Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
So on the drive home, worn thin and reckless and so tired of the frost, I reach for the old spell one last time.
My borrowed heart is still going for him even now, quick and hopeful across the dark of the car, too dumb to know the frost has set for good, still reaching the way it has all along.
"Were you jealous?"
"No."
"Liar—" The word simply slips out, and only as a joke, but when his gaze suddenly snaps toward me, I just know...
No. No. No.
This is the beginning of the end.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
"YOU THINK I WANT YOU?"
The words hit the marble and come back at me from three directions.
We're barely through the door. My bag is still on my shoulder, one heel half off, the party still glittering on my skin, and the man I love is looking at me the way you look at something you scraped off your life.
"That's not—"
"You think any of this was about you." It isn't a question. He says it low and terrible, closing the distance I spent a whole week trying to close, except now I want it back, now I want a wall. "Let me help you. I only ever wanted one thing in this apartment. It was never the girl."
"Maximo, you're scaring me—" I say his name like it can call him back because surely the man who handed it to me is still somewhere inside this one.
He isn't.
"I only wanted Mary's heart!"
The name goes into the room like a stone down a well.
Mary.
The girl behind the locked door. The gap-toothed girl in every photograph. The made bed nobody sleeps in. The grave with the too-neat flowers, where I crouched with my blurry eyes and thanked a stranger for the rest of my life.
Mary.
And all at once it makes a terrible kind of sense.
Because a man doesn't come apart like this over a sister. He doesn't look at the girl living in his home like she's forbidden, like wanting her is a crime he can't stop committing, over a sister's heart alone.
It wouldn't be this if I just had his sister's heart. Oh, if only it were that simple.
So she couldn't have only been his sister. Stepsister, maybe, or no blood at all, but more than that, she was the girl he loved. The one he lost. And I've been living in his home wearing her heart, laughing with it, flirting with it, falling for the one man on earth it used to beat for.
"Everything inside your chest belongs to her."
And all I can do is bite down hard while Maximo breaks my heart—no, while he breaks hers, the heart I only ever borrowed, and that makes it so, so much worse.
"You exist because she died. You've been living in my home laughing with her heart, flirting with her heart, and I let you. I let you."
Maximo picks up his coat, and all I can do is just stand there.
He walks out of his own home, and it's only when the door closes behind him with the small, final click of every good thing leaving at the same time—
That's when my knees buckle.
And I crash to the floor.
And I can no longer keep the tears from falling.
I loved him. I love him still. But now I know I have to stop.
I have to.
There's no way I can keep loving him when his heart...and my heart...
It all belongs to Mary.
I'm so, so sorry.
Never mine.
I'm sorry, Mary. Never will be.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
MAXIMO DROVE UNTIL the tank complained, and then he drove some more, and when he finally came back it was the ugly hour before dawn and every window in the penthouse was dark.
Good, he told himself. She's asleep. She'll have cried it out. In the morning she'll be furious, and furious he could survive; furious meant a fight, and a fight meant she was still here to have it.
He let himself in without a sound, braced for the wreckage. There wasn't any. That was the first wrong thing.
He stood in the entryway and listened to his own home and couldn't place, at first, what was missing. Then he had it, and it went through him colder than anything he'd said.
The silence.
Not the old silence, the one he had lived inside for two years, the one he had built the rules to protect. A new silence, the shape of a girl who wasn't singing in the shower or heckling the television or laughing on a kitchen floor she wasn't supposed to sit on. The apartment had learned her noise. Now the noise was gone, and the quiet it left behind had edges.
She's calming down, he told himself, standing in the dark. This is what calming down sounds like.
He almost believed it.
He went to bed telling himself it, and he lay awake telling himself it, and somewhere down the hall he could hear the smallest sounds, a drawer, a zipper, the careful movements of someone trying not to wake anyone.