All he had to do was make sure things didn’t go too far.

Harper had never done anything this out of character. Once she’d convinced Tobias to keep his own room and he’d gone to bed, she lay awake, staring at the ceiling in his small living room and thinking about how impetuous she’d been to even suggest she spend the week with a man she barely knew.

But, strangely enough, she felt safe around Tobias, comfortable. He seemed to understand grief and how hard it was to recover from the blow she’d sustained. And when she imagined what it would be like in her sister’s big house at this moment—with everyone gone and the rest of the night yawning before her—she was glad for the change of scenery and situation.

She certainly wasn’t tempted to call Axel while she was here, so there was that, too.

Burrowing deeper into the comforter Tobias had taken off his bed, she breathed in the scent of his cologne and decided that, crazy as it seemed, she’d made the right decision. She felt better than she had in ages. But he was right. It would be a mistake to sleep together. She had too much responsibility to be that impulsive.

Kicking off the covers, she got up to dig her phone out of her purse and turn it to Vibrate. She didn’t want the ring to wake him if her sister or her girls called early in the morning.

She was just putting her cell on the coffee table when she noticed the wallpaper on her phone and pulled it back to take a closer look. Behind the apps was a photo of her and Axel from their college days, when they were still dating. Because it had been so rainy and muddy that night, he was carrying her on his back and both of them were wet and laughing. The friend who’d snapped it had just sent it to her a few months ago, and since it represented the foundation on which she’d built her life—what she’d been trying so hard to save—she’d set it as her background picture, as if her stubborn denial could change reality.

Navigating to her photo albums, she scrolled through the photos she had saved until she came up with one of her and the girls alone—which wasn’t hard to find because Axel had been gone so much the past few years—and set that as her background instead.

She couldn’t help feeling a tremendous sense of loss as Axel’s smiling face disappeared from her screen. He was also disappearing from her life, and he was taking a very important part of her with him.

But she had no choice—she had to let him go.

“You okay out there?” Tobias called.

He’d obviously heard her moving around.