Page 73 of Sincerely Yours, Anna Sherwood

‘I didn’t –’

This isn’t how I wanted this conversation to go. I just wanted him to know I hadn’t lied to him. I thought he’d understand. I thought … he knew me well enough to understand. And I thought if I could just understandhimbetter, we could fix this. Be friends again. But none of the words are coming out right, and I just keep making it worse.

‘You act like you’re so above it all. Annalise Sherwood, working hard but never hardly working. She earnseverythingshe gets. She’s worked for it in a way that puts everybody else to shame.’ His words fill the space between us, bloated and poisonous, twistingmy stomach into knots. ‘You’ve made enough comments aboutmehaving everything so easy because of my dad – being the “golden boy”, right? But what about you? Like you’re any better, with your “She-EO” mum? Looked like she was pretty happy to see you the other day. Wants you around, wants youinvolved. And you don’t think that makes you a hypocrite? You don’t get to lord it over me like that when you’reexactly the same. The next generation of the company. Right?’

He sneers, and it fractures something in the remnants of my heartbreak from last week.

I didn’t think Lloyd was even capable of sneering. Of looking so intentionally nasty.

The worst part is knowing thatI’vebrought that out in him.

He scoffs, a soft, breathy noise of resentment. He shakes his head again, eyes focused on some point on the floor. ‘All that stuff you said,’ he’s muttering, mostly to himself, ‘about why you wanted this internship so badly, why you’re giving it everything … It was all just …’

Lloyd trails off, pulling a face like it pains him to have to say it out loud, to have to confront some horrible new reality of who I actually am, who he now believes I’ve been all along.

All those times I looked at him and wondered wherethe boy from the riverside was and had to play dot-to-dot to connect these different versions of him as I uncovered new secrets, new quirks … Now, I realize, he’s doing the same thing with me.

It bruises, knocks the air out of my lungs for a moment.

For all the irresistible connection I’ve felt to Lloyd, all the times I couldn’t help but be drawn in by him or had to fight to keep him at arm’s length – he’s never felt more impossible to reach than right now.

Too taken aback by how badly this conversation has gone to think straight, I blurt out the first – the only – thing that comes to mind.

‘You think we’re the same?’ I snap. ‘We’re not. I meant what I said, Fletcher. I’m doing this to give myself the best future, to open doors, so I don’thaveto be like my mum.’

Lloyd looks up, meeting my eyes again at last. There’s no anger in it this time, no impetuousness or darkness. His eyes are clear, and weary. His shoulders slump, all the fight leaving him as he exhales quietly, calmly.

Whatever thought just passed through his mind, it’s given him the clarity he needed to connect the dots between the version of me he knows, and the stranger he apparently sees in front of him right now. I see theunderstanding, the resignation on his face, and it’s frightening.

I don’t want to be this person. I don’t want to be the girl who snaps at him in the middle of the night in an empty office, all teeth and snarl and no care or compassion. I don’t want to be this angry, feral thing.

I want to be the person he’s seen every other time we’ve been together. The one eating cake late into the night, the one who found herself in his touch, lost herself tangled up with him. I want to be the girl who walked on air through a strange city with a cute boy beneath a starless sky, eating gravy-smothered chips and swapping secrets like they weren’t such precious, fragile, perilous things.

‘So you don’t throw anybody under the bus,’ he says slowly, remembering what I said last time we were here – last time I talked to him about Mum. ‘Stomp all over them on your way to the top.’

And something hardens in his face, a hurt that seeps into a small, soft smile on a mouth I kissed, when I was that other girl, and I suddenly realize something, too.

‘Annalise,’ he tells me, before I can beg him not to, ‘that’s exactly what you did to me.’

I stand in the kitchen on the twelfth floor until the motion-sensor lights turn themselves off, plunging me into darkness. A breath shudders out of me, too loud in the deathly silence of the office. Far from the calm, contained environment it provided earlier for me to catch up on work, now it feels tainted, treacherous.

I move enough to activate the lights, not sure how long it is since Lloyd left. Long enough that the tea he made us both is stone-cold. I pour both cups away, then debate for a moment before making myself a fresh one; I’m shaking all over, so a few minutes to collect myself is probably a good idea before I set off home.

He’s right. Of course he is. He’s usuallyinsufferablyright about things, but I wish this wasn’t one of them.

It’s nowonderhe looked at me like that, or that he was so angry with me. He has every right to be. I’d hate me, too. I do hate me, a bit.

Taking my tea over to the sofas, I sink down onto one. I set the mug on the coffee table and hunch forward, head between my knees, trying to steady my breathing. My chest is tight; the argument has left me nauseated.

It’s too late to apologize. It won’t make any difference now, I know it won’t.

But I should still say sorry. I’d want that acknowledgement from him if it was the other way around, even if it meant nothing.

Is that the kind of thing you can put in a text? I don’t think he’ll answer the phone if I call, and it will feel insincere if I wait until Monday to try to do it in person. He doesn’t need to accept it, but I think it’s better to offer an apology regardless.

When did this all become such a mess? How did it spiral so completely out of control?

Whycouldn’t I have just said sorry when he called me out for being a hypocrite and left it there? Why?

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