I knew she’d never leave me. Her standing there was proof of it. She’d abandoned her painting, half-finished, to be here so I could keep dragging her around the country like luggage. And if I leveled with her, told her the truth about the danger she was in, she’d just say they didn’t scare her and she wouldn’t let them run her off.

I was nothing but an indentured servant. I’d never get away. But I wouldn’t condemn her to one more dangerous minute of it.

I took one final breath in, let it out, and began. “Sloan, we need to talk.”

She blinked up at me with teary eyes. Those beautiful eyes I wouldn’t see again after today.

My heart held the lie I was about to tell like a shot of poison I was braced to drink. But if I didn’t do it this way, she’d never accept it. She’d never move on. She was too sentimental. It was going to be cruel, but it had to be something final. Something horrible.

Something she’d never forgive.

“What?” she asked. “Jason, what? What’s wrong?”

“Sloan, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for wha…”

I didn’t have to say it. Understanding flickered across her face.

She took a step back, dropping her hands away from me, and I registered briefly that that was the last time she’d ever touch me.

“You…” Her voice was shaking. “You actually slept with her?” she whispered.

I dragged a hand down my mouth. “I didn’t plan what happened last night with Lola. It just happened.”

I knew I would never forget that look on her face. Never. Not if I lived to be a hundred. It was the moment after shattered glass. The tinny buzz in your ears after a loud noise. A plunge into glacial waters, frozen, unable to breathe.

I looked her in the eye. “Sloan, this wasn’t going to work out between us. I think we both knew that. I need to be single, I’m not in any position to be a boyfriend right now.”

She put a trembling hand to her mouth and I wanted to shout that it was a lie. I wanted to close the distance between us and kiss her, tell her it was bullshit, beg her to forgive me for not being what she needed, for not being able to protect her. Instead I picked up the hotel phone and dialed Zane.

I marveled at how calm I was. How collected and matter-of-fact.

“Zane? I found her. She’s here. Can you come down here, please?”

Sloan had backed up to the wall. She was staring at me, unblinking. Tears were streaming down her face. Tucker looked up at me and made a whining noise like he was crying with her.

“I’m going to have Zane take you to the airport,” I said, tucking the phone in my pocket. “I’ll buy your ticket. Ernie will pick you up. Oh,” I said, like I’d just remembered something. “And can you keep Tucker? I don’t have time for him.”

He’d take care of her. She wouldn’t be alone.

I gave her the last of my heart to take with her.

She stared at me in horror. “How…how could you do it?”

But I didn’t have to answer. Zane knocked on the door and I let her in.

She stepped inside and looked back and forth between the two of us in confusion. Sloan crying. Me stoic and dying inside.

“I need you to get Sloan to the airport,” I said. “A first-class flight to Burbank. Get yourself a ticket so you can wait with her at the gate.”

I felt Zane’s disapproving glare, but I didn’t pull my eyes from Sloan to see it. This was the last time I’d look at her, and I didn’t want to turn away, even though the stare she gave me was pure hatred.

Sloan let Zane take her arm and allowed herself to be led away.

The door closed after them, and I fell to my knees as my world shrank around me, suffocating me, the edges turning black.

*

An hour later, with Lola dressed in my flannel and one of Jessa’s hats so the cameras waiting outside the hotel wouldn’t see what she’d done to her hair, I climbed onto Lola’s motorcycle with her sitting behind me, and I drove her to a rehab facility an hour away.

I could have taken an Uber. I could have called a black car or had Zane drive us. But I needed something that could outrun the paparazzi so they wouldn’t know where she went. I did it knowing that Sloan would see this in the tabloids and it would add a final blow to the already-mortal wound I’d inflicted.

I remembered the fear in her eyes that day in Dad’s garage and how I’d vowed never to get on another motorcycle.

The last of my promises, broken.

I checked Lola into a private room, gave the rehab facility my credit card, and had Ernie send them an NDA. Then I stopped for a new phone, and when I got back to the hotel, I blocked Sloan’s number and deleted it. Erased all her messages, all her pictures. Deleted her on social media. All traces. I wouldn’t know where she lived now or have a one-click way to reach out to her in case I had a moment of weakness.

And then, with the final thread between us severed, I lost my fucking mind.

I destroyed my room. I threw a lamp, pushed over a table, and punched a hole in the wall. Then I got drunk. Blindingly, sloppy drunk.

When Zane showed up again, coming into my fog like an apparition, I sat with my back against the closet of my trashed hotel room, holding an empty bottle, with a washcloth wrapped around my bleeding knuckles.

She crouched down and peeled away the blood-soaked towel and I watched her dispassionately. She shook her head at me in that unfazed way she had. “Well, this looks pretty bad. Let’s go. Hospital time.”