And then she walked away. Or maybe ran was more like it, taking the stairs blindly. At the top, her fingers shook so badly she dropped her keys twice before Aidan gently nudged her out of the way and opened her door with his keys before bending to scoop hers off the floor.
“You have keys to my place?” she asked in surprise.
“I have keys to everything.”
Except her heart, she told herself. Nope, he was firmly locked right out of that particular organ. And he’d stay out.
Aidan watched Lily’s heart go to war with her head for a beat before gently nudging her inside.
She slipped out of his jacket and handed it back to him. “Thanks for that. And the ride. Lock the door on your way out?”
“I can’t leave you alone. Not on her birthday.”
“Yes you can. You just walk out the door.”
He gave her a slow shake of his head.
“And you call me stubborn,” she muttered beneath her breath, but he was fluent in Annoyed Female Speak, living with Kenna.
“Do you want to talk about her?” he asked.
“No. Not even a little bit.”
Wrapping his fingers around her upper arm, he pulled her back around to face him when she turned away. He tried to read her expression and went still with a gut-wrenching pit in the bottom of his stomach. “Does this have anything to do with me?”
A sound came from deep in her throat. Pain? Regret? Hard to say as she pulled free and took a step back, staring at him, clearly shocked. “No, of course not. I don’t know why you’d ask me such a thing.”
“Maybe because immediately afterward you took off,” he said. “And when I called you, you clearly didn’t want to talk to me. That was the last I heard from you for a decade until the junk food massacre in the convenience store.”
She closed her eyes. “It’s not you. It’s me. Ashley’s accident. It was all my fault, Aidan.”
This was somehow worse, the proof that Jonathan was right, that she did indeed blame herself. Feeling hollow at the notion that she’d been feeling this way for ten years, Aidan shook his head. “Why would you possibly blame yourself?”
“Because she was just trying to be like me!” She covered her face. “I’d climbed the face and hiked down and she couldn’t let it go until she’d done the same.” She broke off and swallowed hard before covering her mouth with a hand and closing her eyes. “If I hadn’t bragged about it—”
“Lily, that was your relationship with her, competitive to the core. What happened to her up there was an accident. A horrible, tragic accident. But it wasn’t your doing.”
Her eyes flew open, filled with surprise, and that just about killed him. Hadn’t anyone else ever told her these things? She was still staring at him when he took her hands in his and lifted them up to his mouth, where he brushed his lips over her knuckles. “Not your fault,” he repeated softly as it all clicked into place and made sense for him.
She’d left because of grief.
She’d stayed away because of guilt.
Not because of him. The knowledge at once changed things for him and also devastated him—for her. “Ashley was book smart but not street smart. We both know that. She didn’t have your logic skills, your ability to know your own limits. She was headstrong and self-centered and she did whatever she wanted—not thinking about the cost to anyone, especially you. You can’t carry around the responsibility for what happened to her, you just can’t. And more than that, she wouldn’t want you to.”
She pulled free and moved to the woodstove. “It’s June and I’m about to light a fire,” she said, her back to him. “Definitely not in San Diego anymore, Toto.”
Nudging her aside, he crouched before the woodstove and began to build her a fire.
“I can do that,” she said.
“I know.” He was expertly and efficiently crisscrossing the kindling, then adding the wood on top, doing what would have taken her a good half hour in less than a minute.
“You’re good at that,” she said, but it wasn’t his fire skills she was admiring. It was the easy way he was balanced on the balls of his feet, his pants stretched taut across what was surely the best ass in all of Cedar Ridge.
He rose and met her gaze, and she could feel herself blush because what if he could read her mind?
“I’m good at a lot of things,” he murmured.
Dammit.
“Now tell me how you can be one of the smartest people I know and yet really believe you were responsible for your sister’s death,” he said, switching gears with far more ease than she could. “What am I missing?”
She stared at him for a long beat. “The day before, I’d come home with a scholarship to the University of Colorado at Boulder and an invite to be on their ski team.”
“Prestigious ski team,” he corrected.
“Yeah, well, it was the last straw for Ashley after the attention I’d received in the recruiting process. And Boulder was the only place she’d ever wanted to go ski, so it was her dream opportunity and I got it a whole year before she could even apply.”