“So choose not to,” she said.

“That’s what I’m doing. Whether you can see it or not, that’s what I’m doing.”

“Well, from here it looks a whole lot like running,” she said.

“You can think what you like.”

“You have to tell me you don’t love me,” she said, facing him head-on. “You have to tell me.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m not going to let you take the coward’s way out. I’m not going to let you try to make this about me not knowing what I feel. I’m not going to let you talk all around it. You better look me in the eye and tell me you don’t love me, Gabe Dalton. Because if you can’t do that then why should I walk away?”

“Love doesn’t mean anything. My dad tells my mom he loves her all the time. He did it before they were married. When they got married. When he would come out of the bed of another woman. What the hell does love mean either way?”

“Say it,” she said, crossing her arms. “I dare you.”

“I don’t love you, Jamie. I’m not the kind of man who falls in love.”

She steeled herself against the words, let them glance off her like a blow. She swallowed hard, her hand shaking. “Then I think we’re done here.”

“I think it would be best. It was good working with you, Jamie.”

“You don’t need me anymore?”

She kept a sharp eye on his face. “I’ll manage.”

“You either could have managed without me before, or not. So which was the lie?”

“Just go, Jamie.”

She turned, feeling strangely numb, her feet feeling disconnected from the earth as she walked on. And in her head, that refrain rang on.

Stand up. Wipe the blood off.

Stand up. Wipe the blood off.

Don’t cry. Don’t cry.

She got in her truck and closed the door, starting the engine and heading down the road. She didn’t look back, her shoulders held straight, her body stiff. And it wasn’t until she made it a few miles down the highway that the first tear rolled down her face. And another. Then another.

She pulled over to the side of the road and put the truck in Park, burying her face in her hands, a sob breaking through her body.

She couldn’t stop. She couldn’t get up.

She couldn’t just wipe the blood off and go on. There was no Band-Aid for a wound like this. There was nothing to stanch the flow of misery that was pouring through her. She cried, cried and cried, and the whole time she kept thinking about the realization she’d had on the camping trip. Some things couldn’t be fixed. But they had to be felt.

And losing the man you loved... You had to feel it.

She had always thought that something like this was a weakness. Something that she would never fall prey to.

But she realized as she sat there on the side of the road, the highway on one side and a wall of pine on the other, that this was the strongest damn thing she’d ever done.