“How? How will you take care of it? By walking away?” Again. “You’re a chef, and you’re telling me you can’t cook! I could never have imagined you like this. What happened to you?”

“I should never have told you. I should have known you wouldn’t understand.”

“Understand what? Is this what happens when you push away what you want for too long? You forget who you are.”

This wasn’t her. This Ashna had suffocated the Ashna he knew—his Ash. She might have been just a girl he dated in high school, but that girl had breathed life back into him and he had to bring her back. Even if she wasn’t his anymore.

She leaned her head into the door. “Is this what happens when you do exactly as you wish for too long? You stop understanding anyone? You end up selfish and alone?”

Damn right. And it was a condition she had thrust him into. “So, you’re not alone, is that it? You’re surrounded by people who love you. People who love you so much that you need to hide anything that’s important to you from them?”

“Will you ever let that go?”

Never. “Sure, I’ll let it go. But have you ever thought about what it means to hide what’s important to you from those you love?”

“Have you ever considered that maybe I hide it because it’s not worth sharing?”

That should have hurt, but it didn’t. He knew she was lying, and she knew it too.

“Or maybe if you stopped hiding it, you’d have to admit its worth. You’d have to admit your own worth. You’d have to admit that you’re deserving of happiness. And if you did that you’d have to fight for it, and maybe you’ve forgotten how to fight for anything.”

Her hand squeezed the doorknob until her knuckles turned white. His heart felt like that doorknob, squeezed tight in her grip. Silence flooded them like a spotlight, leaving no place for their words to hide.

They stood there like that, time slipping and sliding around them. In the end, she was the first to leave. Instead of going back into the studio, she ran around the building and disappeared, exactly the way she had done twelve years ago.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Wanting to run away was never a conscious thought Ashna had. It was this constant, beating sense that was threaded into her being. So much a part of her that she never examined it. She had sure as hell never acted on it.

There was only an hour before they started shooting the competition segment. But she couldn’t stand to be at the studio. She ran out onto the Embarcadero and slowed to a walk.