The Man I Could Never Have

Chapter Eight: What He Doesn't Say

I looked her up that night.

I told myself I wasn't going to. I told myself it three separate times while I lay in bed, phone dark on the nightstand, and then I picked it up anyway, because six years of practiced restraint apparently didn't extend to the mystery of a woman named Diane.

It didn't take long.

Diane Ashworth. Interior designer, moderately well-known, the kind of online presence that was all clean minimalist portfolio and no personal information. But there was one photo, three years old, from some industry gala — and there he was. Marcus, younger by a few years but unmistakable, her hand on his chest, both of them laughing at something outside the frame.

The caption tagged them both. No hashtags, no explanation. Just two names sitting next to each other like it meant something.

I set the phone down like it had burned me.

Three years ago. Around that time, I realized with a slow, sinking feeling, that Marcus had gone quiet for almost a whole season — fewer dinners at our house, a canceled Thanksgiving my father still brought up sometimes, confused and a little hurt, like he'd never gotten a real explanation.

I'd been seventeen. I remembered being upset that he wasn't around, and never once wondering why.

Now I wondered about nothing else.

I didn't bring it up the next morning. Or the morning after that. Marcus seemed to be trying very hard to make the Diane appearance disappear through sheer force of normalcy — more coffee, small talk, an offer to drive me to campus that I didn't need, a run of days that felt almost aggressively fine.

It was Priya, over lunch on Thursday, who put words to what I couldn't stop turning over.

"You're doing the thing," she said, stabbing at her salad.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you decide not to ask about something because you're scared of the answer." She pointed her fork at me. "You've been doing it about Marcus since we were nineteen. Now you're doing it about Diane, too."

"I don't even know what I'd ask him."

"Sure you do." Priya's voice softened, losing its usual sharp edge.You want to know if he ever loved her."

She held my gaze.

"Because if he did..."

Her voice softened.

"Then you'll have to face the possibility that he's capable of loving someone."

She paused.

"Just... maybe not you."The words landed somewhere I didn't have a name for. I stared at my plate, at nothing, and didn't argue.

Because she was right, the way she was always infuriatingly right.

If Marcus Whitfield had never fallen in love with anyone, I could keep telling myself it wasn't personal — that this was just who he was, a man built without that particular room in his house. But if he had loved Diane, fully and completely, and something had still gone wrong enough to make him flinch at her name three years later...

Then maybe it wasn't that he couldn't love someone.

Maybe it was that he wouldn't. Not again. Not anyone.

Not me.

I found him on the terrace again that night, same glass of amber liquid, same closed-off set to his shoulders. He glanced up when I came out, and something in his face braced, like he already knew what I'd come to say.

"I saw a photo," I said, no preamble, because I'd run out of patience to be careful. "Of you and Diane. From a few years ago."

He didn't ask how. He just looked out at the dark yard, jaw working, and for a long moment I thought he wasn't going to answer at all.

"We were together for two years," he said finally. Quiet. Flat, the way people talk about things they've spent a long time trying to stop feeling. "I asked her to marry me."

My stomach dropped somewhere past the floor.

"She said no."

He turned the glass slowly in his hand, watching the liquid catch the porch light. "She said yes, actually. For about six months. Then she changed her mind three weeks before the wedding and married someone else eight months after that."

"Marcus—"

"So now you know why I don't do this," he said, and for the first time since I'd met him, his voice had an edge in it I didn't recognize — not anger at me, but something older, worn smooth by years of repeating the same lesson to himself. "Now you know why the answer's always no. It was never about not wanting it, Elena. I wanted it. I just learned what happens when you let yourself."

He wasn't looking at me anymore.

But I understood, finally, with a clarity that felt like falling — this wasn't a man who'd never wanted marriage.

This was a man who'd wanted it once, completely, and had never let himself want anything that much again.

I wondered...

And immediately hated myself for wondering.

Because if Marcus Whitfield had spent three years teaching himself never to love again...

Then falling in love with me...

Would mean breaking every promise he'd made to himself.

And somehow...

That terrified me almost as much as it terrified him.