The sun hasn’t fully set, but the foliage overhead coats the footbridge in shadow, pinpricks of mounted solar lights illuminating the path to the guesthouse.
It’s like I’m moving through jelly, every step slow and heavy. Then the wood-shingled guesthouse appears, and I round the corner toward the cedarwood shower.
When I see him, it surprises me. As if I didn’t come here expressly for him.
Only the back of his head, neck, and shoulders peek over the top of the cedar walls, the breeze pulling steam out in silver wisps. A feeling of loss, heavy as a sandbag, hits me in the gut.
I can’t do this, I think. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to make things worse.
I turn. My sleeve catches on a low-hanging branch, and all the moisture accumulated there spatters to the hollow forest floor.
Wyn turns, his brow arching with amusement. “Can I help you?” He looks and sounds happy to see me. Somehow it’s another blow.
I waver. “I doubt it.”
“May I help you,” he amends.
“I just wanted to talk!” I step back. “But it can wait. Until you’re less . . .”
“Busy?” he guesses.
“Naked,” I say.
“One and the same,” he says.
“For you, I guess,” I say.
His brow scrunches. “What’s that mean?”
“I honestly don’t know,” I say.
He rests his forearms atop the wall, waiting. For me to come closer or to bolt.
Now that the opportunity’s in front of me, having an answer I don’t like seems eminently worse than never having an answer at all.
“It’s nothing,” I say. “Forget it.”
“I won’t.” He wipes water from his eye. “But if you want me to pretend, I can try.”
I take another half step back. His gaze stays pinned on me.
As always, something about his face coaxes the words out of me before my brain has decided to say them: “It’s killing me not knowing.”
His brow softens, his lips parting in the half-light.
“Even though it’s been months,” I say. “It’s killing me, being here, acting like everything’s the same between us, and what’s even worse is sometimes it’s not acting. Because . . .” My voice cracks, but now there’s too much momentum. I can’t stop talking.
No matter how fragile, needy, broken I might sound, it’s the truth, and it’s coming out.
“Because you just left, Wyn,” I say. “I never got an explanation. I got a four-minute phone call and a box of my stuff shipped to my door, and I’ve never even known what I did. And I told myself it was all about what happened with Martin. That you didn’t trust me.”
He winces at the name, but I don’t back down.
“I’ve spent months trying to make myself mad at you,” I go on hoarsely, “for blaming me and judging me for something I didn’t even do. And then I come here, and you act like you do blame me. Like you hate me or, worse, feel nothing at all for me. Until suddenly you act like nothing’s changed. And you tell me you never thought I cheated on you, and you kiss me like you love me.”
“You kissed me too, Harriet,” he says, voice low, strained.
“I know,” I say. “I know I did, and I don’t even understand how, after everything, I still let myself do that. But I did, and it’s killing me. This is killing me. Every second of every day, I feel like I’m living with a piece of me torn out, and I didn’t even see it happen.
“I have this gaping wound, and no idea how it got there. It’s killing me hearing how happy you are, without even understanding how I—how I—” My voice quavers, my breath coming in spurts. “I don’t know what I did to make you so miserable.”
His mouth judders open. “Harriet.”
I drop my face into my hands as the tears build across my vision, my spine aching with the force of it when they start to fall.
The shower door unlatches and whines open. I hear the rasp of a towel being pulled from a hook and wrapped against skin. Heat billows toward me in a damp wall, and I flinch at the sudden warmth of Wyn’s hands taking hold of my upper arms. I can’t bring myself to look at him, not while I’m falling apart. Not after baring all the rawest parts of myself.
“Hey,” he says in a quiet rasp, his wet palms scraping up my arms. “Come here.”
He tucks me against his chest, the water from his skin sluicing down my arms and back. His mouth burrows into my hair. “It wasn’t you,” he says. “I promise it was never you. I was in such a fucking dark place, Harriet. After I lost my dad. I was drowning.”
He presses me closer.
“I’m sorry,” I say, voice crackling. “I wanted to help you. I didn’t know how. I’ve never known what to do with pain, Wyn. All I’ve ever done is hide from it.”
His hand furls against my ear. “You couldn’t have done anything else, Harriet. It was never you. I just . . . I lost the best man I knew, and it was like I stopped knowing how to exist. Like the world didn’t make any sense anymore. And you had this new life, this thing you’d been dreaming of for so long, and all these new friends, and—and I was greedy for your time, and I hated myself for not being happy for you. I hated myself for not being good enough or smart enough or driven enough for you.”
“Fuck that.” I try to push back from him.
He holds me fast, doesn’t let me go, and it makes me so angry, how he’s holding on now, when it’s too late. “Listen,” he murmurs, “please let me say this.”
I lift my gaze to his. I think of the first time I ever saw his face up close, how his features had struck me as contradictory, a rare mix of magnetism and standoffishness: I want you close, but don’t look at me. Now he’s pure quicksand. No stoniness. Wide open.
“I was lost,” he says. “As much as I loved my parents—as much as I always knew they loved me—I grew up thinking I was a letdown. I had these two incredible sisters, who came out of fucking left field and were nothing like my parents or anyone else in our town, and as early as I can remember, everyone knew they were going to do something amazing. I mean, when I was twelve and Lou was nine, people were already talking about how she’d win a Pulitzer someday. No one was giving me imaginary awards.”
“Wyn.” We’d been down this path too many times.
“I’m not saying anyone thought I was stupid,” he says. “But that’s how it felt. Like I was the one who didn’t have anything going for him except that I’m nice.”
“Nice?” I can’t help but scoff.
Generous, thoughtful, endlessly curious, painfully empathetic, funny, vast. Not nice. Nice was the mask Wyn Connor led with.
“I wanted to be special, Harriet,” he says. “And since I wasn’t, I settled for trying to make everyone love me. I know how ridiculous that sounds, but it’s true. I spent my whole life chasing things and people who could make me feel like I mattered.”
That stings, somewhere deep beneath my breastbone. I try again, feebly, to draw back. Wyn’s hand moves to the back of my neck, light, careful. “And then I met you, and I didn’t feel so lost or aimless. Because even if there was nothing else for me, it felt like loving you was what I was made for. And it didn’t matter what anyone thought of me. It didn’t matter if I didn’t have any other big plans for myself, as long as I got to love you.”