Page 4 of The Replay

Dom and I were so young. So in love. So different, and destined to break up. I learned early in life that nothing lasts forever, except the people that raised you. Moving from city to city every two to three years, with no constant other than parents who loved me and demanded excellence from me in equal measure. Standards as high as the Andes mountains, and expectations as sharp as the tallest peaks. I wanted to go to England to run the family's foundation once Igot my degree. I promised I would. Falling in love with Dom and changing my plans was simply not in the cards, never mind what ending that relationship did to my heart.

The fact I met a handsome guy a few months after landing in London and things escalated quickly afterwards… to the point I eventually agreed to marry him and leave my dream job for promises that didn't deliver… well, those are all decisions I own. I get to judge them. It's on me to fix all these mistakes and reclaim the future I want. What Dom thinks about all of that can't add to my remorse list.

I stomp toward him. "How dare you? You want me to think about what it did to you? What about what your call did to me? We knew we'd break up after I graduated. I believed you when you said being together could be the love story of our lives, even when we knew it had to end after a few months. Something to remember with tenderness forever, you said. Or did you not mean that? Did you tell me that only so I would agree to date you?"

We're alone in the kitchen, surrounded in monochromatic white, to the point everything disappears but Dom. We're in an empty box bathed in cold, harsh light. Nothing but him and his angry eyes, and the fight burning in my chest.

Underneath, something raw lives. Vulnerability and a neverending unease in dire need of protection.

I wall up.

"What a fever dream of a romance," I say. "Intense like the sun, burned out just as fast. We fell so hard but, hey, we were so mature. We ended on such good terms. I told myself we had to be proud of each other, for what we had, what we did— I tried so hard to protect those ten months together in my mind. In my heart. A little shrine to the love we had. But no. You didn't say a thing when I cried and told you I had a plane ticket. 'We knew this would happen,' you said. Then went and changed your mind a year later? Is that why you called me?"

At first I couldn't believe it. I was half-asleep at eight in the morning, after yet another social function the night before. It wasn't every day that a handsome young man with a very distant claim to the throne got engaged to a New World heiress, after all. I thought I was seeing things, when I grabbed my vibrating phone to see Dom's name on the screen.

The first thing he said—don't marry him. I still love you.

Followed by a few teary questions on my part, and growing desperation on his. Before I hung up with a broken heart and cried for an hour. Until my mom came into my room, worried I hadn't gotten up yet, and hugged me while I told her everything.

It wrecked me. For three days, I didn't get out of my bed. My mom found a million ways to push me to be rational. To remind me that Dom and I were not together long enough to know the kind of commitment it takes to be in a relationship long-term. That a successful marriage is about a common goal and compromise and, if Dom and I had broken up already— technicallymorethan a year earlier, mind you— then we had already decided we didn't want that kind of future together.

But Henry and I— we had goals together. We were committed to each other. We were making both our families so happy, and would do wonderful things together. Hell, with his family, I could even go political and change things at the systemic level after a few years.

I believed her. She had the experience to back it up, married to my dad for so long already, pursuing plans they promised each other from the start. So I blocked Dom's number, and followed the map laid out in front of me.

Only it didn't work, and I failed at that too.

Now I'm the weakest link in my family, not knowing where I fit, but determined to find my way once and for all.

The walls around my faults grow twice as thick. I need to keep frailty at bay.

"Are you not ashamed?" I ask the man standing in front of me, all this time later.

"Ashamed?" He moves closer to me, anger pulsing all around him, even as he holds himself still. "Why should I be ashamed of telling you how long I hoped we'd find our way back to each other?"

"You knew what it would do to me."

"Do you think I didn't spend days agonizing over whether I should call you? You think it was easy? I knew that letting you go was a mistake the moment you got through airport security, with me standing outside, not moving until your plane left. But what could I do? Did you know your dad talked to me at that last family dinner? He said the honorable thing was to let you be free, let you pursue your dreams, and let you do all the beautiful things you were destined to do. That I would be tied to college for another year, and I may not even get drafted. So if I really loved you, I'd want your happiness above all and, worse— he was right. And I had no way to prove him wrong."

He looks at me without seeing. His mind is on things I didn't know. Fuck, I had no idea my dad had guilted him into letting our relationship end.

Something tears open in my chest, but I don't look in its direction. The ice maker rattles in the fridge, dropping its cargo into the inside bucket and breaking the silence. I stare at it and put some blame on it too. In my mind, with this confused heart of mine, the appliance has a part in how the past is detonating between Dom and me.

His gaze focuses on me again, staring at me with bitterness of his own.

"If I called you," he says in a low, rumbly voice, "it was because I finally had something that might make them change their mind. Your brothers are all professional athletes, aren't they? Maybe having a good contract of my own would make me worthy in their eyes. But who can compete with the fucking heir to a Duke? Not me, evidently."

The scars in my heart turn tender at his words. Fortunately, I've learned to bite back tears.

Nothing lasts. Not our love, not my plans, not my marriage. None of it deserves for me to break again. It's why I need to build barricades around myheart. Without them, I'll fail again. I'll go back to the worst of it, and I'll really be stuck.

"It was never about competing, Dom." I lift my chin. "But calling me was selfish."

"I hoped it would show you we were not done."

"We agreed on it! We were done."

"I figured, when my texts and calls went unanswered after you hung up. When an email appeared in my inbox, with a screenshot of you smiling in an English newspaper. When you went ahead and got married to him."