“We don’t have to—”
We stop. Laugh awkwardly. Matt looks at me. “Sorry. What were you gonna say?”
Now I wish I’d just let it be. He looks so nervous. But I don’t know if I’m actually up for a picnic—or trying to re-create our second date. I clear my throat. “I just . . . I’m not very hungry, so I don’t know if—”
“It’s okay,” he says quickly. “We don’t have to go all the way up there. It was just an idea. Just a place to go.”
I glance up the road and see a park near the beach. “Can we maybe just park over there? Take a walk or something?”
“Sure, yeah.” He takes the next exit, pulls into the parking lot of the beach park, and shuts the truck off. Looks over at me like he’s waiting for a cue to follow.
As soon as I reach for my door handle, he does the same. We get out, and he lets me lead, which I do, to a bench at the edge of the sand. I’m not quite sure what I want to ask him first, but I can feel myself working up the nerve to start. I think he must be able to feel it too, because when we sit, he swallows hard and then looks at me.
“Is everything okay with you? You seem . . .”
“I haven’t really seemed like myself to you, have I?”
“That’s not what I meant, I just . . .”
“I know.” I look out at the ocean, and the whitecaps coming in with the wind. “I guess I’m not. But I’m okay. I think.”
I honestly don’t know, and trying to explain it isn’t going to be easy. I take a deep breath, then force myself to look at him. “There are some things that have been . . . that I’ve been thinking about . . .” I look down at my hands. “There’s just a lot that I don’t understand, or that doesn’t make sense to me right now.”
Matt looks nervous when he nods. “Me too.”
“This is gonna seem strange, but I need to ask you something,” I say. I take the picture of me out of my purse and hand it to him. “Did you take this picture of me?” I ask. I try to ignore the feeling that I already know the answer.
He takes it and looks at it. Shakes his head. “Wow, no. I wish I did, though. It’s really pretty.” He hands it back to me. “You really don’t know who took it?”
I shake my head. “No.”
A wave rises in front of us, and we’re both quiet as we watch it crash on the shore.
“I need to ask you something else, then.”
“Okay,” Matt says slowly. His voice matches the sudden seriousness of my own.
“Were we happy before the accident? You and me?” The words come out before I have a chance to choose them more carefully.
Matt looks about as ready to answer this as I felt to ask it.
“I . . . yeah, I mean we . . .” He fumbles. Bites his lip. Looks at me. “What do you mean?”
He looks a little wounded by the question, and I feel guilty for asking, but there’s something else that I feel. Something that I trust more than my guilt. It makes me brave enough to push it.
“I mean the two of us, as a couple. Were we still happy?”
“I don’t understand where this is coming from, Liv. Why are you asking me this?”
“It’s just . . . I was thinking about what you said last time, about how doing the interview would help with what people were saying.”
He tenses, and I feel like I’m on the right track. I ease ahead, trying to trust what I feel.
“And then the other day, I was gonna go see Paige, but your truck was—you two were together.”
Matt takes a deep breath and lets it out in a long, slow exhale. I expect him to reach for my hand and explain it away, or at least to look at me. But he does neither. He keeps his eyes on the water in front of us.
The knot in my stomach tightens, but I ask another question. “What was going on with us before the accident? What are you not telling me?”
Matt runs his hands through his hair, a gesture I now recognize as nervous. “I swear, nothing’s happening with Paige, if that’s what you think.”
“Okay,” I say slowly. “So what were you doing with her yesterday?”
“Just . . . talking. About what to do.”
“About me?”
“Yeah,” he says. And now he turns and looks at me. Runs his eyes over my face, and I see sadness in his. He looks down at his hands.
“What?” I ask, more nervous than ever now. I’m afraid of what he’s going to say. I’m afraid that the reason he looks so sad is going to be my fault because there really was someone else, and maybe that’s why we were drifting, like I told Sam. But I can’t handle not knowing. Not anymore. I need to know what I did. “Matt. What is it?”
He looks up at me again, and now his eyes are watery. He presses his lips together and swallows hard.
“We broke up the day before the accident.”
“What? Why?” I ask, even though I’m sure now of the answer, and I’m ready to hate myself for it.
“I . . .” He takes in another deep breath and rubs his forehead. “I broke it off. With you.”
“You did? Why?” My voice is just barely above a whisper. Matt can’t even look at me.
“Because I . . . we . . .” He shakes his head. Shrugs. “We were just drifting. For a long time. I mean. We’d been together for so long, but it wasn’t the same anymore. We weren’t the same. And that day, for whatever reason, I just knew that was it. I told you I thought we should break up.”
He looks at me now, his eyes wet.
“You cried. But you didn’t argue. Because you knew it too.” He rubs his lips together. “So I guess it was both of us, but . . .” He shakes his head again. “I don’t know if it would’ve happened if I hadn’t said it, you know? Because it didn’t feel good. I wasn’t happy after. Or relieved. I was just empty and sad and lonely.”
He looks at me now.
“That’s why I went out to that party on the island the next night. Just to try and shake it off. But then when I started drinking, all I could think of was you, and so I called you, and you said you’d come get me.”
He pauses again, shakes his head. “I shouldn’t have let you. If I didn’t call you that night, we wouldn’t have been on that bridge. And this wouldn’t have happened to you. You have no idea how many times I’ve wished I could take that back, Liv. All of it.”
He looks at me now, gives me the space to say something. Anything. But I can’t. And so he keeps going.
“I just wanted to see you again. I knew I’d made this huge mistake, and I wanted to take it back, and I thought if I could just see you again, we could act like it didn’t happen, and go back to how we were before.”
I force myself to keep my eyes on his, but I feel far away, like I’m watching us from a distance. Like this isn’t really happening.
“You came all the way out there to pick me up, and I tried to take it back. I told you that, and I tried to kiss you—because I couldn’t remember the last time we’d even kissed. But you just pushed me away, you were so mad.”
He pauses again, and I try to picture it.
“You put me in your car anyway. And then . . . you know the rest.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t. I don’t know any of this.”