The Wrong Kind of Right

chapter 8

I told her something true, and the world didn't end.

That was the part I couldn't stop turning over after she went back inside — not the confession itself, but the fact that I'd survived it. Eight months of deflecting, of letting people assume whatever version of the story was easiest, and I'd just handed Aria the real one without meaning to, sitting on a dock at midnight like it cost me nothing.

It cost me everything. I just hadn't felt it happen.

I stayed out there another hour after she left, watching the water go black, trying to figure out why this felt different. I'd talked about Claire before — clipped, factual versions, the kind you give people who ask out of obligation. I'd never talked about the part where I still sometimes reached for my phone to text her before remembering. I'd never said the part where the worst piece wasn't the humiliation of it — it was realizing I hadn't seen it coming at all, that I could be that certain about someone and be that wrong.

Aria hadn't flinched. Hadn't tried to reassure me with some hollow you'll find someone better. She'd just sat there and let it be as bad as it actually was.

I didn't know what to do with a person who did that.

The next morning, I caught myself watching her longer than necessary as she made coffee, humming something under her breath, hair still sleep-messy, wearing my old shirt again like she'd claimed it permanently. She caught me looking.

"What?" she asked, not unkindly.

"Nothing," I said, and looked away too fast, the same way I had after the caulking incident, the same tell I apparently hadn't learned to hide.

I told myself, again, that I wasn't going to let this become something. I had exactly one data point on where "something" led, and it ended with me standing alone in a church in a suit I never wore again.

But I noticed, walking to the yard that morning, that I'd started timing my day around when I'd see her next. Not consciously. Not on purpose.

Just noticing it was enough to know I was already in more trouble than I wanted to admit.