She tries to smile, but her lips won’t cooperate. It’s just a flicker of movement that demonstrates the struggle that’s warring inside her.

“So this is it?” she asks, her voice a few notes higher than it should be. “So this is goodbye and you leave?”

“I don’t have a choice.”

She looks at me in disbelief, and then slowly anger slides across her eyes. “No, you had a choice. I didn’t.”

She pulls away from me.

“You had a choice. I didn’t.”

That’s what I wanted to do—to give her a choice. Am I wrong not to do that now?

“You had these meetings before you came to Bloomfield,” she says, pain thick in her voice.

I hate this.

I mull the pros and cons as quickly as my emotional brain will let me. If I give her a choice, it would put her on the spot. She can’t win. And even if she chooses to let me into her life, she’ll clearly lose at some point anyway.

Damn it.

She just looks at me like I am now the enemy. It kills me; it makes me want to take it all back and just do what’s easier right now—admit the truth.

But I can’t. If I have to be the enemy to save her, I will.

“This was always on the books,” I say. “You knew that.”

Her brows shoot to the ceiling. “What was that shit last night, then? When you were saying that you liked it here or whatever? Or did I completely read that the wrong way?”

Fuck.

“No. I told you—today changed a lot of things,” I say.

She swallows once, twice, three times. I wonder if she has a lump in her throat, too, and if it’s strangling her like mine is me.

I reach for her hand, but she pulls away. It’s like a knife through my heart.

“This is not what I want, Palmer.”

“Really? Then you’re not the man that I thought you were. Because that guy always gets what he wants. That guy got my number when I turned him down and finagled his way into dinner with me. He had me kissing him in a shed and inviting him over to my house, even though I knew this would end this way.”

“Palmer—”

She points a finger at me. “I’m not blaming you. I’m blaming me. Because I knew better, and I let myself fall for a smooth-talking baseball player that acted like he gave a shit.” She laughs angrily. “I’m sorry, Cole. I’m calling bullshit on your story.”

Palmer gets to her feet. “I need you to leave.”

What? I stand too.

“I need you to go,” she says again, holding a hand against her forehead. “I can’t deal with anything else right now.”

“Let’s—”

“Go. Now.”