This was somehow worse, the proof that Jonathan was right, that she did indeed blame herself. Feeling hollow at the notion that she’d been feeling this way for ten years, Aidan shook his head. “Why would you possibly blame yourself?”

“Because she was just trying to be like me!” She covered her face. “I’d climbed the face and hiked down and she couldn’t let it go until she’d done the same.” She broke off and swallowed hard before covering her mouth with a hand and closing her eyes. “If I hadn’t bragged about it—”

“Lily, that was your relationship with her, competitive to the core. What happened to her up there was an accident. A horrible, tragic accident. But it wasn’t your doing.”

Her eyes flew open, filled with surprise, and that just about killed him. Hadn’t anyone else ever told her these things? She was still staring at him when he took her hands in his and lifted them up to his mouth, where he brushed his lips over her knuckles. “Not your fault,” he repeated softly as it all clicked into place and made sense for him.

She’d left because of grief.

She’d stayed away because of guilt.

Not because of him. The knowledge at once changed things for him and also devastated him—for her. “Ashley was book smart but not street smart. We both know that. She didn’t have your logic skills, your ability to know your own limits. She was headstrong and self-centered and she did whatever she wanted—not thinking about the cost to anyone, especially you. You can’t carry around the responsibility for what happened to her, you just can’t. And more than that, she wouldn’t want you to.”

She pulled free and moved to the woodstove. “It’s June and I’m about to light a fire,” she said, her back to him. “Definitely not in San Diego anymore, Toto.”

Nudging her aside, he crouched before the woodstove and began to build her a fire.

“I can do that,” she said.

“I know.” He was expertly and efficiently crisscrossing the kindling, then adding the wood on top, doing what would have taken her a good half hour in less than a minute.

“You’re good at that,” she said, but it wasn’t his fire skills she was admiring. It was the easy way he was balanced on the balls of his feet, his pants stretched taut across what was surely the best ass in all of Cedar Ridge.

He rose and met her gaze, and she could feel herself blush because what if he could read her mind?

“I’m good at a lot of things,” he murmured.

Dammit.