I stared at him. “Tiffany never told me about letters.”

His jaw tensed immediately. “I wrote you every day for a year, B. Some were dumb. Some were just a sentence. Some were pages. I gave them to her and she said she’d send them to you.”

“No, no, no,” I said, my voice sharp. “She never told me, Blake. I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t care if you do,” Blake said, voice tight now. “But I did. I wrote you until my hand cramped. Until I ran out of ways to say I’m sorry. Until I thought maybe you were better off never hearing from me again.”

The air inside the car turned thick, suffocating.

My thoughts tumbled over each other, memories colliding.

Tiffany had never mentioned letters. Not once.

I stared at the road, my heart somewhere in my throat.

“Why would I lie about that?”

“I don’t know!” I shot back, my voice rising in frustration. “Maybe because it hurts less than admitting you just gave up on me. That you gave up on us.”

“I never gave up,” he retorted. “I left those letters on her porch, begging her to tell me where you were. I knocked on every single door in San Francisco, tirelessly searching for you. But you—you—were the one who didn’t want to see me.”

Something inside me twisted so hard it hurt.

Blake’s eyes flickered to me, his face flushed with emotion. “So I stopped chasing you, but I didn’t stop thinking about you, Beverly. For God’s sake, I never stopped loving you. I concentrated on Stanford. I went to therapy. I did everything I could to be better—because I wanted to be better for you. I wanted to be better if, somehow, some way, I ever had a chance with you again.”

I felt the heat rise in my chest, the pressure building inside me as the truth of what he was saying started to break through the walls I’d put up. All the months of silence and distance were crashing down around me.

Blake didn’t look angry. Just tired. Wrecked.

“You don’t have to believe me,” he said. “But it’s the truth.”

“Maybe she threw them away,” I whispered, my voice barely audible. “Maybe Tiffany was just trying to protect me. Maybe she thought it was easier to let me believe you had forgotten me. Maybe she thought it would hurt less.”

Blake exhaled a long breath, running a hand through his hair, making it messier than before. “I hated myself for not being there for you,” he said, his voice raw. “And I hate that you thought I had moved on. That you thought that I could.”