Fall to You (Here and Now 2)

“Right.” She traces a gouge in the wooden table again and again and avoids meeting my eyes.

I take a deep breath. “Is this because of him? Is he offering you a future? Does he love you like I do?”

“He’s not offering me anything. It’s over between Nate and me. This isn’t about him.”

We’re both quiet for a long time before I speak. “The Friday night of your accident, I was training someone at the club, and you left me a voicemail. You said you’d made some decisions and wanted to talk. I was about to call you back when Lizzy called and told me you were unconscious at the hospital. When I got there, you were wearing my ring and your memory was gone.”

“Convenient,” she whispers. The word cuts me.

“Convenient? You’re kidding me, right? You think I was happy you had brain damage?”

“You got a second chance,” she whispers. “I didn’t remember how you hurt me.”

I wish she could understand why I handled everything like I did, but I’m in my own fucking head and even I think I screwed up. “You also didn’t remember deciding to put on my ring.”

“I didn’t. I still don’t, and Nix says I probably never will remember the day of the accident. You should have told me the truth.”

Of course I should have. And I meant to. I planned to. But how do you find a good time to break the heart of a woman you’d do anything to protect?

“You know what you said to me that night I brought you home from the hospital? You said, ‘You’re not going to hurt me.’ Those words killed me. You didn’t remember anything from the last year—not a single kiss or date or touch—but you had so much faith in me. I should have told you the truth, but how would you have felt if I had? How would you have felt if I’d sat there and explained how we started dating and why? If I’d shown you those texts? You’d been through that once. We had been through that once. Telling you when you couldn’t remember would have meant sending you through that pain all over again. I couldn’t do that. Not intentionally.”

“Were you just going to let me marry you? Without telling me?”

“No.” Fuck. When did everything get so screwed up? “I guess I hoped that when you remembered the bad parts, you’d remember the good parts too. You were wearing my ring. Don’t you see that? You’d spent months putting off making a decision. Whatever happened that day you fell down the stairs, you’d put on my ring first—before you lost your memory.”

“I wasn’t seeing clearly,” she whispers, and I feel like I’m slowly bleeding out. “Meredith helped me understand something.”

I don’t know where she’s going with this, but if it involves Meredith, it can’t be good.

“What’s that?” I ask, despite myself.

She’s quiet for too long, studying that gouge in the wood again, and I know before she speaks that I’m not going to like it. “She made me see how marrying me would solve every single one of your financial problems.”

My stomach heaves and thrusts my breath from my lungs. “You believe I want to marry you for your trust fund?”

She looks sad but firm. “I believe my trust fund may be making you misinterpret your feelings for me. Consciously or not.”

I push out of the booth. I love this woman. I would give her everything I have, and she thinks I want her for her money.

“Think about it,” she whispers to my back. “Wouldn’t you have spent more time with me these last few weeks if you really wanted me? I was yours, but you were barely around.”

I turn slowly because I need to look her in the eye when I say this. “I never wanted your money, Hanna. I just wanted you. That’s always going to be true, whether you believe it or not.”

TENSION RADIATES off him in hard waves that would knock me over if I weren’t sitting. I ball my hands into fists to keep myself from touching his cheek and his two-day growth of beard. I have to remind myself to breathe. In and out. In and out. Because giving voice to my suspicions hurt a thousand times worse than letting them simmer in some dark corner of my brain. But I had to do it. I had to explain why I can’t marry him.

He turns on his heel and walks away.

Breathe in. Breathe out. It takes all of my courage to stand behind my words when I just want to chase after him and take back anything that might have hurt him.

William arrived sometime while we were talking, and he stops Max at the bar. Max is nodding, listening, occasionally eyeing the door, but not sparing me a single glance.

Shit. I need to tell him about the pregnancy. I push out of the booth to make sure I stop him before he goes.

Lizzy spots me heading toward the bar and hops out of the booth to join me. “How’d it go?” she whispers.

Brady grins at me and pours a shot of tequila blanco. “I heard about your mom,” he says, nudging it toward me. “That one’s on the house.”

I catch the scent of the tequila, and it jiggles a memory loose. I pick it up, intending to take another whiff and see if I can break the memory free, and Lizzy says, “Hanna, the baby!”