I chuckled. “Weirdly… no. I haven’t thought about Joel in weeks. Maybe because, to me, our relationship had been over for a long while before either of us admitted it.” I paused, staring at my hands a while before I met Emma’s gaze. “Does that make me an awful human?”
“No. You’re much kinder than me, I’ll tell you that much. You and Theo both. Because I would have had all their sorry asses thrown into Italian jail if it were my call.” She reached for another mug, pouring herself some tea, too. “So if not that, then what?”
I chewed the inside of my cheek. “Just realizing that the fantasy world I’ve been living in all summer is going to leave a nasty mark when I wake up and it’s all gone.”
“Gone?” Emma frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Come on, Em,” I said, leveling my gaze. “Theo Whitman is a hot billionaire who could have anything and anyone he wants. No woman has ever tied him down. And now I’m supposed to think I have a chance?”
Emma let out a slow exhale, studying my face. “Well, anything is possible.”
I snorted. “Yeah. I think I heard that in a Disney movie once.” I sighed. “I don’t know how this hasn’t been on my mind from the start, from before either of us even gave in to each other. I mean, Joel aside, what did I think was going to happen? I feel…” I tried to swallow the bitter pill of what I was about to say but came up empty. “I feel like an absolute fool.”
“You’re not a fool,” Emma said. “And hey, who says it has to be forever, you know? Why not just enjoy it now, have some fun, and at the end of the trip… well…”
“I let him go,” I whispered, and my eyes blurred with tears instantly. “God, why does that feel like an impossible thing to ask of myself?”
Emma smiled sympathetically, pouring some scotch into her tea. “Not everything amazing in life is meant to be kept forever,” she said, toasting her cup to mine. “Sometimes, we’re just meant to enjoy a little slice of heaven, or learn a lesson, or grow into someone new.” Emma shrugged then. “I don’t know what’s to come between you and Theo any more than you do, but I do know one thing for certain.”
“What’s that?”
“If you had the chance, right now, to go back and undo it all in the name of saving yourself from heartbreak?” She smiled. “You wouldn’t.”
My throat tightened again, so fiercely I thought I’d lose the ability to breathe altogether. But then I smiled, because she was right.
Why did she have to be right?
Even after the conversation with Emma, I couldn’t let go of my anxiety. It stuck to me like tree sap, following me all around the ship as I tried to busy myself. By the time I gave up and headed back up to the cabin, it felt like my anxiety was permanent, like I had sprouted a new limb that would be a part of me forever.
And when I opened the door and found the suite empty, Anxiety whispered that this was the beginning of the end.
I had asked too many questions.
And now, I’d chased him away.
Theo didn’t come to the room that night, not before I laid down around nine and not any time after. I knew, because again, I couldn’t sleep, and every little sound had my eyes popping open, hoping to see him crawling into bed next to me. I wanted to apologize, to take back everything I’d said and pretend like none of it mattered. I wanted to go back forty-eight hours and stay in my blissful unawareness until I had no choice but to crash on the cold, hard ground.
Theo’s steel eyes haunted the eerie dreams I had that night when I did occasionally slip into a state of sleep, like even my unconscious brain was hell bent on reminding me how much I’d screwed things up. And when I woke to the bed still empty and the morning light streaming through the windows, I sat up and hugged my knees to my chest, finally succumbing to my tears.
This really is it.
I was still rocking in a ball like that when Wayland knocked on the door, and I told him to come in, although the last thing I felt like was seeing or talking to anyone.
“Good morning, Miss Dawn,” he said, like I wasn’t a complete mess before him. His eyes were kind and wrinkled at the edges like always, his smile polite, voice calm.
“I told you to stop that,” I said.
He shrugged. “My apologies. Habit, now that you and Mr. Whitman are…”
Wayland paused, not finishing that sentence, and my stomach cramped because I wasn’t sure there was anything to even finish that sentence with.
“Just call me Aspen. Okay?”
Wayland smiled. “As you wish.” He held up the carafe in his hand then. “Claude is making breakfast now, but I thought you might like some coffee.”
He set down the carafe first, followed by one mug — not two.
“Will Mr. Whitman be joining me?” I asked, hoping I didn’t sound as pathetic as I felt.
“Unfortunately, he’s already gone to shore. Business. I’m sure you understand,” Wayland said.
I nodded, throat squeezing tight again. “Of course,” I croaked out.
He watched me for a long time, and I felt the weight of his sympathetic eyes until he sat on the bed next to me. “We have a saying in Jamaica, one my mother said many times to me.” Wayland paused, furrowing his brows before the thickest accent I’d heard yet from him made an appearance. “De more yu luk, de less yu si.”
He poured some coffee into the mug he’d brought for me then, handing me the steaming cup.
“The more you look, the less you see?”
Wayland nodded. “Exactly. It’s a reminder that it’s impossible for us to know all the
