Page 44 of Mending Hearts
Another message follows.
Marco: Whatever you need—we’ve got you.
My throat closes completely, and I text Carol separately.
Me: I’m sorry for the chaos. I promise I’ll explain.
She replies with a single heart just as the car pulls up to the airport.
Everything feels surreal now, like I stepped off the edge of my life and didn’t hit the ground. I move through the terminal on autopilot, bag over my shoulder, phone clutched in my hand like it might anchor me.
I check the time again. It’s still afternoon. Still possible.
I think about the papers in my bag. About endings. About how I’ve spent eight years being careful and afraid and silent—and how none of it saved me anyway.
The boarding group is called. I step forward with the other passengers, heart hammering so hard I’m sure someone can hear it.
I don’t know what I’m going to say to him. I don’t know what I can offer him beyond honesty and regret and the truth that I never stopped loving him. I don’t know if forgiveness is even possible.
But I know this: I can’t let our story end in an envelope. Not without standing in front of him and asking him to look at me again.
I reach the door of the plane and pause for half a second, hand resting on the edge like it’s a threshold. Then I step on board.
8
RAFE
“…I’m just saying,”Miles murmurs, leaning in like we’re talking about the weather and not the fact that I might be detonating my own life in slow motion. “If he got served, he’s going to call.”
The room is warm with low lighting and the kind of background music that exists to make donors feel classy without making them sleepy. It’s a gala, technically—there are round tables, centerpieces, a silent auction set up near the open bar, people in tailored outfits and moneyed smiles—but it isn’t stiff. Not with our crew here. Not with Eli’s wife, Annie, bouncing between volunteers and guests like she’s running mission control, not with Drew already charming the pants off the older donors, not with Vinny posted near the back wall like an immovable piece of furniture.
And not with Eli’s whole heart wrapped around this thing.
Tonight’s fundraiser is for a foundation connected to the illness his dad just crawled out of. The kind of diagnosis that makes everyone pretend to be brave until they’re alone in a bathroom, staring at their reflection, trying not to fall apart.
Eli’s dad recovered. Not cleanly or easily, but he’s here. Alive. Smiling at people like he didn’t spend months flirting withdeath. Which is why the room feels less like a celebrity event and more like a community wrapped in expensive fabric.
Outside, though, it’s a different world. It always is.
We saw it when we pulled up—barricades, security, a knot of fans pressed up against the sidewalk like the building itself was the stage. Phones held high, names shouted, that particular wave of noise that comes when our popularity crests again. It moves in cycles now. Some months you can almost pretend you’re invisible. Then a song hits a trend, a clip goes viral, and suddenly you can’t walk ten feet without someone trying to touch you.
Tonight felt… wrong for that.
This is charity. This is Eli’s dad. This is a room full of people trying to do something good, not a concert line. And still, out there, the crowd was wild—more desperate than excited, like they didn’t care what kind of night it was as long as we were in the building.
Vinny clocked it the second we got out of the car, gaze sweeping, jaw contracting. He said nothing—he never does when he’s working—but he’d doubled the check at the side entrance and, with Seth, murmured something to the venue’s security lead before we even hit the lobby. No one gets through these doors without a name, a face, a wristband.
And even then… people try.
Miles shifts his champagne flute from one hand to the other, face calm but eyes sharp.
He’s the only officially single one in the band, which is a sentence that shouldn’t matter and still does. Because any time now, I’m going to be joining him with that single label.
He watches me the way someone watches a friend about to do something irreversible.
I sip my soda. “I don’t know if he’ll call,” I say.
Miles raises an eyebrow. “Rafe.”
