“I don’t know if I still like the road,” he admitted. “Maybe I want routine. Maybe I want to wake up in the same bed for more than a few weeks in a row.”

“Okay. What are you saying?” she asked cautiously.

His shoulders jerked toward his ears. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just tired. Or maybe I’m jealous or worried about missing out. Either way, I don’t know how much longer I can do this.” He didn’t actually say the words, but she heard them all the same. He didn’t know how much longer he wanted to do this with her.

“How long have you felt like this?” Maggie asked, her throat tightening up and making it difficult to get the words out. This was why she did what she did. Why she lived like she lived. So no one had the opportunity to do this to her again. And yet it was still happening.

He crossed his beefy arms over his barrel-like chest. “Awhile maybe. I’m not saying you need to start looking for a new me or anything.”

“But…”

He nodded solemnly. “Yeah. But.”

She stepped back from him, needing the distance, and fiddled with her tape measure. “I thought you were all in for life on the road since you and Will broke up?”

How had she missed this? How had she let herself get so dependent on him again?

“I thought so, too. But the thing is, we broke up because of the road.”

She narrowed her eyes. That wasn’t the story he’d given her a year ago. “What are you talking about?”

“He wanted me to choose.”

“Choose what?”

“You or him. And you’d never ask me to choose. So I chose you. But maybe sometimes—like when he posts a picture of his hot new art history professor fiancé—I wonder what it would have been like.”

She felt like the time she’d taken a backward header over a roll of carpet into an open stairwell. Free fall. No time to brace for impact.

Dean had chosen her over Will. A man he’d dated seriously for two years. A man who’d wanted the condo with a water view and the dog park on Saturday afternoons. Hadn’t she and Dean joked about it? Hadn’t she teased him about narrowly escaping the horror of farmers market mornings and Sunday brunches with the same faces every week?

She was an idiot. A big, stupid, self-absorbed idiot.

But she was an idiot with an old wrong to right.