“Do I?” Her laugh is sweet and brittle, all at once. “Because I just spent the last two hours reading every email that we’ve ever exchanged, and that hate . . . it burned away months ago. I wrote to you when I was alone in my apartment, the silence damn near suffocating, and I wrote to you when I was in a room so packed that I could barely hear myself think. I wrote when I was sick and I wrote when I felt guilty over being happy, because how can I be when the man who raised me is locked up?”

I drag in a lungful of air. “It’s not on you. What he did, sweetheart, it’s not on you.”

“You told me that, too.”

“Because it’s true. You aren’t your father’s sins.”

“Why did you come to New York?”

Swallowing roughly, I glance over my shoulder to sweep my gaze over Bryant Park. Laughter rings in the air. Everywhere I look, there’s happiness and a fuck ton of Christmas cheer. Maybe their lives are a little bleaker at home. Maybe the edges of that happiness are singed with despair or grief. But here, for a few minutes, at least, they can bury the sadness and remember what it’s like to hold joy in the palm of their hands.

“Reid?” she prompts in a soft, aching voice that guts me.

“I wanted to hold you.”

Her sharp inhale is loud, vulnerable.

“I wanted to stop living minute by minute, just waiting for your name to pop up on my screen. I—” Breaking off, I clear my throat but the dryness doesn’t leave. “I wanted—want—more, Laela. And I knew that if I stood even half a chance at making you mine, I’d have to do it in person where you could see that I’m not—”

“You aren’t the enemy,” she whispers.

“You thought so once.”

“I was angry and hurt, and I should never have said those things to you.”

“And I shouldn’t have taken advantage of you not recognizing me. It wasn’t right.” I scrub a hand over my jaw. “Fuck, Laela, it wasn’t right.”

“I felt you right from the start, I think.” Over the line, I hear the squall of a cab honking. “You looked at me like you knew me, like I was yours. It was . . . You made me feel like I was alive, Reid. Like I’d finally stepped out of the shadows to feel the sun on my face.”

Fuck.

Raking my fingers through my hair, I tear away from the Plexiglas and nearly wipe out on my way back to the bench. In record time, I wrestle off the skates and pull my heavy boots back on. I need her in my arms. I need her mouth on mine and her skin under my palms and—

“Where are you?” I growl.

“At BellaDonna.”