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The girl who twirled bottles behind the bar, flashing skin on Friday nights to earn bigger tips. The girl who still lived across the hall from her dad because it was all they could afford.

I splashed water on my face, trying to calm the shaking in my hands.

And then?—

“Blue!”

West’s voice carried from the living room, sharp, commanding, laced with something that sent chills racing down my spine.

Chapter Fifty

WEST

They sayif you love someone, you let them go.

And maybe I didn’t even know what kind of love existed between Blue and me, but I knew enough to recognize I couldn’t keep asking her to carve pieces out of her life for me. I couldn’t take her away from her dad, from Fiddlers, from everything that mattered to her, just so I could keep lying to a billionaire from Texas and convince him to line my pockets.

Ending it hadn’t been my plan for tonight. I’d meant to wait, to soften the edges. But when the words came out of my mouth, I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought she’d be relieved. Instead, the look on her face gutted me.

She hadn’t expected it. Hell, neither had I.

I’d told her the bar was hers, that the lake house was in her name too. That place never meant as much to me as it did her. I couldn’t shake that maybe fate had kept it in my hands all these years just so I could give it to her. She deserved it more than I ever did.

She locked herself in the bathroom. And I gave her space, pacing the living room, dragging my hands through my hair as if that would keep the pieces of me from splintering apart. Theonly thing anchoring me to my resolve was knowing that after her dad got home, I was going to try again, but the right way. Not from the premise of using her.

The house was quiet except for my footsteps. My eyes roamed the room, cataloguing the old worn couch, the boxy TV that looked like it weighed a hundred pounds, a shelf cluttered with dusty encyclopedias and how-to guides no one had cracked open in years.

And then I saw it.

An old photo frame, glass scratched, paint chipped along the edges.

At first, I barely looked because it was just another family picture, another reminder of the life Blue had fought to hold together. But something tugged at me, and I looked again.

The woman was Blue’s mother. Younger, smiling stiffly at the camera. And next to her with her arms crossed and lips pressed in defiance was Blue. Younger, smaller, but unmistakably her.

Then my eyes caught the other girl, and the breath left my chest immediately.

She had a face I knew. A face that had been burned into me since the night my parents died.

Brittany Donovan.

The girl I had hated for twenty years for no other reason than she reappeared in my nightmares so much. A reminder of the night I was forever changed into the hard shelled man I am now.

My stomach twisted. My hand clenched at my side as I called out, “Blue.”

My voice was sharp, almost angry, echoing down the hall. Her footsteps came quick but hesitant. She found me standing in front of the frame, my jaw tight, my chest heaving like I’d just been punched.

“Who’s this?” My finger pointed directly at the face that had detonated something inside me.

Blue’s eyes darted to the photo. Her voice was soft, uncertain. “That’s my sister. And my mom.”

My throat felt dry. “How much older is she than you?”

“Ten years,” she said carefully. “I told you, my mom had her before she met my dad.”

“What’s her name?”

“Brittany.”