“Delilah.” He leans closer, his big shoulders bunching. “You’re not hearing me. The necklace belongs to you or no one.” Coffee-black eyes peer at me from under the sweep of thick lashes. “You’re under no obligation to wear it, but don’t expect me to return the thing either. It’s a decade too late for that.”

“Stubborn.”

His grin is quick but fond. “Says the most stubborn woman I know.” The easy expression fades, and he takes a breath. “I meant every word I wrote. And I know it isn’t enough . . .”

“Words never feel like enough,” I say. He winces, and I continue in a soft rush. “When you’re the one saying them. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t. You opened a window to your heart. You gave me your trust. You didn’t have to do any of that, but you did. And it means something.”

He seems to consider this but then draws himself upright, a new, deeper tension moving over his features. “There’s a bit more.”

“More?”

Macon reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small bundle of folded papers. “I could tell you all this. But it’s the past that’s haunting us now, so I think it’s better if you hear it from the me that you used to know. It isn’t exactly pretty, and some of it I am ashamed of, but these, too, are yours.”

He sets the bundle on the table before me. “Read them. If you want to end this afterward, it will hurt badly. But I won’t stop you. We’ve played enough games over the years. I don’t want what’s between us to be another one.”

Gray edges my vision, and I expel a hard breath. I want to tell him that it will never be over for me, but he doesn’t wait for my answer, doesn’t even meet my eyes; he simply nods toward the papers. “Go on. I have nothing left to hide.”

With another breath, I unfold the pages. The letters are all clearly written on whatever paper must have been on hand: stationery, spiral notebooks, a rumpled scrap. The ink is different on each one: some in black, some in blue. One is scrawled in smudged pencil lead. The top letter is the oldest, dated a few months after my family moved to Los Angeles, the black ink scrawled so hard there are small punctures where the pen pushed through the paper.

D—

My mother is dead. The doctors say it was an aneurism. Personally, I think she simply did not want to be here any longer. I empathize.