Page 59

Those questions had been rattling around in my brain for years. I had moments when the need to understand overwhelmed me, but I often found myself capable of working through it.

Now that I’d seen her again and knew she was in Landing for the foreseeable future, I didn’t think it was going to be so easy to push past the questions and pretend I wasn’t interested in learning the truth.

Didn’t I deserve at least that much?

Jules leaned in my direction, resting her weight on the arm of the chair. “How did she seem?”

Over the last several years, I’d learned to observe what was going on around me more than I had before things took that awful turn between Layla and me. But there was something about seeing her two days ago that had me resorting to old habits.

I didn’t pay enough attention.

As much as my focus was all on her, it was on the longing I felt seeing her there. It was on the questions I’d had rattling around in my brain for years about what went wrong between us.

And I was obviously distracted by her beauty. It wasas though I’d had those years of memories replaying themselves in my head as I stared at her. Memories of running my fingers through her hair and holding her hand and kissing her mouth. Some memories that had been buried for so long and only came to the surface when she was standing in front of me again.

For those reasons, I could only give Jules the most obvious response to her question. It was the only thing that stuck out enough for me to be unable to ignore. “More than anything, she seemed stunned.”

Jules nodded. “That sounds about right. I think it was the same for the both of us when I saw her, too. She might have been too stunned to speak, Liam.”

“She did speak, though. It’s just that she could only bring herself to apologize.”

“Well, maybe she’s sorry,” Tate reasoned.

“But for what? And why did it take her all these years to figure that out?” I countered.

“I don’t know. Did she say that? Did she tell you anything about what led her to leaving you? Maybe there’s a good explanation.”

Was that even a possibility? Was there any justifiable reason for rejecting my proposal and never even offering any clarification as to why?

I got nothing from her.

Not a hint of anything to indicate where I went wrong and what I’d done to push her away beyond admitting my proposal made her panic.

“She didn’t tell me anything. She only apologized. And the truth is, I think she did that because she couldn’tbring herself to say or do anything else. I only received that apology because I showed up at the store unannounced. It was the best she was willing or able to do in that situation.”

Silence stretched between us as Tate and Jules considered my thoughts.

“You know we love you, Liam,” Jules eventually began. “I don’t think any of us can deny what you went through for years. You have every reason to be upset and to feel frustrated. But maybe it was overwhelming for her to see you again after all these years.”

“It was the same for me. Do you know what that was like?”

“I know it must have been difficult.” She offered a sympathetic look. “And that leads me to draw some conclusions.”

My brows knit together. “Like what?”

She held my stare for several beats, the tension building in my body. “Can you tell me whether you were even in a place where you could hear the truth from her, whatever it might have been?”

I looked away, returning to my attention to the lake as I recalled my mindset that morning. I’d gone into it unsure of what would happen, but believing I’d be able to handle whatever did.

But one look at her made that conviction fly out the window. God, it was like everything inside me had stopped functioning altogether.

“I left so fast, she couldn’t have told me anything even if she wanted to,” I confessed. My throat was unbearablytight. “I didn’t expect how much I’d feel seeing her again.”

“Oh, Liam.” Jules’s voice was barely a whisper. When I looked at her, I saw the sadness etched into her features.

Tate’s expression mirrored our sister’s. “I wish I knew what to say to you. But I don’t. I don’t because I don’t know how you’ve survived this long without losing your mind. Ava left for a couple of months at a time, and I was lost. And when things weren’t good between us, the tension I felt every time I saw her was unbearable.”

I remembered that situation vividly.