Page 66 of Vegas with my Ex’s Best Friends

He doesn't speak right away. His eyes drop to our joined hands, then back to my face. Something raw flickers across his expression—not quite shock or hope, something heavier that sits between the two.

He swallows once, hard.

“I didn't know,” he says, voice rough. “I didn't know it was possible to want something this much and be terrified of it at the same time.”

I don't answer. I just watch him process it, the way his shoulders shift like he's trying to carry the weight without dropping it.

He looks up at me again, eyes steady even though his hand isn't.

“I'm staying,” he repeats, quieter this time. “For both of you. I need you to hear that.”

I don't know if I believe him yet.

Part of me still wants to pull away. The rest of me is too tired to fight it.

But I don't pull my hand back.

“Okay,” I say.

Chapter twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-Four—Andrew

I've been watching her sleep for twenty minutes.

Maybe longer. I stopped tracking time when her breathing evened out and her head dropped sideways, settling against the headboard at an angle that's going to hurt her neck in the morning.

I thought about moving the pillow. Decided against it.

If I move, she wakes up. If she wakes up, she remembers to be careful around me.

So I stay.

The design sketches cover almost the entire wall opposite the bed. I've been looking at them since she fell asleep. Dozens, different sizes, but the same hand. Hers. Some have notes in the margins, quick pencil marks I can't read from here. One has a yellow sticky note attached, a word circled twice. I can't make out what it says.

I want to.

She kept drawing, even after everything. She was studying design when we were together, always pulling the world apart in her sketchbooks, finding the structure underneath. I didn't know she stuck with it.

There were a lot of things I made sure not to see.

That's mine to carry.

The thing I regret most isn't the morning I left.

It's that I never said why.

I got up before sunrise and gathered my things with the efficiency of someone who'd been preparing for it all week—the slow withdrawal that preceded the exit—and walked out and let the door close behind me without a word. Without a note. Without anything.

She would have tried to make sense of it. That's what Riley does—pulls things apart until she finds where they broke. She would have found reasons. Probably the wrong ones. Probably ones that landed on her.

I should have told her. That I was twenty-one and terrified and absolutely certain that everything I touched eventually broke. That leaving wasn't a statement about her—it was a statement about what I was. That the wreckage was mine to own, not hers to explain.

I didn't tell her. I let her carry seven years of not knowing, and that's the part that sits in my chest like something with corners.

I'm telling her now. Everything. That's the deal I'm making in the dark. Every true thing, even the parts that don't reflect well on me. Starting tonight and for however long it takes until she believes me.

The coffee mug on her nightstand has a chipped handle. I noticed it the first morning she came into the kitchen at the penthouse, the same mug every time, never swapped for any of the matching set in the cabinet. The chip runs from the base of the handle down about an inch. She keeps using it anyway.