Then doing something stuttery that doesn’t feel like a heartbeat should at all. Like everything inside me is suddenly getting reshuffled.
My whole reality tilting.
“I never wrote that.” My voice barely makes a sound. “I never— Caleb, I didn’t write that.”
He’s not moving. Not one single muscle.
“He lied to you,” he says. “Zlied.”
And then Caleb strides toward me, and then his body is up against mine. He presses me back against the car door, his hands desperately cupping my face.
“What are you talking about?” I whisper, heart slamming out through my chest.
I can’t be this close to him.
Nothing he’s saying is making sense.
“Hewrote that note,” Caleb says, quiet and certain and absolutely devastating. “He wrote it, pretending to be you. Then he told you Helen sent you away. To separate us. He cleared you out of that house while I was on the way to the hospital with medics still pumping away at Mom’s chest, but only because it was protocol—” He stops. His throat moves. “Jesus, Harper.Ten years.”
The two words land like a verdict.
No.
No. He’s got to be remembering it wrong.
He’s told himself a story so many times that he believes it the way hewantsto. Memory is funny like that, sometimes.
Because oh God, itcan’tbe true.
It would mean the foundation ofeverythingwith Z was built on a lie.
All I had wanted was to get back to Caleb. If Helen never sent me away... If she was alreadydead, oh my God, that meant Caleb was all alone the whole time and?—
Oh my God. Oh myGod, oh my God, oh my?—
Caleb’s jaw is tight. His searching eyes are very bright.
And I can’t say anything. I can’t make the right sound come out of my mouth because all of me is busy doing the catastrophic math often yearsand the note I never wrote and the message Helen never sent and Z’s face in the car sayingshe doesn’t want you thereand me believing him because why would he lie, why would anyone lie about that, why would anyone?—
I have no idea who I’ve been living with.
The thought arrives fully formed, and it is the most terrifying thought I’ve ever had.
Caleb is still watching me. Stillcontained.And somehow, in this moment, that control of his—that hard, careful distance he’s kept since he caught up to me in this parking lot—is more gutting than anger would have been. Because anger would mean he hadn’t had time to learn to be okay with losing me.
That wall means he did.
“Caleb,” I say. My voice comes out wrong. “I need you to know that I never knew—I never meant for?—”
“I know.” His voice is rough. “I can see that you didn’t.”
The words don’t fix anything. They can’t. Ten years don’t just undo themselves because two people are finally standing on the same sidewalk, saying the right things to each other.
I watch something shift in his eyes when he looks at me. Something that was locked clicks almost imperceptibly… notopen—not yet. But for the first time, I let myself acknowledge it’s there.
“Come back for the reception,” he says finally.
His voice is back to careful and controlled. But underneath is something that took ten years of precisely laid bricks to cover over. And in the end, it turns out, it could never be fully buried.