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Lia moves her hips, and my body responds to hers with an electrifying tingling sensation. My mind shuts down. I can’t figure out why I’m about to tell her the truth. Although it might be because she let her own walls come down today. Not completely, but enough. So maybe I do the same because it’s only fair.

Stone by stone.

Secret for secret.

It wouldn’t be fair to steal hers and not reveal any of mine in return, would it?

“Isabel,” I manage to say, the name tasting like acid in my mouth. It’s been forever since I said it out loud. Isabel, not Izzie.

Lia’s eyes widen. Her body tenses on top of mine. She doesn’t want to show it, but I can see that it affects her to hear another woman’s name while she’s sitting half-naked on top of me.

“You got that necklace from her.” It’s a statement, not a question. The jealousy in her voice is unmistakable, and my chest tightens as I realize she actually wants me to hear it. She doesn’t want to hide her feelings from me anymore.

Stone. By. Stone.

“Yes,” I say as my throat constricts. I have to force the words past the tightness, but they must come out. “She died.”

Lia blinks. Shock, dismay, horror, and finally compassion fill her eyes, her face. I can’t breathe. The noose has been around my neck for years, ever since I left Boston, and it’s only been getting tighter since I returned.

She notices. Of course she does. Just because she suppresses her own feelings doesn’t mean she doesn’t notice mine. She slides off me and lies down next to me. Her lips brush my jawline, a tender kiss that expresses everything she doesn’t say.

She doesn’t say she’s sorry. She doesn’t say anything at all, just nestles up against me, her fingertips dancing gently across my chest. I don’t know what it is, her silence or her touch, that makes me want to tell her more. Maybe it’s both, or maybe it’s this unbearable pressure inside me to finally tell someone what I’m thinking. A part of the truth that I’ve never told anyone before.

“She died, and it’s my fault,” I manage to say, the words like shards of glass in my throat. I have to swallow them and keep talking. There’s no turning back now, no matter how wrong it is. Even though I shouldn’t be telling Lia any of this. She shouldn’t be here either, but here she is lying next to me. It feels way too good.

“It happened four years ago in March.”

Stop talking already! the voice in my head begs me, but I can’t stop. I’ve started and set it into motion. It takes on a life of its own.

“We were on our way to her parents’ house. We’d just looked at an apartment and couldn’t agree on whether we should take it. Isabel really wanted it. I . . . didn’t.”

Because you were a selfish asshole. And you still are.

I don’t notice my hands have clenched into fists of their own accord until Lia reaches for them and slides her fingers between mine.

“You don’t have to tell me,” she whispers. There’s a sound in her voice that’s very familiar. A subtle kind of pain, a wordless understanding. It makes me suspect that she also lost someone once.

It’s just a hunch, but when I look into her eyes, which are glistening with unshed tears, I know it’s true. There was someone she lost. Someone who was important to her.

“But you can if you want to,” she continues, brushing my shoulder with the tip of her nose, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to touch me like that. To talk to me like that. It’s not. Not in the slightest. It’s wrong and difficult yet somehow also easy and right.

My mind is racing. I feel dizzy, and I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I only know that I have to tell her about that night.

Secret for secret.

“We had an argument. Isabel wanted this apartment. She wanted the whole deal, and I . . . I wasn’t ready yet.”

“You were young,” Lia says softly. Her fingers make gentle circles on my chest.

“Yes, we were. We met in high school, and we’d been together for three years. It was only logical that she wanted to move in with me.” I try to breathe, to talk without choking on my own words. “But I just . . . wasn’t ready,” I say again. There’s no point in sugarcoating it. “I was selfish. All that mattered to me was dancing. I wanted to be on stage. I couldn’t afford to commit to a city, an apartment, anything. Not while I was in college. I had so many dreams, and she had . . . different ones.”

That’s not the whole truth. But it is true that Isabel had different dreams than I did, and every single one of them made me panic.

“So she wasn’t a dancer?”

I shake my head, my eyes burning. “Her mom has a flower shop, and Izzie wanted to take it over someday. She . . . she loved working in the shop, and she was good at arranging flowers. There was something magical about it. That shop, the life her parents led, that was what she dreamed of. I couldn’t give her that, and she didn’t understand why. She didn’t understand the pressure or competitiveness in ballet. Her world was bright and sunny, and mine . . . wasn’t.”

Lia is silent. She knows what I mean. After all, she’s been there. She knows how it works.