At Any Turn

She rocked in her seat, appearing deep in thought. Tears started to leak from her eyes again, streaking her pale cheeks. My throat tightened and God if I didn’t feel the tears prickling my own eyes. Fuck. This hurt. This hurt so goddamned badly. I sniffed and looked away, blinking. No, I wouldn’t shed tears, not here, not in front of her. I hadn’t cried since—God, I couldn’t even remember. When I found out Bree had died—months after the fact? Not even then.

I wanted to pull her into my arms. I wanted to forbid her to leave me. I wanted to stand my ground and not give an inch. All my first instincts. All terrible mistakes.

I enfolded one of her cold hands with mine. “I’m sorry. I’m an idiot.”

We were quiet again for a long, tense moment. Then she cleared her throat. “Adam, I still—”

“Don’t say it,” I choked out before she could finish, before the knife could sink deeper into my heart. “I don’t want to hear you say it again until you are in my arms, your lips an inch from mine ready to kiss me, ready to be mine again. Because, Emilia, if you can’t trust me to come back to me for forever, then don’t come back. I won’t be able to stand this again.”

She left minutes later. I walked her across Bay Island to her car and when I would have bent to kiss her good-bye, instead I opened her door for her. She looked up at me through the window for a long moment before she started the car. I stepped back and walked away, refusing to watch her drive away, drive out of my life.

My life was careening out of control. I was no longer steering. And I was losing everything.

Chapter Ten

The next day, Wednesday, I was at work again, this time spending the entire day on insurance and lawsuit business. I tried not to be pissed at Jordan every time he showed up in my office to work on stuff. It wasn’t his fault, after all, that I’d followed his shitty advice.

My cousin, Liam, made a rare appearance in my office just before lunch. When Maggie buzzed him in, I looked up in surprise, finishing typing out the e-mail I was working on. He went over to the window and stared out at the atrium.

“Hey guy, how are you doing?” I said, closing my computer.

He gave an agitated shrug and said nothing. Uh-oh. He was in one of his moods.

He didn’t turn to look at me, which was unsurprising as he rarely made eye contact with anyone. We, his family, were used to it, but most other people found it oddly unsettling. “Neurotypicals,” as Liam referred to us, had the disturbing habit of needing people to look them in the eye—a need that he lacked.

He reached up and fiddled with the edge of the window.

“What’s wrong?”

“Family dinner,” he mumbled.

“Sorry I had to bail early on that—”

He huffed and started pacing the room, his hands stuffed into his pants pockets. “Mia didn’t come.”

Chalk him up with the rest of my family who were more concerned about her not being there than me. Jeez. Did I smell bad or something?

So Liam was blaming her absence on me. Well, one thing could be said about my cousin. At least he was consistent. Very consistent.

“She wasn’t feeling well that day.”

Liam glanced at me out of the corner of his eyes.

“Everything’s messed up now. Everything. She’s not working here anymore. Why can’t you just apologize to her? Why can’t things be the way they were?”

I blinked. “I wish it were that easy.”

“It could be that easy. If you just stopped being an idiot.”

I took no shit from anyone, but I allowed a lot of leeway to my cousin. Nevertheless, he was now on my last goddamn nerve. “Watch yourself, Liam. I’m not in the mood and I don’t have my usual brand of patience, so if you are in here to bellyache about the fact that Emilia wasn’t at the family dinner you can—”

“Mia,” he said.

“What?”

“She prefers to be called Mia.”

Not by me.

“So you think she didn’t go to dinner because I don’t call her Mia?”

He kept pacing and pulled his hands out of his pockets and worked them furiously like he did when he got agitated. It was a stim—a soothing mechanism where he rubbed his palms with his fingers. “Shut up, Adam. You know that’s not the reason. Just apologize to her. Tell her you want her to come back.”

I stood up. This could be a good opportunity to reinforce that pressure that I’d wanted to lay on her to stay at the job. “Why don’t you call Mia? Let her know how much you miss her at the dinners and at work.”