Page 50 of Sawyer

“Yeah, but they could’ve said hello. My Gran taught us that there’s always room for civility, especially in a small town.”

“I guess they know how things ended between us that summer.”

I nod, shoving my hands into my pockets as we walk south together along Broadway. “I was hurt. I drank a lot after you left. And I tend to vent when I’m drunk, so…”

“They must have heard a lot of choice tidbits about me, huh?” She chuckles, but it’s a sad, sour sound. “No wonder they hate my guts.”

“They don’t!” I insist.Yes, they do.“They just…like you said, they’re protective. I’ll talk to them. Ignoring you when you walk into a room is totally unacceptable.”

“You don’t have to say anything,” she says, her voice small and soft. “I spent that whole summer with you. And then I left without a word, went back to Fairbanks, and never returned any of your calls.”

“We had an agreement,” I remind her. “You were clear with me at the beginning.”

“We both broke that agreement,” she says, the first admission of its kind.

“What do you mean?”

“Sawyer,” she says, pausing in our walk to look up at me. “I fell just as hard for you as you fell for me.”

Oh, my heart.

These words.

I’ve been waiting to hear them since the morning she left Skagway four hundred and twenty-five days ago.

“Then why?” I ask her. “Why’d you leave? Why wouldn’t you talk to me that fall?”

“Leaving was nonnegotiable. I had to go back to college,” she says. “I wanted to get my degree. No matter what, I was always going back to Fairbanks.”

“But why didn’t you say goodbye?”

“It was hard enough just to leave. I cried all the way to the airportandthe whole flight home,” she confesses. “If I’d seenyour face and heard your voice that morning? I don’t know if I would’ve had the strength to go.”

It’s like a punch to the gut to know that she suffered as much as I did. But at the same time, it feels so good to know I wasn’t alone—that what I felt for her was silently reciprocated. No matter how it may haveseemedat the time,my feelings didn’t exist in some sort of alternative-reality vacuum. She cared about me, too. It’s a relief.

“Aw, Ivy…”

“Same goes for talking to you once I was back at school. I knew that if we started talking again, it would make everything harder,” she continues. “It hurt like hell at first, but I knew if I made a clean break when I went home, I would survive leaving you. So, I didn’t look back. I only moved forward.”

“No offense,” I say to her, “but that’s a little terrifying. How do you compartmentalize like that?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s just raw self-preservation.”

“I think it’s a learned skill.”

“Alearnedskill?”

“Yeah,” I say. “A survival skill you learned out of necessity.”

“You’re probably right,” she says. “I know how my life looks on the outside.Lucky Ivy Caswell! Her dad owns a coal company! She’s so rich! She’s got everything!But my life isn’t perfect like that. My mom left when I was a child and never came back. She literallychosea life that didn’t include me. Do you know what that does to a kid’s self-worth? Self-esteem? It was decimated. And my father? He was away from home more than he was around, but he was all I had. I…I just wanted him to…you know…”

“Be home?”

“Love me,” she says, her voice breaking on a quiet sob.

“He’s your father,” I say. “Of course he loves you.”

She shakes her head. “No. You don’t know him.”

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