“What if I told you that I don’t want you to run?” he asked.

You know better than to let him matter, something inside me whispered. You damn well know better.

“What if,” Nick continued, “I told you that I don’t need your help to get Jessi into the Symphony Ball anymore? What if I told you your debt was paid?”

I went very still, and the muscles in my stomach tightened. “What are you talking about?”

“I haven’t needed to play nice with high society for weeks,” Nick told me, his voice as soft as his touch and both like fire to my nerve endings. “Your grandmother told me to consider it taken care of. Turns out she has a soft spot for girls from the wrong side of the tracks with lofty aspirations.”

There was nothing chilling in those words. No reason I should have felt dread pooling in my stomach. “When?” I said.

He knew what I was asking. “The fund-raiser at the Arcadia hotel. While you were outside.”

That was the first time we went out. Weeks ago. I couldn’t make my mind slow down. Before Fourth of July. Before we were ever . . .

I stepped back, away from his touch. Away from him.

“See?” Nick told me, his voice low enough that it was almost lost to a sudden, punishing wind. “When things get real, you run.”

“You lied to me,” I said.

He just looked at me. “That’s not why you’re pulling away.”

I shook my head, feeling cornered and caught and like something horrible might happen—or already had. “I have to go. I told Aunt Olivia I’d be home for dinner. And Lily . . .”

“Lily is dealing with a crap hand life dealt her,” Nick told me. “But we both know people who’ve dealt with worse. She’ll come out of this okay. Don’t make her your reason for walking out of here and away from me.”

I wanted to say something else. I wanted him to be wrong. But he wasn’t.

“I have to go,” I said again.

“I’m not going to chase you,” he told me. “If you’re too damned scared to let this be real, if I don’t get to matter to you, if I have to let this be nothing for you to stay—then go.”

Go.

He called after me as I fled. “I’m done playing, Sawyer. If you’re too much of a coward to stay? Don’t come back.”

CHAPTER 50

I have to go. I played the words I’d said to Nick over and over again in my mind. I made it halfway through dinner before thinking about what he’d said in return.

Don’t come back.