Page 122 of Merry Me
I let the silence stretch between us. I wanted to see if it would make him squirm. I wanted him to feel just a fraction of what I’d carried.
The footsteps stopped beside me, a few feet away. Not close enough to be familiar. Not far enough to feel safe.
After another breath, cold and sharp, I asked, without looking at him, “Why did you come?”
The words hung there, frozen between us.
He exhaled through his nose. “I wasn’t going to. I—” His voice caught. “I didn’t want to make anything worse.”
A bitter laugh slipped from me before I could stop it. “Well. Nailed it.”
He flinched. I could hear it. The sound of someone realizing too late that they walked into the wrong conversation without a map.
“I thought maybe,” he said slowly, like the words hurt his mouth. “Just maybe…if I showed up, it would mean something.”
I turned then.
And maybe I shouldn’t have—maybe I should’ve stayed with the trees and the snow and the version of me that didn’t have to look him in the face—but I did.
“Mean something to who?” I asked, my voice sharper than Imeant it to be. “To me? To Paige?”
He smiled weakly as if he weren’t actually sure.
I crossed my arms, not because I was cold, but because it was the only thing keeping my hands from shaking. “Why now?”
His mouth opened. Closed. His jaw clenched.
And then he said something I wasn’t ready for.
“Because I’m sick.”
My spine went rigid. My lungs squeezed tight, like his words had knocked the air out of them.
I blinked at him, studying him closer now, seeing how he kind of looked like a ghost trying to remember how to be solid again. Or maybe that was just my hatred, twisting the picture.
“Sick?” I repeated, barely recognizing my own voice.
He nodded, his jaw tight. “Leukemia. They caught it late. I didn’t…I didn’t know how to tell you.”
My stomach twisted. Not out of sympathy. Not yet. It was too tangled for that. I didn’t know if I felt sad or angry or nothing at all. Maybe all three.
“So, you decided to crash Paige’s wedding?” I asked sharply. “Thought you’d just drop the bomb and then blend in with the hors d’oeuvres?”
He winced. “I didn’t mean for it to be like this.”
“But it is,” I said, cutting him off. “It always is with you.”
He nodded slowly, lips pressed together like he couldn’t argue. Because he couldn’t. Because he knew.
I looked away, out into the trees, the world too quiet. The cold burned in my lungs.
“I didn’t come to cause trouble,” he said softly. “I swear. I just wanted to see you. Once. Before…”
He didn’t finish.
Didn’t have to.
And I hated the part of me that still cracked down the middle at the thought of him dying. Of this being real. Of it being too late, again.
