Dear Sister,
You might have noticed the lack of adjective in my greeting. Too tired to come up with a good insult. Our dear mother used to say that I needed to pick my hill to die on because I couldn’t die on all the hills. Well, guess what? I think I’m finally starting to understand that.
Your sister, Eleanor
Knox climbed the stairs, not sure what he was walking into. A month ago, he’d have agreed with Lauren wholeheartedly, that Alice was indeed about to walk away from them. But after all the time he and Alice had spent together, practically 24/7, working their asses off, getting to know each other, sometimes laughing, sometimes fighting, sometimes not saying a word but making love all night long . . . she wouldn’t just take off without talking to him, without making plans for how to keep this undeniable connection between them, no matter where their jobs took them.
At the doorway to her room, he stopped short. She had her big duffel bag on the bed and was shoving things into it.
Trying to control his racing heart, he walked over and looked inside. Yep, all her stuff. He pulled out a small bag containing what looked like her current knitting project, a migraine-inducing mix of yellow and green. “Where we going?”
“I’m going.” Taking the knitting back from him, she shoved it into her duffel again. “We’re done with the inn. Lauren’s going to manage things for us. We’re finished here.”
He pulled the knitting back out.
She met his gaze for the first time, and in hers he saw a very carefully banked grief that stole his breath. “Alice.” Stepping toward her, he cupped her face. “Why are you running?”
“I’m not.”
What a devastatingly gorgeous liar. He brushed a kiss to her temple and was gratified to feel her lean into him. “Can we go for a ride?” he asked. “Talk?”
“We already went for a ride, a month-long one. And it was . . .” She closed her eyes for a beat. “Amazing.” She stepped back. “But it’s time to go back to solo.”
It wasn’t often that anxiety gripped him by the gonads, but it did now. “Why?”
She just gave him a look.
“So you’re going to let the email of a dead woman chase you out of here? You’re tougher than that, Alice.”
She turned the laptop he’d left on her bed to face him. That morning, he’d woken up to her already in the shower, and he’d spent a minute running through his work emails and his accounts before joining her.
Alice made the screen live, revealing the spreadsheet he’d left open, with the balances of his bank accounts showing.
Well, hell.
She was watching him. “That’s a whole lot of zeros.”
He wasn’t sure what to say to that. “You’re mad because I’m not broke?”
“Nope. I’m mad because you lied.”
He shook his head. “I’ve never lied to you.”
“On day one, I asked you—No, I begged you and Lauren to think about buying me out. I didn’t want to be here and you knew that.”
“I did.” And back then, maybe he hadn’t taken her wanting to leave seriously. But in the weeks since, he’d come to take her very seriously. She was clutching a T-shirt in her hands, ready to add it to the duffel. “Is that my shirt?”
“Yes. I’m stealing it. I’m not a liar like some people, but I am a thief.”
She had that right. She’d also stolen his heart. “Listen, I—”
“No, Knox, you listen. There were so many options. We could’ve gotten the lawyer to redo the partnership without me, worked out a deal where you didn’t have to pay me anything until the inn was in the black again, anything. Only you wouldn’t even consider it. So I had to stay, and that’s fine. I learned a lot about myself. I also learned who I can trust, who I can’t, and that’s fine too. But I never thought you’d be one of them.” She brought his shirt up to her face and inhaled.
He was pretty sure she had no idea she was even doing it. “Alice—”
“I don’t care that you have money,” she said. “You work your ass off. You’re smart and resourceful and successful. I’m not surprised by any of that. But you know what I do care about? That you let me think you couldn’t buy me out, when you clearly could, probably without losing most of those pretty zeros. Why not just be honest? That you enjoyed making me stay here in my own personal hell this past month.”
“If that’s what you think, we have a bigger problem than I thought.” He stopped and looked at what appeared to be his deodorant, also in her bag.
“So I want to smell like you, so what?”
Damn, he loved her. “Alice, you can take everything I own. And what I said that first day was that I wouldn’t buy you out. Not that I couldn’t.”
She took this in with heartbreaking uncertainty, then tossed his shirt into her bag and zipped it. “You know what? Forget it. I don’t care anymore. I put in my time, and now I’m out.”
As she shouldered her bag and turned to the door, he felt panic sink like a stone in his gut. Catching her hand, he very slowly pulled her around to face him. “You have to trust me when I say this. I never meant to hurt you.”
“Trust you?” She let out a mirthless laugh. “As it turns out, there’s no one I can trust anymore, and it doesn’t matter anyway.” Belying those words, her eyes filled. “I’m best off on my own. Goodbye, Knox.” And with that, she walked out the door, pausing only to grab his ball cap from the dresser.
He was still standing there when Stella started up with a rumble, watching out the window as she vanished down the driveway.
Lauren came running into the room, stopping at his side. She looked into the yard, now empty of one 1972 Blazer. “Oh, no. Knox, I’m so sorry.”
He exhaled but didn’t speak. Wasn’t sure he could.
“Do you know what my biggest regret is?” she asked. “It’s not when I turned down Will. It’s that after Alice took off because she was so hurt—me being one of the ones who hurt her—I didn’t go after her.”
Knox tore his gaze from the window and looked at her.
“I mean, yes, we talked occasionally, but it wasn’t the same. For her, going is easier than giving anyone another chance to hurt or disappoint her.”
“You want me to go after her.”
“You would be the first,” Lauren said. “And if you told her how you feel about her, how much you love her, that would be another first for her.”
“And if she still wants to run?”
Her eyes were shimmering with tears at the thought. “Well, then, at least you gave her the chance to choose love.”