Page 81 of Yours, For Good

She shook her head and walked away from the dining room. She reached the stairs and went up again.

"You know what else I hate?" she asked, her tone making it clear it was a rhetorical question. "I hate that I feel like a fool for not figuring it out. How did I not see the signs? And I hate the idea you could have been laughing at me behind my back and I would have never known. I sent those letters because I was lonely and I desperately sought connection— and you were a voyeur the whole time without my permission."

"Please, Nora—" my voice came out hoarse. "I never laughed at you. I couldn't—"

She sighed. "I know you didn't. I read your journals. At least I have that."

She couldn't see me but I shook my head anyway. I hadn't found humor in our situation at all.

The door to the guest room was opened and she peeked inside, without stopping there long. She did the same with the bathroom on that floor, before turning to the front of the house.

She shook her head as she passed me by. "I hate that for a second I thought I'd ruined things by kissing you, when you had done worse."

I rubbed my mouth with two fingers, a poor replacement for her lips. She hadn't ruined a thing, but I had.

Nora opened the door to my office and stepped in. "I hate that this whole thing is making me feel indecisive and insecure. I'm not someone who is wishy-washy! I hate that I can't seem to make up my mind."

She stopped in the middle of the room, me a few steps behind her. In one of my favorite spaces in the house, she went quiet and turned on her heels to admire the view.

A dusty navy blue painted the walls. White built-ins filled a third of the room, and flowed seamlessly into the detailed crown molding and coffered tall ceiling. The shelves were full of books, making my home library a collection of stories, poems, and memories I adored.

Decorative curtains fell like waterfalls from ceiling to parquet floor. A banquette made for a perfect lookout to people-watch down on the street. On one end of the room, a large reading chair invited us to get lost in a book, or take an easy nap on a weekend. At the other end, a big desk in wooden tones matched the herringbone at its feet and headed the space.

Without added words, Nora approached it and discovered my journal closed on top of it.

I cleared my throat. "You can read the new entries if you want."

Nora ignored my invitation and turned to gaze at the book spines behind her. After a minute, she turned and made for the reading chair instead. Her skirt fanned around her as she sat on it.

A sudden dream overtook me. In a different life, we might have huddled together there and read our books together. She might have dozed off with her head on my shoulder, and it would have put a smile on my face as I read of worlds far away.

Longing for a time like that with Nora seized my chest. It rocked me on my feet.

Her brow pulled up in dejection and hurt. "This feeling inside, it won't subside. It should be gone, killed by your deceit. But it's there, and it won't leave me alone. How can I want it? Where would it even lead?!"

My heart hammered to be heard in all of this, but I denied it of what it wanted. I deserved for it to break.

All I did was kneel at her feet and fist my hands not to take her in my arms.

She covered her face with her hands. "The smartest thing would be to cut this clean. So why does the idea of never seeing you again make me want to crawl into bed and cry?"

"Please, Nora…"

I didn't know what I meant to ask. I stopped myself regardless. Words crashed in the dam of my throat. Each one of them wanted to beg her not to cut me off from her life, and yet I had to let her make her own choice.

She shook her head in her hands, a rocking motion of confusion. "When I read your journals I thought, maybe this is how it felt for you too. Knowing what the right thing was and finding yourself incapable of doing it. How crappy is that?"

She gazed at me again, searching for something in my eyes. I wasn't a spiritual man, but I would have prayed to a deity in that moment that she found what she needed.

Her voice came out breathy in her confession. "I don't know how to reconcile that I want to be your friend, and I want to kiss you and forget about everything with your arms around me, and the fact I haven't forgiven you and— above all? That I can't imagine losing you now, or making things worse by trying something and losing you in the process anyway."

"Nora…" I choked.

"If it weren't for this program I owe some much to, we could have done this better if we ever met. Now we're here in one of the most beautiful homes I've ever seen, in a dream-like room, and I don't know if I should find a way out of this mess when you broke my trust. If I should fight to keep you or be the one to let you go."

Her words speared cleanly through me, its edges ragged as they cut me open… and all I could do was let it happen, because everything she'd said had been right.

Chapter 34