“I don’t deserve your forgiveness.” His voice broke. He took a step closer, standing less than a foot away.

I could smell him from there. That scent that used to comfort me was now choking me. My vision blurred as tears filled my eyes. My chest was on fire. “Get away.” I pushed him back, trying to maintain some space between us.

His fingers wrapped around my wrists, his hands flattening against my fists as I clutched at his graduation gown. “I’m sorry, Bay.” He traced his finger along the back of my balled-up hands, over my knuckles.

Letting out the breath I’d been holding, I shakily snatched my hands back, keeping my gaze trained on the center of his chest. I gritted my teeth and met his gaze. “I don’t care. I’m not going to say it’s okay or that I forgive you, because it’s not, and I don’t. You can choke on those words and what you did for the rest of your life. When I said you were wrong, I lied. No one could love you for who you truly are because you’re an asshole who can’t help but destroy the people around you.”

“Bay!” My mom’s voice broke through the throngs of people around us.

I knocked the chairs out of the way, rushing toward her, burying my face in her chest.

Her arms wrapped around me, squeezing me and rocking me. “Your dad would have been so proud of you, sweetheart. He’s here with us.”

That broke the last of the dam. I held on tight to her. This whole day I hadn’t thought about my dad. What kind of shitty daughter did that make me? Instead, I’d been fixated on the boy who broke me. I peered over at the sea of people in navy and gold. There was one figure sitting in a chair with his head in his hands as people celebrated around him. I allowed myself one last look. It would be the last I’d ever give him.

38

Bay

Four Years Later

* * *

“Dare.” My lips were numb. My whole body was numb. He stood in front of me, as though saying his name had conjured him from my past, a memory brought to life and made manifest through sheer force of will. He wasn’t a mirage or a dream, though. He was here.

As quickly as all those happy memories flooded in, right behind them was the pain and the heartache. The cracked-open chest with a gaping hole where my heart had once been, all because of him.

“Bay.” He said it like a prayer.

A wet splatter ripped me back from drowning in the memory well.

“Oh, shit.” Felicia clutched her stomach. Her legs and my floor were now drenched with water. No, not water, something much more terror-inducing. “That was my water.”

“Oh, shit.” A chorus of voices added to her own.

There was a flurry of activity. I shot off a message to her husband. He rushed over to the building, getting there just as the ambulance arrived to take her to the university hospital.