Page 167 of Sin

I write it slowly.

I love you. I loved you before I was brave enough to call it love. I love the way your mind works. I love your terrible jokes. I love that you make me feel seen and challenged and wanted. I love that you do not let me hide behind power or money or silence. I love you enough to know that loving me may have cost you too much. And if you decide you’re done, I will respect that. It will hurt like hell. But I will respect it.

I stop there. Not because there is nothing else to say. Because there is too much.

The page blurs slightly. I blink hard and fold the letter once.

I don’t send it. Maybe I never will. But for the first time in weeks, I sleep. And when I wake before dawn with Laurel’s name still sitting in my chest like a wound, I realize something.

I have spent my entire life confusing possession with love.

My father possessed.

Controlled.

Took.

Jenna and I possessed a marriage long after we stopped loving inside it.

Even with Laurel, at first, I wanted to hold on because wanting her made me feel alive.

But love is not holding someone so tightly they cannot move. Love is opening my hand. Even if she leaves. The thought nearly breaks me. But beneath the pain is something steadier.

For once, I don’t want to take. I want to be worthy of what I’ve already been given. And if Laurel ever comes back to me, I want it to be because she chose me. Because she looked at the man I became after the damage and decided he was worth loving anyway.

24

Laurel

I miss Sin so much it hurts. Not in a pretty, poetic way or in a wistful staring-out-the-window-while-rain-falls way. In a raw, embarrassing, physically inconvenient way. I miss him when I brush my teeth. I miss him when I make coffee. I miss him when I pass the aisle at the grocery store where they keep the soup because I know it’s his favorite kind.

But, as Opal is constantly reminding me, life must go on. Bills must be paid. Emails must be answered. Plants must be watered, though honestly mine has given up and I respect its boundaries.

The online backlash against me has settled. Mostly. The internet has the attention span of a drunk raccoon, so some newer scandal eventually came along and distracted the masses. I don’t know what it was. I refuse to look. I’m sure it involved a celebrity on a yacht. The in-person threats and texts have also stopped since I moved into a secure building and changed my phone number. New apartment. New locks. New phone number. Same stomach-drop every time someone knocks.

Right now, Mara and I are in the midst of settling everything with the board at SINsual Adult Toys. It’s pathetic how each day I go to meetings and secretly pray I’ll see him.

Tate said Sin has been told to stay away. But the Sin I know wouldn’t listen. He’d find a way to reach out to me.

Something.

Anything.

Except he hasn’t.

And that’s starting to hurt in a way I don’t want to examine too closely. Because maybe he is finally doing the right thing. Maybe he loves me enough to stay away. Or maybe, now that the divorce is real and the consequences are expensive and public, he has realized loving me cost more than wanting me ever promised.

That thought sits in my chest like a stone.

“Stop doing that,” Mara says.

I blink and look at her. “Doing what?”

Mara sets her pen down and gives me a look over the top of her glasses.

I’ve learned many things over the past few weeks. One of them is that Mara Ellison can communicate an entire cease-and-desist letter with her eyebrows.

I sit up straighter. “Sorry.”