Page 41 of The Promises We Broke
I reached for her hand without thinking, and she didn't pull away. Her fingers were cold, trembling slightly, but she let me hold on.
"You were everything," I said quietly. "You were my best friend, my first love, my whole world. Leaving you was the hardest thing I'd ever done, and I've regretted it every single day since."
"I kept your letter," she said suddenly. "For eleven years. I told myself it was because I was angry, but really... I think I kept it because I knew it was the only honest thing you'd ever given me."
The knowledge that she'd kept my desperate, rambling goodbye hit me like a physical blow. "You shouldn't have had to carry that alone."
"We both carried a lot alone."
We sat there on the floor of our house, surrounded by the wreckage of my emotional breakdown and holding hands like teenagers who still believed in forever. For a moment, it was like no time had passed at all. Like we were still the kids who'd carved our initials in the oak tree outside, who'd planned our wedding in these empty rooms.
"I miss you," I said quietly. "Not just the romantic us, but you. My friend. The person who knew me better than anyone."
"I miss you too," she whispered. "I miss having someone who understood me completely."
"I know I don't have the right to ask for anything from you," I said, tightening my grip on her hand. "I know it's going to take time to rebuild trust, if that's even possible. But Billie... could wetry to be friends again? Could we try to find our way back to at least that?"
She was quiet for a long moment, and I could see the war playing out across her features. Professional caution warring with personal longing, self-protection battling against the pull of shared history.
"We can try," she said finally. "We can try to be friends."
The relief that flooded through me was so intense it left me lightheaded. Not everything I'd lost was gone forever. Not every bridge I'd burned was irreparable.
"Thank you," I whispered.
"But Gage," she said, her voice firmer now. "Friends don't disappear on each other. Friends don't miss therapy appointments because they're having emotional breakdowns with power tools."
Despite everything, I laughed. "Fair point, although in my defense it was a crowbar."
"That's not winning you any points in this argument, you know," she said flatly, before adding, "But most of all, Gage, friends definitely don't try to renovate houses with broken bones."
"Also fair."
She squeezed my hand once before letting go, and I felt the loss of contact like a physical ache. But the warmth in her eyes, the absence of the professional distance that had been there for weeks, was worth everything.
"Come on," she said, standing and offering me her hand. "Let's get you cleaned up and back to the ranch before someone sends out a search party."
As I let her help me to my feet, surrounded by the destruction I'd created and the beauty I'd revealed, I felt something I hadn't experienced in eleven years.
Hope.
Not just for my recovery, not just for my place in my family, but for the possibility that some broken things could be made whole again.
That some promises could be remade, even if they had to look different than they had when we were young enough to believe in forever.
Chapter 14
Billie
Ididn't sleep. My brain refused to allow that sense of peace to wash over me for the entire night.
Every time I closed my eyes, I was back in that house with Gage, sitting on dusty floorboards while he fell apart, and I clung to his hand like it was a lifeline. The way he'd looked at me when he apologized, like I was something precious he'd broken and couldn't figure out how to repair. The way his voice had cracked when he said he wanted his friend back.
The way every cell in my body had screamed that I wanted to give him so much more than friendship.
I couldn't keep lying to myself that this was going to work. That I could fit him inside the mold of nothing but a patient.
I sat at my kitchen table at five-thirty in the morning, nursing my third cup of coffee and staring at the ethics guidelines I'd printed out. The words might as well have been written in a foreign language for all the sense they made through my sleep-deprived haze.
