Surprised, I glanced up at her face, and she smiled at me. “Oh,” I said.

She wiped the tears from my cheek and squeezed me tighter. “You used to talk to me, until you were about five or six.” She laughed softly. “After that, you were all about Luke and Rose. I would see you three, whispering to each other, giggling together, and it made me happy and sad at the same time. Happy that you were all so close, but sad because you’re my baby and I wanted you to confide in me too. Rose wasn’t quiet like you. She let it all hang out, no secrets with that one. You were always my little mystery girl.”

“I don’t talk to Luke like that anymore. We went out tonight and—I don’t even know what he did for all these years when he was home on leave. I have never met Liam before, and they were friends when we were still together. He has secrets, or just stuff he doesn’t want to talk about. He thinks he has to protect me. I don’t like that. I don’t expect to know every little detail about his life without me, but I don’t like how it makes me feel. I feel like I can’t talk freely. It feels like there are things that will push him away if I say them out loud,” I confided. It felt good to talk to her. Those thoughts were like thorns, poking me from the inside, and now they were out.

“He’s been through a lot. It probably hurts to talk about some of it. He’s in therapy. I can only assume he’s getting it out that way,” she said.

“That’s good, but—I guess I feel left out. We used to talk about everything, and it was easy.”

“He’s always put you on a pedestal. But after you two fell in love, I could tell that he was sort of in awe of you, like he got lucky and didn’t want to ruin it.”

I nodded. When we’d first got together, I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world to have a boyfriend who was so romantic and giving. “That was becoming a problem between us. Sometimes I wanted to be the one to take care of him, to comfort him or just talk about what he was going through. But then he got hurt, and it was too late because he was gone,” I said.

“Did you talk about it back then? The distance between the two of you?” she asked.

I didn’t want to admit the truth, but I did it anyway. “No. I didn’t. I just waited for him to tell me on his own. I would ask questions, and I wouldn’t argue when he deflected them. I never told him it bothered me.”