No, no, no. He hadn’t given her any indication of that.
She smiled breezily and adjusted her position to put more space between them. “I’ve been helping you because I’m friendly and also because I wanted to spend time with you.” Through dint of will, she kept her voice sunny. “It’s been nice to catch up with you. I always hoped you were doing well, Josh. Ben told me you were but it’s been really nice to have the chance to see that for myself.” She’d used the word nice two times and in so doing, damned their current relationship with faint praise.
He concealed his thoughts expertly. She could see no change in him outwardly. None. He was an astute businessman, after all. The owner of a company. He hadn’t gotten to where he was in the world by having the transparent feelings of a girl scout.
And yet . . . she could sense the shadow of sadness that lived in him deepening. Which made her regret her smokescreen approach. She should have replied to his honest question with an honest answer. He’d given her an opening and hadn’t she been half-hoping, maybe three-quarters-hoping, for just this kind of an opportunity to talk to him about the past?
She should be brave—right now at this very moment—and tell him the things she’d been yearning to tell him for eight years. She spoke before she could lose her nerve. “Josh, I . . .”
“Yes?”
She had a hard time getting the rest out. “I want you to know that I’m sorry for any hurt I may have caused you when we broke up.”
He gazed at her, his features guarded and grave.
Why wasn’t he replying? Doubt assailed her. “It could be, of course, that I didn’t cause you any hurt. In which case, you can ignore what I just said.”
“You did hurt me, Holly.”
His bluntness came as a relief. It bolstered her courage. “Okay. I thought so. Are you still angry with me?”
She could hear a distant dog barking and the quiet conversation of the caterer and her employee, cleaning up together in the kitchen.
“There’s a part of me that is,” he admitted.
Her stomach dropped. She didn’t want him to be angry with her, and yet, if she put herself in his shoes she could understand why he was. She fought to order her spiraling thoughts into words. “Here’s the thing. I didn’t tell you the truth back then about my reason for breaking up with you.”
Several taut seconds dragged past. “You told me something about how your feelings had changed and that you wanted to be free to date other people,” he said.
“Yes, that’s exactly what I told you, but neither of those things were true.”
He frowned, his eyebrows drawing down in the center.
“Should . . .” The concerns that had kept her silent on this topic until now rose to the fore of her mind. “Should we just let bygones be bygones? Or do you think there’s value in revisiting what happened at this point?”
“There’s value in it for me, Holly. Even now.”
She slowly inhaled. “Do you remember, back when you first started MIT, that there was a time when you considered returning to Texas?”
“Yes.”
“Your mom . . .” She swallowed. Was this really a good idea? Maybe the bygones thing was better.
“What about my mom?”
“She was upset about the possibility of your leaving MIT. She couldn’t afford to send you anywhere else. But more than that, I mean, MIT, Josh. It was the best possible school for you and she and I both knew it. You were brilliant. You deserved a chance there.”
“And?” he asked grimly.
“Your mom came to see me at UTSA and asked me to break up with you. I—”
“What?” He spoke the word quietly, almost whispering it. Nonetheless, it vibrated with menace.
“She asked me to break up with you so that you’d stay at MIT and focus on your studies.”
His brown eyes blazed as he struggled to process what she’d said, to reframe their breakup through a different lens.
“I still remember her tears,” Holly said. “She cried when she came to see me. Your mom liked me, I think. I definitely liked and trusted and respected her. It wasn’t easy for her to ask me to end things, but she did, and she made a very strong case.”
Josh bent his head and stared at the table as if trying to decipher a code in its surface. “You should have told me that she came to see you.” He lifted his chin again to meet her eyes.
“Maybe. I didn’t because I promised her I wouldn’t.”
“If you had told me, we could have talked it out.”
“Yes, but would you have stayed in school?”
“I don’t know.”
“See? By breaking up with you, at least I could be fairly certain that you’d excel in school and in your career. Those were the things that your mom and I wanted for you.”
“What about what I wanted?” His frank question caused her whole body to still. “Did you or my mom ever stop to consider that?”
“We . . . I mean, we thought that you wanted to leave MIT and come home to Texas.”
“Would that have been so terrible?”
“Yes!”