Page 124 of Mark my Words

Fuck. She’d left. Of course, she wasn’t answering the door if she’d checked out.

“Would the front desk tell me if she checked out? Where would she go?”

“Let’s go.” Kelly grabbed my hand, towing me toward the elevator, riding silently to the ground floor.

Kristine wasn’t in the small seating area where the complementary breakfast was being served. Somehow, I knew that we wouldn’t find her.

“Let’s ask. Maybe she’s still here.”

Kelly trotted over to the desk, and I followed, my footsteps heavy as she talked to the clerk.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Willard checked out and had the shuttle take her to the airport about an hour ago...”

Fuck...she was gone. She panicked again, and I couldn’t blame her. After all, hadn’t I been the first one to leave?

KRISTINE

BOSTON

So, maybe the note was a little much, but I’d panicked when I’d woken up at four-thirty in the morning with Sam wrapped around me. That night hadn’t changed anything. He was still in Chicago, and I was still in Boston. Things between us would never be resolved unless something major changed.

No matter how much I missed him, a long-distance relationship without any plans to change wasn’t an option. He’d eventually find someone who wasn’t constantly pushing him away, and then I’d have the painful privilege of hearing about his perfect new girlfriend through social media. Maybe he’d even show up with her at Chase and Evan’s wedding in a few months.

Nana had read me the riot act when she found out what had happened with the job, telling me I was being an idiot if I just let him go without a fight, but there wasn’t anything left to fight for. Sam had left. He’d gotten a better offer than anything I could give him and jumped at the chance. I couldn’t blame him, not with how I’d treated him. He was right to accuse me of breaking his heart. It may not have been intentional, but I probably would have ruined him with my tendency to close out everyone and everything close to me.

Work was busy, and it’d been a steep learning curve, having to go from answering to only Isobel to working with several different departments and supervising my own team of three copy-editing interns. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t as easy a transition as expected. And I wanted to talk with Sam about it, but I’d cut him out so brutally. I knew he’d balk at me coming to him for advice or even to have a friendly ear. The office felt more isolated than ever, and I realized how dependent on his company I’d become in the months leading up to the book tour.

It also bruised my ego more than I wanted to admit that I wasn’t the first pick for the position. Sam may not be the manipulative asshole that my father was, but he’d diminished my achievement by passing off the job to me. Sloane seemed happy to have me in the position, but I still felt I hadn’t earned it. It may not have bothered anyone else, but being the second choice ate at what was left of my ego. Not that my ego and sense of self-preservation had gotten me anything but a broken heart and wounded pride.

It also sucked that now I had no one to talk to about whatever weird relationship was still going on with Isobel and Adrian. She was pregnant—I knew that much from the ginger ale and saltines she kept on top of her filing cabinet—but my new job duties left me extraordinarily little time to spend with her lately. She was training my replacement, and knowing I was almost her equal was weird. I’d been with her so long; it was bizarre to walk to my own—albeit much smaller—office in the morning instead of hers. It was on the other side of the floor, so I didn’t even see her in passing. Loneliness had also settled in over the last several weeks. My interns had all been assigned cubicles, so I was often in my office by myself. Isobel wasn’t on the other side of the room, and I didn’t even have space for a table and chairs in my office like she did if I decided to invite my interns to work there.

The private conference rooms were still mostly vacant, but I got a weird pang in my chest every time I looked at those closed doors, so I’d started avoiding that corner of the floor.

Several months ago, I was perfectly content to work in peace and quiet, and now my brain was filled with nonsense I didn’t want to focus on. I missed Sam fiercely some days, almost to the point of tears, which would have shocked me before I’d fallen for him, but now, he was gone. If only my heart got the memo.

His absence didn’t make my heart grow fonder. It just ached like I was missing a limb instead. He’d slowly worked his way into my heart, and now I didn’t know how to get him out.

I was surprised when Chase had called to invite me to the engagement party, but I guessed with all the time we’d spent with them on the tour, we’d all grown closer together. She’d fished around a little about Sam when we’d talked, but all I had to tell her was that he was in Chicago, and no, I hadn’t talked to him since he left Boston, and she dropped it.

He’d tried to call me several times a day until I decided to finally change to a local mobile phone number, turning off my old one from New York. It had the bonus of making it harder for my family to contact me, not that they were speaking to me since I’d embarrassed them at Nana’s party.

I knew it was shitty of me to ghost him, but he’d broken something inside of me. For the first time in my life, I felt like I’d finally connected with someone and let my guard down enough for them to see the real me, and he’d pulled the rug out from under me. It hurt worse knowing I deserved it because I’d been so horrible to him for so long that he didn’t expect anything else from me. I’d realized my feelings for him too late and hidden behind my insecurities.

I was supposed to be the one with the commitment issues, but he’d left when things got messy. It was a bitter pill to swallow that he’d left without saying goodbye, but I hadn’t given him much of a chance to anyway. Isobel had castigated me for asking if I could work from home the last two days he was in Boston, but I couldn’t face him. Now, I was kicking myself for not getting some closure. But closure wouldn’t have helped anyway because that meant letting go of him and moving on.

I’d thought he’d been close to telling me he still loved me, but I’d stopped him, knowing it’d make my heart crumble even further. Sam had broken me, and all it would have taken to glue me back together were those three magic words, but knowing there was no way for us to be together would have shattered my heart into more pieces than before.

This was why I didn’t date, why I didn’t put myself out there emotionally, because it gave someone the power to tear your entire world apart.

I knew if I’d stayed that morning, I would have said things I couldn’t take back, and he would have told me things that probably would have made it harder to walk away again, but I’d lied in the letter. We weren’t better off apart. We fit together. He softened my sharp edges, and I—I became the person I wanted to be when he was around.

I’d been trying to absorb everything about him into my skin that night, knowing it would be our last time together. I hadn’t known before that the final night in New York would be the last time I was with him, but now that I had been with him one more time, the ache was worse than I’d anticipated.

“You planning to sit there in silence, brooding the entire day?”

“What? What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be at a signing or something?”

“Oh,” Chase smiled as she settled into the small solitary chair across from my desk. “Evan’s fine. Diana is there. He doesn’t need me anymore.”

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