Remi said she didn’t want it to be real, and I’m the clueless fuck who decided it was.

The shock and disbelief of having everything I ever wanted within reach and then watching it be ripped away has already turned. She knew. She knew what happened with my dad, and she still led me on like that?

Even though my phone vibrates in my pocket, I dig out the other one. The sparkles on the cover glint in the moonlight. You can always run to me, darlin’ repeats in my head. And I hate every memory cycling in there too.

“Goodbye, Remi.”

I draw my arm back and launch the phone toward the house, bouncing it off the porch railing into a bush.

Climbing back in the car, I text Sage.

You were right. About it all.

I crank the engine and tear down the street, needing to get the fuck away from here. To leave her with him at Echo Lake. The illusion of us over.

When I reach the main road, Chase has singed my last damn nerve with the incessant calling and texting. Sometimes it’s not fucking about him, and he needs to back the hell off.

I dig out my phone at the stop sign, over it all.

“What, Chase?” I snap, not even checking the stupid picture on the screen. “It better be fucking life or death because I’m not⁠—”

“Foster.” The panicked voice that’s not quite Chase’s has never sounded so fucking serious in our entire lives. I glance at the screen, see Colton snarling in the contact picture, and he croaks it again, “Foster.”

Even more broken.

“What happened?” I ask.

As Colt fights to talk through tears, existence altering the more he says, I stare into the rearview mirror at a sliver of the light across the lake. Light from the window of the house of the girl who I would have given up everything for.

The girl who was supposed to be my everything.

Only she wound up destroying part of me instead. And I might have just lost the rest because of her too.

39

FOSTER

Now…

She blinks at me, like her mind wants to reject what I’m saying.

“You…” Remi takes a shaky inhale, stepping back, so my hands fall away from her face. I want to move with her, touch her. But even though it kills me, I don’t move, needing to serve my penance.

“I’ve spent all this time thinking it was my fault. I led Daniel to us. Now you’re telling me you left my phone so he could track it when he noticed it missing?”

“I had no idea there would be a tracking app on it, Remi.”