The cut that had glanced bone: Luke had gotten his ex-wife pregnant, and she would become a permanent fixture in his life. Which meant she would become a permanent fixture in my life. I didn’t blame him for not telling me when he’d found out—he was right in that the timing was garbage. I trusted him with her, I did. I believed him, it was true. But finding out like I did was brutal, shocking and brutal and too fast to follow, leaving me no time to process or even react beyond the knee-jerk desire to get as far away as I could. It was my nightmare—there had been no way to plan around it, no way to prepare, and the trauma had been blunt and forceful, taking me out at the knees.

But the deepest wound of all—the biggest, most impossible reason why I could not seem to stop crying—was because I had fallen in love with Luke Bennet.

It was perhaps the worst of all outcomes.

Not because he made me happy. Not in the way he had earned my trust. Not for the freedom I’d found in him. Luke was full of vitality and possibility, his spark igniting something in me that I hadn’t known existed—adventure. Spontaneity. Joy in the unknown.

It wasn’t even because he loved me too.

The painful realization that I had let Luke in was a mortal wound. I gave him my heart, day by day, minute by minute, piece by piece. And that was a sacrifice, one I hadn’t realized the weight of.

Not until yesterday. Not until I had seen him with her, learned of the bond they would share, and I realized with a brutal drag of the knife that I could lose him.

And when he left, he would take my heart with him.

I would be alone again.

Maybe this was the reason I’d guarded myself all this time, all these years. I’d made excuses—work, my father, etcetera, ad infinitum—because I didn’t want to make room for someone. Because when they were gone, the space was still there, empty and whistling with the wind.

The cavernous space left by my mother had never closed, never contracted.

I wondered if the one Luke left would either. Somehow, I doubted it would.

He didn’t say he was leaving, I told myself as I trudged down the steaming sidewalk toward Longbourne. He doesn’t want to leave any more than you do.

But was that desire, that intention, enough to hold us together through the hurricane on the horizon? Because there was another list, one of truths that made up Luke Bennet, truths that had made themselves too known to ignore.

He was irresponsible enough to have slept with his ex-wife, unprotected. He needed constant change, constant action—without it, he would be miserable—and I needed stability. Stillness. Security. For a moment, I’d thought he could be all that I needed him to be. But the chaos of yesterday had pitched me off a cliff and sent me tumbling in a freefall. Everything had changed, and my bearings were lost. I couldn’t draw the line between the boy I used to know, the man who’d returned, the man I had fallen in love with, and the man he would become.