to know what he was thinking then. She didn’t even have the strength to call herself pathetic. It was simply that same old madness, all these years later. It was all the proof she needed that nothing was different. Herself least of all.
“What did you do then?” he asked.
“I told a nice Canadian couple at the gas station that my abusive boyfriend had left me there after a fight. They were so nice, they drove me all the way to Portland, Oregon, to get me away from him. When they kept going toward Vancouver, they left me at the bus station with cash and a ticket for my aunt’s place in Texas.”
“You don’t have an aunt in Texas.” His gaze moved over her face. “You don’t have an aunt.”
“No,” she agreed. “But that was no reason not to go to Texas. So that was what I did. And then it was a week later, and everyone thought I was dead. No one even looked for me. So I decided I might as well stay dead.”
“But you were pregnant.”
She nodded. “Yes, though I didn’t know that then.”
“If you had?”
She wanted to lie to him, but didn’t. “I don’t know.”
Rafael nodded once. Harshly, as if it hurt him. “And when you discovered that you were pregnant, it didn’t occur to you a woman on the run, presumed dead, might not be the best parental figure for a child?”
“Of course it did,” she said, frowning at him. “If I couldn’t provide for him myself, I wasn’t going to keep him. I had it all planned out.”
“Adoption?” he asked, almost indifferently, though she didn’t quite believe that tone of voice.
“No,” she said. “You, Rafael. Of course, you. I figured I’d leave him on your doorstep or something. It seemed like a miracle that women hadn’t already done that a hundred times, when I thought about it.”
He absorbed that for a moment.
“But in no version of this story were you planning to come back,” he said, when the silence began to feel much too thick between them. “Is that what I’m hearing?”
Lily hadn’t expected that. She tried to read that closed-off look on his face, or the oddly stiff way he sat there at the foot of the bed. But either she’d lost her ability to see through him, or he was doing a far better job of hiding himself. She felt both possibilities as a loss.
“No, Rafael,” she said quietly. “I wasn’t coming back. Why would I?”
He met her gaze then, and she caught her breath. He looked haunted. Wrecked. She didn’t understand why that made everything inside her seem to shatter like so much glass.
Lily wanted to go to him. She wanted to hold him, touch him—anything to make that terrible look on his face go away. Anything to make it better.
But she didn’t move. She didn’t dare.
“I can’t think why you would,” Rafael said into the dark, into what was left of the night. Straight into that heart of hers that Lily thought should have been healed by now, but was, she understood, still broken. “Not one single reason.”
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