He looked away, but not before I saw the wet in his eyes. “Aye, well, you weren’t there to see Sylvie when she saw me for the first time after their move over there.”

I knew if he felt that way that there wasn’t anything I could say or do to make it better. Only time would handle those feelings. However, I needed him to understand something too. “Us being in a real relationship won’t bring her back, if that’s where this conversation is going.”

He jerked like I’d hit him. “I don’t fucking think that.”

“Well, do you think being with me will miraculously make you like yourself better, because I can tell you from experience, Aidan, it won’t. Only time can give you that.”

“Aye, no doubt you’re right,” he said, eyes blazing. “But in the meantime, I don’t want to lose the one thing in my life that makes every other thing in it worthwhile. You’re everything to me, Nora. Every bloody thing. I never knew happiness like it until I met you. And maybe that scares the shit out of you, but news fucking flash: it scares the shit out of me too. I don’t know if it’s fear holding you back or if what you really need right now is to be alone. All I know is that I won’t love you selfishly. I was going to keep you in this fucked-up arrangement you suggested, hoping that somehow loving you, even if only through sex, would bring you back to me.”

He stood abruptly, looking down at me with that love and anguish that made me shiver in my seat. “But I can’t do it, Nora. I can’t take what you don’t really want to give me. If you’re to be mine, I need all of you to be mine, because all of me is yours.”

Tears spilled down my cheeks, and I couldn’t speak for the lump thick in my throat.

Crushing disappointment strained his expression and he looked at the floor. His voice was hard as he said, “I’ve been offered a job producing a studio album in New York. I’m going to take it. I’ll most likely get a flight out on Monday. Concerning you and me? Once I’m gone, I’m gone for good. I won’t stay on this roller coaster.”

Leaving me?

Aidan gone?

I couldn’t process that properly.

NO!

I’d already lost him and now I was going to lose him again.

This time … my fault.

“I’m going for a walk, and when I come back, I’m sure you’ll be gone.” He strode toward the door, bending down to put on shoes that didn’t match his sweat pants. He didn’t even seem to see them. As he stood, the scream inside of me threatened to burst out, and I felt the sound coming as he opened the door.

But before it could, before he left, he turned back to me. “If you figure out that everyone changes, bit by bit, day by day, Nora, while somehow staying the same, then come find me. If you figure out that we’ve got nothing to fear from the people we were yesterday, and that you certainly don’t, that I know who you are and I love you, then come find me. Just because it takes more than falling in love to find yourself doesn’t mean that losing yourself in another person can’t be fucking beautiful. I promise you, Pixie, being lost in each other for the rest of our lives will be the best thing to have ever happened to either of us.

“And if you figure that out in time, come find me before I leave.”

To say I was lost in a fog of confusion over the next few days was an understatement. I felt an itch inside me, a constant reminder that Aidan was walking out of my life. It didn’t seem real to me that Thursday morning in his apartment could be the last time I’d ever see him.

It didn’t have to be.

Aidan loved me.

Loved me.

Loved me.

Just me. Not the ghosts between us or all those reasons we were drawn together in the first place.

Just me.

Like I loved him.

So why couldn’t I shed my fear that by being with him, I’d become someone broken and lost?

“Because that’s who you were when you first met him?” Seonaid said when I finally got up the courage to ask her.

It was Saturday night, I’d blown through a terrible rehearsal with the rest of my cast members, and Seonaid had come over after I’d called to explain the countdown to Monday.

She brought beer.

“Thanks.”

“Well, you were. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, Nora. You lost a lot as a child, and then you left your family to be with a man who didn’t really get you, loved you, but by God, he didn’t understand you, and,” she sucked in a teary breath, “he died. Too much to lose and all it did was fill your head with guilt that didn’t belong to you. You were broken and lost. Finding Aidan made you feel less alone when you needed it most. He mended you, babe, whether you want to admit it or not. Finding him gave you faith that this world is filled with good. And then you lost him. You thought he walked away. And it broke what was left of you.

“But this time, you knew you had to put yourself together. And you did. You became a survivor and a fighter, and you went after all the things you wanted in life. That’s who you are now. So why on earth would you run from this thing you want in life? Because we both know you want Aidan Lennox more than you want anything. He’s consumed you from the moment you met him.”

That word, though: consume. That didn’t sound very healthy. Not at all.

“Does Roddy consume you, Seonaid?”

She smiled, lowering her eyes to the glass of beer in her hand. “I know to everyone else it looks like the bugger bewitches and bothers and bewilders me. But when we’re alone, he’s someone else. He gives me a piece of him that belongs to only me. And aye, he consumes me with it.” She looked at me. “If that’s madness, Nora, then I gladly give myself over to it.”

I envied her, her clarity of mind. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Talk to Jim,” Seonaid said.

“What?”

“Visit Jim. I like to believe he’s not really gone.” Tears wet her eyes. “And I talk to him, liking the idea that he understands us all now better than he ever did when he was alive. So talk to him. Maybe everything that has happened will start to make sense, and all the pieces will make a path that’ll lead you to the right decision.”

I took a swallow of my beer to avoid bursting into tears. And when I thought I could speak without crying, I said, “You’re the wisest, dearest friend I’ve ever known, Seonaid McAlister.”

The pressure of her smile caused her tears to spill over.

Sun dapple from the leaves on the tree above Jim’s grave caused patterns to dance across the dark gray of his headstone. I hadn’t been to visit since before I left for Indiana, afraid of seeing it in the same way I was afraid of returning to Aidan.

“I’m sorry, Jim.” I placed a hand on the top of the stone. “It’s about time I stopped evading the things that scare me.”

I studied the gold lettering on his stone.

James Stuart McAlister

June 12, 1990 to July 15, 2014

His life a beautiful memory, his absence a silent grief.

I didn’t remember discussing Jim’s epitaph. I know Angie wouldn’t have gone ahead with something without my approval, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember discussing it. She’d chosen beautifully.

I hadn’t been in love with Jim.

But he’d been my closest friend for a number of years, and I loved and missed my friend.

The memories of our life together flooded me as if Jim were pumping them up into the hand I’d placed on his headstone. The nervous excitement of running away together, his patient gentleness the night we made love for the first time. How scared I’d been. How it took weeks for me to feel comfortable enough around him to start enjoying sex with him. How when we were together like that, I used to stare into his eyes, wishing that the connection I sought would somehow magically appear between us. I’d get lost in his lovemaking because Jim was good at it, and he was not a selfish lover, but afterward when we were finished, I’d feel more alone than ever.

As alone as I’d felt in that small, cramped room back in that unhappy house in Indiana.

Jim wasn’t the reason I’d lost myself.

I lost myself the moment my dad stopped loving me and started hating the world. Or maybe that wasn’t right, either. Maybe I was too young then to have even have found myself. Maybe Dad had thrown me off course. And Jim’s waves had buffeted me to the wrong shore.