Page 150 of Reckless
“No.”
“Then you made the right call.”
I looked down at my hands.
“He knew what happened to your parents.The hardest part isn’t leaving,” Britney said.“The hardest part is knowing you could have stayed.”
“That’s exactly what I told him.”
“Then he knows.”She paused.“What matters is whether he does something with it.”
“He loves me,” I said.
“I know,” Hope said softly.
“That makes it worse.”
“I know that too.”
Then I turned and walked out into the night before I could love him badly enough to stay.
Nineteen
No Performance
Xerses
The first twenty-four hours after Kelly left me in that restaurant felt like being skinned alive with perfect manners.
No one around me behaved differently enough to call it tragedy.
The city still moved.Meetings still happened.Emails still arrived.Roman still expected me to understand numbers.My father still sounded like a man who believed the world could be bent into sensible shapes if you knew where to apply pressure.
I loved her and I had loved her exactly wrong.
Her parents had died chasing a potential gift.Kelly hated presents.
And I had made the woman I loved feel managed instead of chosen.
Every room I entered, some part of me looked first for Kelly.At the office.In the apartment.In my phone, when it lit up with any message at all.In my own bed.
I could still see her there if I looked too hard.
Roman found me in my office at ten the next morning staring at the same email thread I had not absorbed in fifteen minutes.
“You’re getting worse,” he said.
“I’m not dead.”
“You’ve been staring at the same email for fifteen minutes.”
“I was thinking.”
“You were suffering.There’s a difference.”
I leaned back in my chair and looked at him.He stood in the doorway with coffee in one hand, expression flat enough that most people would have missed the concern under it.
I did not.“You came in here to tell me I look terrible?”
