The Life You Stole (Life Duet 2)

“I did,” I murmured, ripping the card into tiny pieces. “I’m going to do some inventory in the back if you need me.”

“Uh-huh …” Sophie hummed in her pouty tone.

Tapping Graham’s name in my contacts, I brought the phone to my ear while closing the door to the back room.

“Hey, Evelyn, give me a second …” he answered. His voice muffled in the background, but I made out the “everyone please leave the room” part.

Graham loved me.

Graham sent flowers.

Graham cleared rooms to make me his priority.

Graham could save the world, defy gravity, and walk on water … but he would never be Ronin.

“I’m back. I take it you got my apology?”

“I feel like you threatened the people I love. In the bathroom you said, ‘For everyone’s safety, this needs to stay between us.’ That felt like a threat. When you said I would eventually have to give you something in return and that something was me … that felt like a threat. That’s not love, Graham. Friends don’t threaten friends like that. True friends give unconditionally or not at all. I can’t accept your apology unless you take back all those things you said to me. And even then, it’s going to take time for you to earn back my trust. My trust can’t be bought.”

“Can I steal it?” He chuckled. “If I can’t buy something or steal it, how do I get it?”

“Good deeds.”

“I write checks for good deeds. That’s how it’s done right? How else do you do a good deed?”

I couldn’t play his joking game. The things he said to me in the bathroom, the way he said them to me, wasn’t a joke. He meant them. The truth could right the wrong of a lie, but nothing fixed the truth. His love was ugly and so was his truth.

“I’ve been replaying every word in my head, formulating a plan. Figuring out what’s the worst that could happen if I told Lila she should leave you, if I confessed everything to Ronin, if I walked away from the shop and gave you back your building, if I told my sister she took a gift from the Devil. Then what? What would you do to me? To my family? To Lila?”

After a good thirty seconds of silence, I wondered if we were still connected. Just as I started to say something, Graham said four simple words that I never expected him to say. “I would be devastated.”

No begging.

No new threats.

No attempting to call my bluff.

His reaction left me feeling my own kind of devastation.

There were a lot of what-if’s that I imagined before confronting him, but I never expected to feel sorry for him. Not even a little. Yet, that was exactly how I felt. I imagined what it would be like to love Ronin and know that he didn’t love me the same way. Just a few weeks of not feeling like he physically wanted intimacy with me nearly brought me to my knees.

Graham spent years pining for me from near and afar. He dug himself into such a deep hole he must have felt the improbability of ever seeing light again. But he took my best friend with him, and that still felt unforgivable.

“I love Lila as much as I love my own sister. How am I supposed to live with myself when I know she’s in a loveless marriage? She could have a chance at true love, a family, the life her parents always wanted for her. Not some rich politician who married her to make some other woman jealous, not a second-place trophy.”

“She’s not a second-place trophy and you know it. You know me better than that.”

I didn’t.

Since Graham became governor, most days, I didn’t think I knew him at all.

“She’s miserable. I can tell.”

“When my term is up, I’m out. She can do whatever she wants. Go back to work. Travel. I don’t care.”

“But I want you to care!” I closed my eyes, pinching the bridge of my nose. “If you love her, then you care. You don’t ask her to wait for happiness. Give it to her now.”

“So you want me to resign?”

“I want you to give her a family or give her the chance to return to her career now. She deserves to pursue her dreams before they’re too unreachable.”

“What if she doesn’t want what you think she wants?”

He had a point. I didn’t understand Lila all the time. It wasn’t just Graham who I didn’t always recognize. Lila had changed too.

“Love her,” I whispered. “Love her with your whole heart or let her go.”

“Okay.”

Why, Graham? Why do this?

He played head games better than anyone else. Okay what?

“I have to go,” I sighed, drained of all desire to play the game any longer.

“Are we good?” he asked.

No. We would never be good. I would never look at him again and not think of the words he said that could never be forgotten. Him referencing how I still smelled familiar after I married another man and had two kids.