Page 118 of One and Only

His tone was so casual.

So unaffected.

Maybe his ribs weren’t rattling, and maybe his heart wasn’t knotted.

Maybe this was easy for him—doing the thing that was right, following the path in front of him that he’d decided on.

“Yeah,” I said, mentally clapping myself on the back that I didn’t sound like I was about to burst into tears.

“When is Mommy coming?” Olive asked.

“She’ll be here soon,” he answered. “I told her when we’d be home. She wants every second with you before she goes to London.”

Olive nodded. “She’s going to buy me a real Paddington Bear and bring home biscuits and a little red bus for my room.”

Beckett’s hand tightened on the steering wheel, and I had to tear my gaze away.

If she still went to London.

If she didn’t change her mind in light of what we’d done.

I wasn’t really surprised we’d found ourselves here. No matter how badly I didn’t want to admit it, the moment he locked that door behind me, I knew that some small piece holding up the entire structure got knocked off-kilter.

A mistake.

He didn’t say it, of course. He wasn’t cruel.

As much as we’d promised each other the truth, that one he’d shared with me felt an awful lot like dying by a thousand cuts.

The idea that he might look back on this someday and view it in that light—view it as a selfish indulgence, view us as a mistake—was a ruthless slice of pain to the parts of me that were the most tender.

But even worse than all that, I knew that whatever was happening inside me paled compared to how he must be feeling.

Olive ran into the house, leaving Beckett and me lingering on the front porch. He braced his hands on the railing and stared down the driveway.

I stood next to him, the heat of his body close enough that I could feel it seep through my skin. I fought a wave of longing, of helpless desire to lift this burden from him.

There was nothing I could do to make this better.

Nothing I could do to take it away.

“Do you know what you’re going to say to her?” I asked.

He dropped his chin and sighed. “No.” After a moment, he lifted his head and pinned me with a look that I felt down to my toes. “You understand why I have to do this, right?”

Every selfish instinct screamed raw to convince him not to.

To tell him we didn’t need to risk what we were building.

To slide into his arms, pour all these feelings into a kiss that might change his mind so we could stay just like this.

Me and him and Olive.

That we could take this year and build a foundation of an amazing life.

Something with love and laughter and butterflies and cats named Clarence and football games and crayons littering the kitchen table.

A sob threatened to crawl up my throat, and I swallowed it down, a door snapping shut with vicious precision in my head.

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