But today there was no bliss, and no delusion, either. He’d spent all fucking day storming through Castell Cottage to remove signs of Public Enemy Number One, scrubbing the kitchen from top to bottom and putting things back on the high shelves instead of the ridiculously low ones her adorable—her annoying—shortness had required, washing his sheets and also any sheets Eve herself had washed because they all retained a faint scent of vanilla (he’d checked), and so on and so forth.

After all that, he should be sleeping like the dead, but he couldn’t so much as nod off—not with a certain weight missing from the left side of his mattress. He was determined not to miss Eve, but his body hadn’t quite caught up. Fucking typical. Fucking infuriating. So here he was, sitting in his office, staring at spreadsheets until his eyes bled. Funnily enough, it wasn’t improving his mood.

With a muttered curse, Jacob jerked open his desk drawer searching for a distraction and found—

An AirPod. Right there, in the midst of his carefully organized sudoku magazines, resting on a heart-shaped sticky note that could only have come from one person. His stomach tensed, and he slammed the drawer shut again. Exhaled, hard. Stared at the wall, and swallowed every forbidden feeling that tried to creep up from his chest . . . until one slipped past his defenses and whispered in his ear.

She didn’t actually leave, you know. You sent her away.

Well, yeah. That had been the fucking point: sending her away before she could leave. He’d learned very early in life that obligation wasn’t enough to make anyone keep him. Eve wouldn’t have kept him, either, in the end, whether she realized it or not. So he should just—he should just fucking forget her.

Instead, he opened the drawer again with a shaking hand. Then he lifted out the AirPod and the sticky note, put them both on the desk, and read the flowing lines of Eve’s handwriting.

Jacob,

This is synched to my phone. If you keep one, we can listen to the same music while we do the housekeeping!

XOXO

Sunshine

It was the Sunshine that did it. Jacob stared at the note for long minutes, memories flickering through his mind like old film. He saw Eve’s eyes flash as she fired sarcasm and insults right back at him. Eve’s irrepressible smile as she laughed in the face of his irritation. Eve’s voice practically singing his name, as if she’d never met a word she liked better.

The feelings he didn’t want came thicker and faster, until there were far too many for Jacob to bat away. They crawled over him in a wave of uncomfortable warmth and impossible longing, whispering wild hopes he could never in a thousand years believe. But he wanted to. His heart twisted, almost pulling itself in two, because he wanted to believe those hopes so bad. They washed across his scorched earth like a gentle, cleansing wave, and suddenly, he saw everything a little differently.