Page 66 of Better than Yesterday
“Bullshit. I understand it perfectly because I’ve lived it. I understand what it feels like to be so afraid of losing something that you decide to lose it yourself first.” Austin’s eyes met mine, gray and unflinching. “And I understand that it destroys you from the inside out.”
Brenna appeared beside Austin, almost as if she’d been waiting for him to soften the ground first. She sat down on one of the logs, her posture deliberately casual.
“Braden,” she said, and just hearing my name in that tone—the one she used when she’d decided to cut through every wall I’d constructed—made my stomach clench. “Do you want to know what I think?”
I snorted. “I don’t think I have a choice.”
“You don’t.” She smiled sadly. “I’m sure you told Tessa she should go after her dream instead of staying here. But you know what? Austin’s right—you took that choice away from her. You decided what she wanted. And you did it all without asking her what she actually thought.”
The crackle of the fire seemed to grow louder, or maybe my ears were just ringing. I couldn’t breathe quite right. The anger drained out of me, replaced by something much worse—something that felt a lot like the truth.
“Brenna,” Harper called a warning from somewhere near the edge of the group, but Brenna held up a hand.
“No. He needs to hear this. He’s been sitting in his cottage for three days practicing the narrative that this was a hard but necessary choice. I love you, Braden. We all do. But what you did wasn’t hard. It was easy. The hard thing would have been trusting her. The hard thing would have been saying, ‘I’m scared, and I don’t know how this ends, but I want to find out with you.’” She paused to take a breath. “But that required vulnerability, and you don’t do vulnerability. So you hid behind logic instead.”
Something cracked inside my chest. I could feel thecareful architecture of my self-deception beginning to fracture under the weight of her words. She wasn’t wrong. Every excuse I’d rehearsed, every logical justification I’d prepared, exposed itself as the thin cover it had always been.
Across the fire, Eli had gone very still. He’d been watching the exchange, and now he glanced at Brenna and Austin like he was about to say something.
Then Ben moved.
Ben, who’d been quiet at the far side of the gathering, holding Colton in his arms. Ben, who never pushed anyone or offered unsolicited advice. Ben, who’d spent most of his adult life working through his demons and had learned, somewhere in that process, the difference between judgment and truth.
He handed the baby back to Hunter and stepped into the firelight. He waited until I looked at him. “I fought like hell to become a paramedic. Not because I had all the answers. Not because I knew for certain it would work out. But because I was finally willing to show up for myself even though I didn’t know how the story would end.”
He paused, and something in that pause held more weight than a thousand words. Ben had been the wild card of the family, the angry kid who seemed destined to fail. He’d done the work, faced his demons, and earned the right to speak about courage.
“The real tragedy,” he continued, his eyes steady on mine, “isn’t losing a fight you should have won. It’s being too afraid to step into the ring.”
And there it was. The part of me that wasn’t hidden behind logic or self-protection or carefully constructed justifications went perfectly still.
Because Ben was right. I’d folded. Not because I’d thought it through and made a brave choice, but because Iwas scared shitless. Of Tessa leaving. Of being abandoned again, the way I’d felt when she left town at eighteen. So I’d abandoned her first, as if that somehow gave me power over the outcome.
It didn’t. It just meant I didn’t get to fight for what I wanted.
And neither did she.
I’d built everything here. The business, the life, the persona of the guy who had his act together. The golden boy who’d recovered from his high school heartbreak and transformed it into success. Except I hadn’t recovered from anything. I’d just gotten better at hiding the wound.
Then Tessa had come back, and for a few months I’d let myself believe that the story could have a different ending. That I was enough now. That she would choose me because she wanted to, not because I needed her to. But the moment I experienced that uncertainty, the moment I couldn’t control the outcome, I’d panicked. And I’d ended it.
Which meant I’d abandoned her. Like I’d been abandoned before. And like I was terrified of being abandoned again.
The fire crackled, and my family chatted among themselves, giving me time to process what they’d said. They weren’t angry at me. That would have been easier, somehow. They were seeing me clearly—seeing the fear beneath the logic, the cowardice beneath the careful decision-making—and they were saying so anyway.
That was what family did. They stared you down at your worst and didn’t look away.
I stared into the embers and let the full weight of my mistake press down on me. The hollow ache in my chest was immobilizing. This was worse than the breakup, worse than the relief I'd felt when I’d finally made the decision.This was the moment I couldn’t hide from the truth anymore.
That I’d been a coward. Chickenshit.
That I’d chosen the pain of loss over the risk of love, and I’d lost anyway.
I was hollow. The structure of my justifications had collapsed, and underneath it was just regret. Suffocating, immobilizing regret. I’d found enough courage to start building a future, but not enough to see it through. And I had no idea where to go from here.
Chapter Twenty-Three
TESSA
