I saw Hunt’s expression first—devastated and defeated. Then I heard a familiar voice through speaker.
“It’s about damn time, Hunt. Tell me what the hell my daughter is doing or you’re fired.”
The phone slipped from my hand, and time seemed to move into slow motion as it dropped. My heart fell at the same speed, long enough that it could have passed through galaxies before it hit the floor. The phone at least made a satisfying crack when it landed, but the crash of my heart was nothing more than a dull, hollow thud.
“Not just a stalker. A paid stalker.”
I guess it wasn’t me he wanted something from after all.
It’s a quiet thing when your heart breaks. I thought it would be loud, louder even than the air rushing around us when we’d dove off that bridge. I thought it would drown everything else out.
But it happened like a whisper. A small, clean split. It broke in a second, and the pain was little more than a pinprick.
It’s the echo that kills you. Like the echo inside the Grotta Azzurra, that tiny little sound kept bouncing around the cavern of my ribs, getting louder and louder. It multiplied until I heard a hundred hearts breaking, a thousand, more. All of them mine.
“Kelsey, just listen.”
How could I listen? I couldn’t hear anything over this pain.
Outside. Outside maybe the sound would have somewhere to go.
I grabbed my bag. It didn’t have everything in it, but it had the most important things. It had what I needed to run.
I blew past him, and I didn’t even look at his body, at the towel slung around his hips. I couldn’t let myself. My mind was decades ahead of the rest of me. My body still remembered the shape of his and that damn gravity still pulled and pulled and pulled.
So I pulled back, and broke out into a run.
I thought I would make it farther, that maybe I could make it down to the main road, and for once there might be a taxi nearby without having to wait or call.
He overtook me before I’d even worked up a sweat. He’d pulled on a pair of gym shorts and two unlaced tennis shoes. He panted like he was running from the devil himself.
“Don’t come near me.”
“I never meant to hurt you, Kelsey. I love—”
“Don’t say it. Don’t you fucking say it.”
“I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
I didn’t know whether to cry or scream or collapse, and my body shook with the force of everything pent up inside me.
I scoffed. “Yeah, I can see how you just did this all by accident. You accidentally followed me all over Europe, and accidentally got paid for it. Shit like that happens all the time.”
“I was going to tell you.”
“I don’t care. It wouldn’t have mattered. I told you about my parents. I told you about everything.”
“I know. I know. And I haven’t talked to your father in weeks. You saw the voice mails. I’ve not told him anything important.”
I was moving to dart around him, but I stopped cold.
“When was the last time?”
He hesitated.
“Damn it, Hunt. When was the last time you played spy for my father?”
“Prague.”
Oh, God. I was going to be sick.
Prague was everything, the beginning of it all. We’d met before then, but I couldn’t even remember half of that now. Prague was where he’d spun my cares away on that merry-go-round. Prague was where he convinced me that I could find another place that felt like home, or another person even. Prague was when I’d started falling.
Goddamn it.
He continued, “You used your card at the hotel in Florence, and he called then on the room phone.”
I knew something had been strange about that phone call with the concierge. He’d lied to me.
“But Kelsey, I swear I didn’t say anything. And I made sure we left the same day.”
That was why we’d left and gone to Cinque Terre.
Even when I thought I was free, I wasn’t. I was a bird with clipped wings.
When I thought I was having the adventure of a lifetime, I was a dog on a leash taking a stroll through the park.
And when I thought I was in love, it was a lie.
I’d wanted a story, and this was it.
And, boy, wouldn’t it make a great one when I was old and unhappy and bitter.
It unfolded just like the rest of my life so far. A smile to my face, and a knife in my back. A hug in public, and a thinly veiled disdain at home. A pretty face and a rotten soul.
I was a fool to think my reflection had changed.
“I checked in when we got to Prague, while you were in the bathroom looking for Jenny. I still knew so little about you, and the night with the roofie had scared me. I didn’t know what I was dealing with. But that was the last time. Once you and I started getting to know each other, I ignored his emails and his calls.”
“Did you tell him I’d been roofied? Did he even blink a fucking eye?”
“I didn’t tell him. I thought … I thought that would come better from you.”
“Too bad. You missed your shot to see just how much my family can suck.”
“I know you’re angry, and you have every right to be. But please … just listen. Just let me explain.”
“It doesn’t matter what your explanation is. Don’t you get that, Jackson?”
“No one’s called me Jackson since before I joined the military. No one but you.”
“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“Jackson was the old me. The kid from a fucked-up family where money was more important than love and society more important than the individual.”
“If you’re trying to bond with me, it’s too damn late.”