Different book. Different Scarlett. Different outcome.

Ryan has been very careful not to ask me about my breakdown. There have been a few times when he’s skirted around the issue but stopped himself short of asking. For some reason, he seems reluctant to talk about it. I’m not entirely sure if it’s because he’s worried that asking will remind me why I left in the first place or if it’s because he truly doesn’t want to know. There are so many things I want to tell him, but I decide to let him take the lead. If he keeps changing the subject before asking, he has his reasons. I’ll respect those boundaries. Anything he wants to know, I’ll disclose. But for now, at least, I want to give us a chance to look forward instead of back. It’s what he seems to need from me, and I want to make him happy.

One night as we’re lying face-to-face in his bed, sated but still unable to take our hands off each other, Ryan skates his fingers lightly over the curve of my hip. He’s taken to touching me in small ways like this, ways that are full of both tenderness and awe, as if he can’t believe I’m here with him.

“Five years.” He says it like a prayer, like he’s lifting his gratitude that we came back to each other up into the universe. It has been such a long time and also no time at all.

“Five years,” I whisper back, hoping that if I add my prayer to his, it’ll mean something more.

“What did you do all that time?”

This is the first time either of us have broached the subject. It feels like a carefully designed question, dipping his toes into the waters of the past, and I imagine he’s working backward toward the day I left. Which is good. It gives me a chance to think carefully about how I want to tell that story when the time comes.

“This and that,” I hedge.

He pinches me, and I giggle. Smoothing over the spot with his thumb, he smiles softly. “Were you alone that whole time?”

“Are you asking me if I slept with anyone else? Because if we’re sharing that kind of history, you’d better be ready to fess up yourself.”

“No,” he says quietly, unwilling to play into my teasing. His tone quickly sobers my mood. His gaze drops to my lips, then back to meet mine. “I called everyone when you wouldn’t answer me. Trina, Mandy, Ava, Katherine…anyone who would have had any contact with you. None of them knew where you were. I went to your condo more times that I’d like to admit that first year. No one had heard a word from you. When I saw your condo was for sale, I finally gave up.”