Second Hearts (The Wishes Series) (49 page)

Now was the time. Somewhere along the line, love and happiness had become mutually exclusive. Our five minutes were definitely up.

***

After an unsettled few hours of sleep, I spent the next morning packing, somehow managing to squash my New York life into the one suitcase I’d arrived with a year earlier. The thing I most wanted to pack was sleeping a few feet away from me. Adam was much stiller than usual, but groaned occasionally, leading me to think that a whacking great headache would add to his troubles when he woke up. He finally appeared just before noon, staggering into the lounge half-dressed, sleepy and sexy as hell. If there was supposed to be a moment that I reconsidered leaving, that was it. Staying would require no courage at all. Finding the strength to leave was going to take all that I had.

“You’re awake,” I mumbled, stating the obvious. “How are you feeling?”

He smiled sheepishly. “Horrible. Close to death.”

“Hangovers suck,” I said sympathetically. “I’ll get you some water.”

“I don’t need water, Charli.” He caught my hand as I passed him, stopping me dead. “The way I’m feeling has nothing to do with a hangover.”

“Do you remember much of last night?”

It occurred to me that my recollection was probably a lot stronger than his. The last thing I wanted was to have to fill in blanks for him. I worried that the mutual decision to go our separate ways might not be so mutual in the cold light of day.

“I remember everything,” he replied. “I just want to make sure I that I said everything I needed to.”

“We talked about everything,” I assured, pulling my hand away. “I’m good to go.”

I walked into the kitchen on the guise of getting him some water. I held the glass under the running tap, giving myself the distraction I needed so I wouldn’t have to look at him. At that moment, nothing about leaving seemed right. Looking at him just confirmed it.

“So I told you about the billet-doux I wrote you?” he finally hinted.

I turned back to face him, ignoring the fact that I’d left the tap running.

“No. You never mentioned it. Can I have it now?”

He shook his head, smiling only slightly. “No, not now. You’ll find it when you most need it, but I want you to promise me something.”

“Okay.”

“When you read it, I want you to look at the deeper meaning. If you take it at face value, you’re reading it wrong.” He frowned as if he was having trouble deciphering his own words.

“I will look for the deeper meaning,” I promised. “It’s what I do.”

He looked relieved. “I know.”

“Is it a drunken billet-doux Adam?” I asked, trying to lighten the conversation. “If you wrote it last night, I’ll give you a chance to rewrite it. Drunk billet-douxing is a big no-no.”

He turned off the tap, pinning me against the counter in the process. “I’m pretty sure billet-douxing isn’t a word, Charlotte,” he murmure
d. “But for the record, no. I wrote it a long time ago.”

As curious as I was, I wasn’t going to press him for more information. Instead, I imagined how good it was going to feel to find a love letter from him after I’d gone. I
put my hands on his chest and sighed pensively. “Saying goodbye is going to suck.”

His hands rested on my hips as
he pressed himself against me. “We’re not going to say goodbye. Never say goodbye, because goodbye means going away, and –”

I cut in, finishing the very familiar quote myself. “Going away means forgetting. That line wasn’t actually in
Peter Pan
, Adam. It was in the movie.”

He looked guiltily at me. “I haven’t had time to read the book. I took a shortcut and managed to catch
some of the movie on TV.”

The smile I forced was edged with sadness. Our time together in Pipers Cove
had been slow and easy, leaving plenty of time for Adam to concentrate on the small details. Our New York life was the complete opposite. It was fast, fuelled by drama and full of far too many shortcuts.

I crushed my lips to his. “I will never forget,” I promised, breaking free for only a second.

***

I knew that letting Adam go wasn’t going to be a one-time thing. I was going to have to live through it every day, over and over again. For that reason, I was determined to make it as painless as possible. I didn’t want him to come with me to the airport. In my mind, that fell into the dragging-out-a-long-goodbye category.

Adam didn’t share my misgivings. “We spent the afternoon in bed, Charlotte.” He smiled, though it had a rueful tinge to it. “The get-out-of-Dodge-quickly ship sailed hours ago.”

He had a point. I relented immediately, and within the hour we were in a cab on our way to JFK airport.

I put absolutely no thought into where I was going until Adam asked me where I was headed. Only then did I begin weighing up my options. One was returning home to Pipers Cove. I had some serious bridges to mend with my father. Over time, my relationship with Alex had buckled. I couldn’t pinpoint the moment it became irreparable; all I knew was that the phone calls between us had become few and far between. There was a time that being out of contact would have sent him into a blind panic, but Alex had stopped chasing me, just as I’d begged him to.

He had always considered my marriage to be a mistake of epic proportions, so going home alone was an ordeal I was happy to delay for a while. I decided to go with option two – Mitchell.

I didn’t think Adam would want to be privy to that plan, so I purposely kept my answer vague. “I think I’ll try and get a flight to Dubai and figure it out from there.”

I could see the tension in his jaw as he nodded. My plans from here were on a need-to-know basis. And he no longer needed to know.

By the time we’d reached the airport, booked my ticket and checked my luggage, the pressure of what we were about to do was starting to hit. The end was close and we were both feeling it. I couldn’t bear dragging out the agony any longer.

“Well, this is it,” I said shakily, lifting my bag off the floor and slinging it over my shoulder. Adam reached for my hands. He stared at me with the intensity that always made me feel as if he was looking beyond my eyes.

I had nothing to lose by questioning him about it. “What do you see when you look at me that way?”

He looked away and I tilted my head, chasing his eyes.

“The same thing I always see.”

I feared what that meant. A million poss
ibilities ran through my mind. “Which is?” My voice was tiny.

He leaned down so close that his words hummed against my mouth. “Our happy ending.”

I arched my back, buying some distance between us as I tried to make sense of his answer. “It didn’t happen, Adam. I was wrong.”

His he
ad moved infinitesimally but he spoke with strength. “You weren’t wrong about us. Don’t leave here thinking I’m not the one for you, Charli. I am. I just haven’t proven it yet.”

The burning feeling of wanting to kiss him to death pulsed through me. Perhaps noticing the danger he was in, he put me out of my misery by leaning forward and pressing his lips to mine.

It wasn’t just a kiss. There was an underlying promise to it – one day he’d find me again, and things would be different.

We weren’t giving up. We were just letting go for a while.

***

The three hours I spent in the airport at Dubai while waiting for my connecting flight to Cape Town weren’t good. It gave me time alone to think. Grief was inevitable, but I was never going to get through it if I couldn’t get over it. I’d been there before and it wasn’t something I could endure indefinitely. It was a feeling of heaviness, as if my chest had been encased in concrete and my heart was trying to smash its way back in. Now seemed like the perfect time to find the billet-doux Adam had promised me. Ignoring the stares of passers-by, I upended the contents of my bag onto the floor of the departure lounge, hoping he’d hidden it there. I checked every pocket, and when the last one came up empty, I spiralled to the point of tears.

Out of sight, out of mind was the motto I quickly adopted, starting with the biggest reminder of all. I roughly twisted my wedding ring off my finger, preparing to hide it away in my bag with the other fragments of my New York life. It was the first time I’d taken it off since the day he’d given it to me, and I was struck by how bare my finger felt without it. I rolled the band between my thumb and forefinger, contemplating putting it back on my finger on the grounds that I’d given up enough for one day. Then I noticed something I’d never seen before. The inside of the ring was engraved.

I squinted to read the tiny script:
I will love you always, wherever you are
.

I’d found my billet-doux.

A normal girl would’ve been devastated at the realisation that Adam had written that message less than a week after marrying me, and would’ve been cut to the quick by his prediction of failure. But I wasn’t normal. I instantly found the deeper meaning, just as he’d made me promise to do.

It didn’t matter that he knew I would eventually leave. His resolve to stay in New York made that inevitable, whether we lasted a week, a year or a decade. What mattered was that just as he knew we’d end, no matter how ugly or hurtful it might’ve been, he was certain he’d still love me long after I was gone.

The End….for now.

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