Page 47 of Rune’s Solace

I looked at the window. The pines out back. The path through them.

“He chose it,” I said.

“What?”

“He chose to do it that way.” My voice didn’t sound like mine. It sounded soft and dangerous, and some part of me stood back and marveled at it. “He could’ve told me no. That’s it. One word. No. He could’ve knocked on my door and said I was too young. He’s too old. I’m not built for his life. He doesn’t feel that way about me. Pick one. Pick literally any reason on earth, Sable, and I would’ve cried and hated him and probably embarrassed myself for a while, but I would’ve lived.”

“Amy — ”

“Instead he decided I was too breakable for the truth.” And there it was, the thing under all of it, coming up out of me. “He decided for me. He looked at me and he saw somebody too fragile to be told, so he built a show and he broke my heart the fastest, cruelest way he could think of, and he made me watch, and he told himself it was a good thing.”

The line was silent while I ranted.

“No.” I shoved my arm into the jacket. “Do you know how many men have decided things for me because they thought I was weak? My entire freaking life. What I could do. Where I could go. What happened to me if I didn’t do what they wanted.” My voice cracked then, and that only made me madder. “Rune was supposed to be the one man who didn’t do that.”

I was already pulling on my boots.

“Amy, what are you doing?”

“I’m going down there.”

“It’s almost midnight.”

“I know what time it is.”

“Okay, but you haven’t slept in six days and maybe midnight after six days without sleep is not when we make major life decisions.”

“I’m not making a life decision. I’m asking a question.”

“You are putting boots on. I can hear the boots. Those are angry-question boots.”

Any other night, that would’ve gotten me.

Not this one.

“Amy, please. Just wait until morning. Sleep on it.”

I actually laughed. “Sable. I can’t sleep. That’s how we got here.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No. I’m done waiting. I’ve waited months. I stayed away from him, didn’t ask questions, didn’t make a scene, didn’t make anybody uncomfortable. I did exactly what he wanted, and he knew. Every single day, he knew I had it wrong and just let me keep thinking it.”

“What are you gonna do?”

My hand stopped on the doorknob. That was a real question, and I didn’t have a real answer. There was too much of everything in me, six nights without sleep, my father’s face or maybe not my father’s face in a parking garage, the nightmares, Rune’s hand over mine on his chest, his bike behind me every morning, and now this huge new hole punched straight through the story I’d been telling myself for months.

“I’m going to ask him why.”

It was the only answer I had.

I hung up on my friend, opened the door, and slipped out the back of the clubhouse into the dark. The pines were black ahead of me, the path darker, but way out at the far end of the property one light was still burning.

His.

I headed straight for it.

CHAPTER TWENTY