But hadn’t he done exactly that by leaving?

He’d left her. After demanding over and over again she take a leap of faith, he’d walked out and ruined her tenuous trust. For God’s sake, she’d only been in town for what? Five weeks? What did he want from her?

Everything, that’s what. He’d asked for everything—and that hadn’t been fair.

So she’d kept a few safety nets. Good. As the man who loved her, that’s exactly what he should have been encouraging. Piper’s safety. What the hell had he done instead?

Punished her for it.

No wonder she hadn’t shown up at the dock. He hadn’t deserved to see her there, much less stand there praying for her to show up, begging God to make her appear, when he now realized full well . . . that she shouldn’t have come.

And now, when it was too late, the obvious solution to keeping her, to deserving her, bore down on him like a meteor. She didn’t have to give up everything. He loved her enough to find solutions. That’s what he did. There was no inconvenience or obstacle he wouldn’t face if it meant having her in his life, so he’d fucking face them. He’d adapt, like Piper had.

“I made a mistake,” he rasped, razor wire wrapping around his heart and pulling taut. “Jesus, I made a fucking mistake.”

But if there was a chance he could fix it, he’d cling to that hope.

Otherwise he’d go insane.

Brendan whipped around on a heel and ran for the wheelhouse, only to find Fox looking concerned while he spoke to the coast guard over the radio.

“What is it?”

Fox ended the transmission and put the radio back in place. “Nothing too bad. They’re just advising us to adjust our route south. Drilling rig caught fire about six miles ahead and there’s some bad visibility, but it should only set us back about two hours.”

Two hours.

Brendan checked the time. It was four o’clock. Originally, they were scheduled to make it back at six thirty. By the time the boat was unloaded and they’d taken the fish to market, he was looking at goddamn ten or eleven o’clock before he’d make it to Cross and Daughters.

Now, on top of his inexcusable fuckup, he was going to break his promise to be at the grand opening.

Helplessness clawed at the inside of Brendan’s throat. He looked down at the picture of Piper he still held, as if trying to communicate with her.

I’m sorry I failed you, baby.

Just give me one more chance.

* * *

The text message popped up on his phone the second they pulled into the harbor.

I’m coming. I had an emergency. Wait for me. I love you.

Those words almost dropped Brendan to his knees.

She’d tried to come? She’d wanted to see him off?

Oh God. What emergency? Had she hurt herself or needed him?

If so, if he’d left when she was in trouble, he would never recover.

After that, his ears roared and he saw nothing but his feet pounding the pavement.

When Brendan and Fox stormed into Cross and Daughters at eleven o’clock, it was packed to the gills. “Summer in the City” was playing at an earsplitting decibel, a tray of cupcakes crowd-surfed toward Brendan, and everyone had a drink in their hands. Momentarily, pride in Piper and Hannah, at what they’d accomplished, eclipsed everything else. But an intense urgency to see his girlfriend swarmed back in quickly.

She wasn’t behind the bar.

It was just Hannah, uncapping beers as fast as she could, clearly flustered. She was shoving cash into her pockets and trying to make change, tossing bills across the bar and running to help the next customer.

“Christ. I’ll go help her out,” Fox said, already pushing his way through the crowd.

Where was Piper?

With a frown, Brendan moved in his friend’s wake, nodding absently at the locals who called—or slurred, rather—his name. He went to the dance floor first, knowing it was a likely place to find Piper, although . . . that didn’t track. She wouldn’t leave her sister in the lurch behind the bar. And anyway, she was supposed to be bartending. Hannah was the DJ.

A hole started to open in his gut, acid gurgling out, but he tried to stay calm.

Maybe she was just in the bathroom.

No. Not there. A lady on the way out confirmed the stalls were empty.

Panic climbed Brendan’s spine as he pushed his way to the bar. Fox’s expression stopped him dead in his tracks before he could even get there.

“Where is she?” Brendan shouted over the noise.

Hannah’s gaze danced over to him, then away just as fast.

She served another customer, and he could see her hands were unsteady, and that terrified him. He was going to explode. He was going to rip this place down with his bare hands if someone didn’t produce his girlfriend right the hell now.

“Hannah. Where is your sister?”

The younger Bellinger stilled, took a breath. “She went back to LA. For Kirby’s party. And maybe . . . to stay.” She shook her head. “She’s not coming back.”

The world blurred around him, the music warping, slowing down. His chest caved in on itself, taking his heart down in the collapse. No. No, she couldn’t be gone. She couldn’t have left. But even as denial pounded the insides of his skull, he knew it was true. He couldn’t feel her.

She was gone.

“I’m sorry,” Hannah said, pulling out her phone and lowering the music with a few thumb strokes. People behind him protested, but shut up and quieted immediately, distracted by the man at the bar keeping himself upright with a stool and dying a slow, torturous death. “Look. There was no one here. No one. Until maybe half an hour ago. We thought it was a huge fail. And before that, our stepdad canceled, and you—well, you know what you did.” Moisture leapt to Hannah’s eyes. She swiped at her tears while Fox hesitantly began rubbing circles on her back. “She’d lost her Piper sparkle. It scared me. I thought if she went home, she’d get it back. But now she’ll never know that everyone loves this place.”

She’d lost her Piper sparkle.

It was girl language, and yet, he so thoroughly understood what Hannah meant, because Piper did have a singular sparkle. Whether they were arguing or laughing or fucking, it was always there, pulling him into her universe, making everything perfect. That sparkle was positivity and life and promise of better things, and she always, always had it, glowing within the blue of her irises, lighting up the room. The fact that it had gone out, and that he’d had something to do with it, gutted him where he stood.

“I should have gone and found her,” Brendan said, more to himself than anyone else. “When she didn’t show up at the dock. I should have gone to find her. What the hell did I leave for?”

“She did show up,” a woman’s voice said behind him. Sanders’s wife approached, a half-drunk beer in her hand. “She was there, just late. Blubbering all over the place.”

Brendan had to rely on the stool to hold his weight.

“Told her to toughen up,” his crew member’s wife said, but her tone changed when people around her started to mutter. “In a nice way,” she added defensively. “I think.”

Jesus. He could barely breathe for thinking of her crying while he sailed away.

He couldn’t fucking stand it.