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“They made you believe him,” Sterling said. “Didn’t they?”

A stilted breath hitched out of me. “Yes.” My voice cracked. “They made me think I was difficult and ungrateful and wrong about everything. That if I just tried harder, he wouldn’t⁠—”

My throat closed around the rest.

“Wouldn’t hurt you,” Sterling finished for me, his voice threaded with something fierce and terrible. Something protective. Something that made my pulse stutter dangerously.

I swallowed hard again, blinking fast. “Yes.”

“You don’t have to apologize for bleeding, Sienna,” he finally said.

The words struck straight through me, and my chin wobbled.

“You’re not going to believe it, but I don’t usually fall apart like this,” I said.

“You didn’t fall apart,” he said, his voice dipping enough to make something deep inside me trip and stumble. “You told the truth. That’s different.”

It was the way he said it, flat and cold…that made me glance over.

There was something in his eyes I recognized, a shadowed fury banked behind his calm. An intensity that went beyond casual anger.

It should’ve scared me. Instead, absurdly, it made me feel…safe.

“You believe me,” I said, surprised.

His gaze grew more intense. “Did you expect me not to?”

“Most people don’t.”

He huffed at that, but there was no humor in it. “I’m not most people.”

No. No, he definitely wasn’t.

The wheel creaked, the car swaying again as more people loaded below. We were still at the top, suspended.

“Anyway,” I said, the awkwardness of everything I’d just admitted to him settling in. “That’s why I’m going to California. It’s far away from all of that. It’s…not Boston.”

For a long moment, he didn’t speak.

The silence didn’t feel empty, though. It felt full. Like he was sorting through every word, examining them from all angles before choosing his own.

Something in my chest loosened, a knot I hadn’t even realized I’d been clenching around since the day I drove away from that house.

I exhaled slowly. “Your turn,” I said.

He arched a brow. “For what?”

“To be emotionally stripped on a Ferris wheel. We’re friends now. Fair is fair.”

A flash of something that looked like guilt, or maybe reluctance, crossed his features. It was gone so fast, I might have imagined it.

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

“Why you stay,” I said. “You act like Blackwood is the only place on earth, but you don’t walk like a man who never saw anything else. And Hattie may have said you went to New York at some point.”

He huffed. “I did go to New York.”

I tried to picture Sterling in New York—black jacket, boots, swaggering down a Manhattan street like he owned it.