I didn’t want to tell him, but how could I leave things like this, with him thinking I didn’t care enough to find a way for us to be together?
‘Please, Lexi. If you’re walking away from me, don’t I at least deserve to know why?’
So, I told him. I told him everything. He didn’t interrupt me. He didn’t say a single word, he just stood beside me, staring out to sea while I systematically destroyed something that had only just begun to live. When I finally finished talking, he turned slowly to face me.
‘If you’d chosen another man over me, I would have fought for you.’
I felt my heart swell in my chest at the sincerity in his voice.
‘If you had chosen Amelia and her happiness over me, I would have somehow come to terms with it, because I know how much you love her.’
Tears were stinging my eyes again, but I blinked them away.
‘But what I can’t fight and what I can’t understand is that you’re choosing Amelia’s happiness over your own. You’re enabling her fantasy to destroy your own reality. And I’m powerless against that. There’s nothing I can say, because the only person who can change the way you’re thinking… is you. I will put you first. Always and forever. You and Holly are the most important things in the world to me and I will put you both before everything else. But you need to put yourself first too. You need to put Lexi and Nick before Amelia and Sam.’
‘I can’t, Nick. I can’t do that to her.’
He was quiet for the longest time. I couldn’t tell if he was furious, frustrated, or heartbroken. Perhaps all three.
‘Will you let me come to the airport with you?’
I reached for his hand, trying to memorise the feeling of his fingers curled around mine, because I knew it was going to be the last time I ever felt them there.
‘No, Nick. It would be too hard. Please let’s end it now, here on the beach where it first began.’
He drew me back into his arms again, and for a moment I thought he was going to kiss me, which would have been my undoing, but Nick was too honourable for those tactics. His arms tightened around me in a hug that said everything we both felt. It went on and on, as though we both knew that something precious would be gone the minute our arms fell away.
Time seemed to stretch endlessly as the world went quiet. The gulls stopped shrieking, the wind ceased its whistle, and the surf grew muffled.
‘I’m not going to stop hoping that you’ll find a way back to me,’ Nick whispered into my hair.
‘I leave in two days. That’s not going to change.’
‘I know.’
I’d done all I could to shut the door on our future. But Nick was still there, standing on the other side of it, hoping for a way to break it down.
27
‘This is ridiculous, Lexi. Youhaveto let me talk to her.’
I shook my head. ‘No, Mum. We’ve been over this again and again. You can’t say anything.’
I reached across the kitchen table and took hold of her hand, keeping my voice low so it wouldn’t carry to Amelia’s room, where she was taking yet another nap. There’d been quite a few of those over the past two days. She was clearly avoiding me.
‘Right now, Amelia thinks I’m the only one to blame.’
‘I know,’ Mum said sadly, ‘and that’s why I want to put her straight. It’s so unfair.’
‘It would be more unfair if there was no one here she could trust after I’ve gone. As it stands, I’m the only villain in this story. I’m the one keeping Sam from her and making her believe he isn’t real. It would devastate her if she thought you were stopping him from coming back too.’
I saw by the tears filling Mum’s eyes that she understood exactly what I was saying.
‘The only way to fix this is for me to go back to New York and clear the way for Sam to come back to her. And when he doesn’t, when Amelia finally realises that he was never real, then maybe she can start to get better. And that’s all I’ve ever wanted.’
‘Is it, Lexi? What about you and Nick?’
Would it always hurt this much whenever I thought of him? I had a horrible feeling that it probably would.