“Go buy yourself a peg leg.” I shove my head under the pillow, which smells like mothballs, and I really don’t care.

Yum, mothballs.

Like death, but mothier.

“You know you broke my best friend’s heart.”

“Talk to the universe. I’m saving his life.” My voice cracks, and I want to hit something, but I also want to roll over and go back to sleep and hope that when I wake up in five or six years, I won’t have residual pain in my leg and Wyatt will have found a safe, kind, motherly type of woman that he’s madly in love with who gives him blow jobs every night after she bakes cookies for Tucker.

Okay, maybe I’m not willing to go that far. I didn’t even get the chance to give him a blow job before fate decided blowing up Beck’s house was more important.

Great.

Now I’m dictating when his imaginary girlfriends can go down on him.

And possibly my eyes are leaking.

And if any fucking asshole woman bakes Tucker cookies—

I squeeze my eyes shut, because Tucker’s adorable and sweet, but he’s not mine.

“Eeeellllliiiiiiieeeeeeee,” Beck whines. “Get uuuuuuuuuppp.” He pokes me in the back.

I let him.

He pokes me again.

I still don’t move.

When he pokes me the third time, and I still don’t react, the fucker sits on me. Right on my back with his bony butt.

“Aaahhlp!” I grunt. “Get off.”

“I missed my sister,” he declares.

“I can’t breathe, you ass.”

He moves to sit on my calves, and now, even if I wanted to, I don’t think I could bend right to punch him. “And what do I come home to? A woman who’s not my sister walking around in my sister’s body. What did you do with Ellie, Fake Ellie? Where’d you put her? Are you from Zygorb? Are you an alien wearing my sister’s skin?”

“You are annoying as fuck.”

“I’m annoying? You’re the one who’s pulling this shitty woe is me, the universe hates me, and for once in my life I’m gonna just lay down and take it because I’m afraid to love somebody who might actually break my heart shit.”

I freeze.

Because that might be hitting too close to home.

“Go. Away.”

“Wyatt’s a good dude, Ellie. And he likes you despite you.”

“And he flies in airplanes for his day job and we can’t even kiss without dishwashers leaking and towels catching on fire and Tucker deserves to grow up with a good dad.”

Beck heaves a loud, annoyed sigh and climbs off me. “Fine. Have your pity party. But if you don’t get up, I’m calling Monica, and you know she’ll skip her honeymoon to be here.”

“Dick move. And you’d put her on a private jet and upgrade her to the fanciest cruise in the world to make it up to her.”

“Yeah, but she won’t know that when she comes running.”

Which is why she’s my best friend.

My best girl friend.

My best friend friend might be—dammit.

“And I’ll send Mom,” he adds. “Oh, and by the way, Wyatt was pissed when he found out Cooper lives so close. Dude thought he was bicycling up the mountain to deliver you donuts because he’s angling to get into your pants. Isn’t that a hoot? Ten minutes, Ell. And then I’m singing again too.”

He heads out the door whistling like he has fucking sunshine in his sparkly bright soul, and I realize I’m naked.

I’m naked, with a healing black eye, a sore hip and thigh, and a big ol’ pile of ash in my chest.

But that’s how it has to be.

Because I’ve hurt enough people in my life.

I won’t put Wyatt in danger. He deserves better.

Twenty-Nine

Ellie

I’d planned to stay in Shipwreck through the weekend for recovery time, but with Beck back, the odds of having a minute of peace are nil. Not because he’s always as annoying as he was this morning, but because he’ll be calling anyone he can to hang out while he’s in town, which will undoubtedly be three days or less.

And I don’t want to be in the house when he sees the new high score on Frogger.

Too many memories.

So I convince my dad to ride with me back to Copper Valley before lunch.

When we hit the 256 loop around the city, my eyes sting, because we’re officially now out of the country and out of the mountains. It’s back to the hustle and bustle. Traffic. Billboards. Skyscrapers.

Dad’s quiet the entire ninety-minute drive. When I pull into the driveway of the red brick colonial in the middle-class neighborhood where I grew up, with the old basketball hoop still over the garage door, my eyes burn again.

Dad squeezes my knee. “Been through a lot this year.”

He doesn’t tell me I’m overreacting. Or that it’s okay to be scared, but not okay to let fear rule my life, or any of the other things I logically know.

That’s not how Dad works.

Probably because all the rest of us finally talked him into silence over the years.

But he does offer me a scoop of homemade peach cobbler if I want to stay a few hours.

So that’s how I find myself curled up on my parents’ couch, watching the Fireballs get creamed in high definition, while my dad cuts and sugars early season peaches for our late lunch of peach cobbler.

I don’t realize I’ve drifted off to sleep until the doorbell rings, and when I wake up, I’m disoriented and confused, and it takes me a minute to remember why my heart hurts.

Wyatt.

He probably hates me.

I hope he does. That’ll make it easier for him to move on.

I curl tighter into a ball. The game’s over, and now an old Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks movie is on.

“Ellie, I’m going for a walk,” Dad calls from the front door.

“’Kay,” I answer, frog voice and all.

I haven’t had any peach cobbler yet, but I should go home. I don’t have any food. I need to do laundry. And catch up on work email.

Plus, I could stop at a pet shelter on the way and ask to play with the dogs for a few hours. Guaranteed pick-me-up.

Since Beck sometimes shares my social media posts about dogs that haven’t found their forever homes—always with a caption like Sharing for my sister, who wishes she’d been born a dog so it would be socially acceptable for her to lick my face—I’m undeservedly welcome at all the shelters in the metro area.

I’m staring blindly at Meg Ryan’s profile on the television when the hairs on the back of my neck prickle, and the pile of ashes in my chest gives a big ol’ whomp.

There’s a shadow in the doorway.

A Wyatt-size shadow. Or possibly more than a shadow.

That whomp turns into a staccato beat of whomp after whomp after whomp.

“Please,” I whisper, and I don’t know if I’m asking him to stay or leave. I just know it hurts.

It hurts to think about hurting him.

It hurts to think about losing him.

And it hurts to be terrified that disaster is waiting around every corner if I reject both of my first two options.

He steps slowly into the room, eyes trained on me, searching, asking.

I don’t even have to look him in the eye to know.

He’s not afraid.

He’s not afraid of anything.

“You okay?” he asks, and that voice.

God, I love his voice. Rich and smooth and warm, like hot chocolate after a day playing in the snow.

“Fine,” I say hoarsely, and we both know I’m lying.

I can’t tell if he’s tired, frustrated, or all of the above, but I do know the yellowing bruise on his eye is all the reminder I need of the danger of the two of us getting together.

“Where’s Tucker?” I ask, and dammit, there’s another flame attacking the ashes in my chest.

“With your dad. He’s not too happy about the drive coming up.”

The drive.

He should’ve already left.

Instead, he’s still here, lowering himself to the couch on the opposite end of where I’m curled up, and it’s all I can do not to crawl across the cushions and into his lap to hold him and tell him how sorry I am.

For everything.

For being a shithead when we were kids. For seducing him at Christmas when we were both hurting.

For not answering his phone calls after the accident.

For pushing him away.

“I love you,” he says quietly, his voice husky but strong. No hitch. No hesitation. “I’ve spent my whole life afraid of what it would be like to love you, but I do, Ellie. I love you.”

“You shouldn’t.” He’s going to break me.

“I never thought I was built for marriage. I never believed in forever. But I look at you, and I can feel it. I can see it. You? You’re everything I never knew I wanted. Never knew I needed. I didn’t believe in forever until I believed in you.”

Break me? No. Destroy me. “We’re—we’re dangerous, Wyatt.”

“If there’s anyone in the world who can give the universe a middle finger and tell it to kiss your ass if it thinks it’s going to stand in your way, it’s you.” He sets a piece of paper on the cushion between us. “I don’t care if it takes you two hours or forty years. I’ll wait. You will always be the only woman I’ll ever love.”

My breath hitches when he takes my hand and kisses my cheek, because yes, he’s everything I want.

Everything.

But I’m terrified.

My entire life, all I wanted was to meet the goal.

Of course I dated Patrick. He checked all the boxes. Handsome. Successful. Smart.

We could’ve had a lovely marriage where neither of us actually had to love each other, where there was no danger of a broken heart, because all we wanted was someone to be married to.

But I could have so much more.

Laughter. Joy. Tears. Heartbreak.

With a man who knows me. Who gets me. Who accepts me.

All of me. The good and the bad. The pretty and the ugly. The broken and the whole.