people's explanations than anyone I've ever met. Whatever she thinks I did, the Darcy I know opens the door far enough to let a man hang himself with his own rope.
She's not opening the door at all.
She heard that I'm leaving tomorrow, and that I'm part of that idiotic bet that says falling in love is for suckers, and she connected the dots. Dots that aren't there at all, but she doesn't know that. All she knows is that I treated her like a punchline in school and now it looks like I'm making her the punchline of this new joke.
She couldn't be more mistaken.
She doesn't know that she's the only thing that matters to me now.
She's put up a wall between us, but I'm the one who built it.
Evan has never looked more contrite. "I'm so, so sorry, Finn. I mean it. You want to break my other leg? Go ahead. I'd understand."
I don't laugh. He doesn't expect me to.
"For what it's worth," he says, "Annie wasn't gossiping. She was scared for her friend. If it had gone the other way, if somebody knew something about Darcy that I was keeping from you..."
He doesn't finish it. He doesn't need to. I'd want to be told. Anyone would want to be told.
"I know," I say. And I do.
And here's the thing I can't do, even now, standing in the wreckage of it. I can't put this on Evan. Not most of it. Every word he told Annie is true. The deal is real. The flight is real. The bet is real, and I'm the jackass who invented it.
My brother didn't tell Annie a single lie. He just couldn't tell her the middle, because he doesn't know any of it. The middle is mine, and it only works in person, face to face, where Darcy can see me while I say it. That Colorado is nothing next to her. Nothing.
That I'm in love with her and have been since before I let myself know it.
That the bet was written by a man I stopped being somewhere around the first full week of her.
She has to hear all of it from me. As soon as possible.
And if she won't give me the chance? If she won't allow me to tell her what's real?
Then I need a backup plan.
Because I'm not going anywhere without saying what she needs to hear.
I grab the pen lying atop the deal paperwork and a notepad from the little box of stationery my mom keeps on the kitchen island.
Evan watches me, his brows knit in confusion. "What are you gonna do with those?"
