All I can do is trust that this is the right thing for both of us and hope she sees it, too. She deserves better than this. She deserves more than half-assed kisses and hollow conversations. She deserves better than me.

“I’ll always care about you, Mandy. Always. And I know you’ll fall in love again and walk down that aisle someday. I know you’ll find someone who sees the scariest, darkest parts of you and loves the shit out of you anyway. Someone who presses your buttons, gets under your skin, makes you crazy in all the best ways. Someone who makes you feel so alive, you can’t imagine going back to the shell of a human you were before you met them. Someone who sees you, really sees you, stripped down and raw, and wants to collect all your broken pieces and cherish them like they are something beautiful.”

I take a deep breath. Then another.

My heart is pounding against my ribs, my vision blurring. Mandy is staring at me like I was momentarily possessed by Nicholas Sparks.

Fuck.

I close the gap between us and grab her face between my hands, pulling her forehead in for a kiss. “Mandy, Mandy, sweet as candy,” I whisper, echoing the rhyme I’d sing to her when we were teenagers. “I don’t regret you. And I pray you can forgive me someday and we can be friends, because my heart won’t be the same without you in it. But I understand if you can’t, and I respect that.” Her eyes are shut tight, weighed down by the burden I am handing her. “I know this isn’t the happily ever after you imagined. I’m so sorry for that. But I promise you’ll get it, and when you do, you’ll look back and this will all make a hell of a lot more sense.”

I place one last kiss against her hairline, watching as her tears silently dampen her cheeks.

Then I pull away and walk out her front door.

Chapter Twenty-One

Cora: I did a thing.

I’m sitting at my kitchen table that Saturday afternoon, eating one of those frozen macaroni and cheese dinners, when Cora’s text comes through.

Me: How outrageous are we talking?

Cora: Hmm. Upper medium?

Me: On a scale of “I cut my own bangs” to “I bought a llama farm”

Cora: Let’s just say I bought the llama from the farm. Two of them.

Me: Wtf?

I’m about to just call her when a picture text comes through and I almost choke on a noodle. It’s a selfie of Cora holding a scraggly Yorkie mix in one arm, while her other arm is draped around a German Shepherd, hugging the animal to her chest.

Me: … …

Cora: I sort of adopted a serial killer’s two dogs. Meet Jude and Penny Lane.

Twenty minutes later, I’m standing in her living room.

“Are you nuts?” I glance at the two dogs curled up together in one giant dog bed as the miniature bed sits empty. “You adopted Earl’s dogs? The ones who were going to eat us?”