Page 118 of Caught from Behind

“Yeah.”

Riggs’s eyes come to mine when I stand, but I just shake my head slightly, letting him know I’m fine.

He lifts a brow in response and I know he might stay in that round of Rummikub, but he’s going to be keeping an eye on me.

And I don’t miss that Lake has a similar nonverbal conversation with Nova.

Heart warming, I step out onto the deck, stare up at the stars twinkling like tiny diamonds overhead.

Orion. Big Dipper. Little Dipper. Venus and?—

“That used to be what I wanted to feel,” I tell Nova as she comes to stand next to me, nodding up at the constellations. “So distant, so cold, so untouchable.”

A long blip of silence before she hands me half the blanket and we cuddle up under it. “You’re far from cold, Ella.”

“I wish I was.” I huff out a laugh and plunk my head onto her shoulder, but I’m not amused, not really. “I feel so much, too much. Sometimes it hurts so bad that I just want to feel nothing.”

“Honey,” she whispers.

“He broke me,” I say, not willing to hide from this any longer. “My dad—I didn’t know how to be an unloved daughter, a discarded piece of trash. I thought…I thought if I just pretended, it would all be okay.”

“Pretended what?”

“To be the best version of me—funny, loud, fixing every problem, ignoring that my own heart was hurting so I could help everyone else. So I could be happy for them. So I didn’t have to be happy with my own life.” I swallow hard. “And…pretending I was fine, that I was great when I wasn’t—” My voice hitches and I break off.

“I didn’t know,” she whispers, her eyes glassy with tears.

I touch her cheek. “I became an expert in hiding it.”

“I don’t think so.”

Surprised, I rock back on my heels.

Her mouth curves, just slightly. “I wasn’t here to call you on that.” She sighs. “And who am I to talk now that I am? I spent years running from my problems—hiding from them in the Arctic, burying them in the desert in Asia, leaving them in the clouds thirty-thousand feet overhead while I flew as far as I could from my pain. I didn’t know anything about myself, about my feelings, about what I really wanted—” She crouches a little to meet my eyes. “Not until you helped me.”

“Novs.”

“You’re my best friend and…I wasn’t here for you like I should have.” Watery green eyes on mine. “I’m sorry.”

I laugh and it’s broken. “You have nothing to apologize for.”

“I should have been here. Should have done more.”

“Now you sound like me,” I tell her, swiping at a tear sliding down her cheek. “Can we try to stop fixing everyone else and just enjoy the fact that we’re here, we’re together, and we both have hot hockey players in our beds?”

“With big sticks?” she teases.

I laugh and it’s still uneven, but at least it’s laced with real humor now. Because I’ve teased her about Lake and his stick far too often.

She touches my cheek. “But you’re happy now? Here? With me and Knox? With Riggs?”

“Happier than I ever thought possible.” I close my eyes. “He knows more about me than anyone—more than maybe even you and Knox.”

Her arm tightens around my shoulders. “Good.”

“And you know that I liked him from the beginning—I thought it was just going to be sex?—”

“A common problem with hot hockey players and their sticks,” she quips.

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