Page 100 of Thrones We Steal

“What the hell, Henry? You can’t just stop loving someone.”

“Please try.”

“It doesn’t work like that. It’s not something I can just shut off. Besides, I don’t want to.”

“You’re young. You’ll get over it.”

“Excuse me? Because I’m young, I must not know what love is, is that it?”

He looks truly miserable, like I’ve just put him into the worse situation imaginable. “Celia, you know how it is. We make fun of girls who think they’re in love at fifteen.”

“It’s different for us.”

“No, it’s not.”

“You let me think we had a future together.”

“Actually, that was your mother.”

I gape at him. “I don’t believe this. You told me I was the only girl for you. You—”

“I meant as a friend.” His voice is an ice pick on my oozing heart.

I fight the confusion swirling through my head. For a second I think I’m trapped in a nightmare, but the sun on my face is too warm, too real. “Fine,” I say. “We’ll just stay friends.” Even as I say the words, I’m battling my inner critic who says there’s no way I can be friends with him after this. But if there’s even a chance he’ll change his mind, I have to try.

I love this boy so much, I would walk across hell if it meant we had a chance.

“I don’t think that’s a possibility either.”

I’m afraid I said the words out loud, but then I realize he’s referring to us remaining friends.

“You’re saying you don’t want to be my friend anymore?”

“I’m saying, I think we’re both too old for this kind of relationship.”

He’s breaking up with me, and we’re not even together.

“Goodbye, Celia.”

And like that, he walks away. Not a backward glance, not a hesitation in his step. Just gone. Out of the garden and out of my life, taking my heart and my dreams and my future with him.

Smashing the fairy tale under his heels as he goes.

* * *

I can still remember the bitterness on my tongue as he walked away, that acrid flavor of heartbreak. I found Wuthering Heights discarded in the grass where he’d been lying. I picked it up and threw it into the fountain in the center of the garden. The splash it made as it hit the water did not make me feel better.

I’m not proud of the spiral I took after that day. I slept all day to forget, and then wrestled with insomnia at night. My appetite fled town and I dropped five pounds in just over a week. Rosalind was worried, but it didn’t last long because a bigger issue arose. Two weeks after Henry minced my heart into tiny pieces, my father was diagnosed with a rapidly-growing brain tumor.

There was no cure.

Henry was the only person I could imagine talking to. He’d ignored all of my texts, but he would want to know that my dad was dying.

A girl answered when I called. She told me he was in the shower, but she’d tell him I called. I told her not to bother.

Six months later, my father was gone, and Henry had become the world’s favorite playboy.

* * *

---