Page 105 of You Owe Me

Dinner was silent.

Not the comfortable kind of silence we’d built over months of learning each other’s rhythms. This was the silence of two people drowning in secrets, sitting across from each other at our small kitchen table, pretending to eat food that tasted like cardboard.

I’d made pasta. Something simple, something that wouldn’t require conversation or coordination. Just boiling water and jarred sauce and the kind of mechanical cooking that gives your hands something to do while your mind races through everything you’re not saying.

Ainsley picked at her food, twirling around her fork without eating, her eyes focused somewhere past my shoulder like the wall behind me held answers she couldn’t find anywhere else. Her phone lay face down beside her plate, silent, but I could see the tension in her shoulders every time it vibrated with notifications she didn’t check.

“You’re not eating,” I said, because the silence was stretching too thin and someone had to break it.

She blinked, refocusing on me like she’d forgotten I was there. “Neither are you.”

She was right. My own plate sat mostly untouched, pasta cooling into unappetizing clumps while I tried to figure out how to have a normal conversation when everything between us felt like walking through a minefield.

“Long day,” I said, which wasn’t a lie but wasn’t the truth either.

“Yeah.” She set down her fork, giving up the pretense of eating. “Me, too.”

The weight of everything we weren’t saying pressed down on the room like humidity before a storm. I wanted to tell her about the surgery, about the lies I’d constructed to keep her from worrying. I wanted to ask her what Carter had done to put that haunted look in her eyes, what threat he’d made that had her checking her phone like it might explode.

I wanted to reach across the table and remind her that whatever she was carrying, she didn’t have to carry it alone.

But I didn’t.

Because I was carrying something, too. And if I asked her to trust me with her secrets while keeping mine locked away, what did that make me?

A hypocrite. A coward. A man who’d built his entire life around control and was about to lose it in the most fundamental way possible.

“I’m going to see Pops tomorrow,” I said instead, the lie sliding out smooth as silk. “Help him with some quarterly reports. Probably be gone through the weekend.”

Something flickered across her face—relief, maybe, or guilt, or both. Like my absence might solve a problem she couldn’t tell me about.

“That’s good,” she said softly. “He’ll be happy to see you.”

“Cooper’s got regionals this weekend. Figured I’d catch his game while I’m there.”

Ainsley doesn’t follow his schedule closely enough to know any better. And by the time she realized the timeline didn’t add up, I’d either be recovering in a hotel room or dead from surgical complications.

Either way, the lie wouldn’t matter.

“Tell him I said good luck,” she said, and her smile was so genuine, so trusting, that it made my chest ache in ways that had nothing to do with my condition.

We finished dinner in that same weighted silence, clearing plates and loading the dishwasher with mechanical precision. Every movement felt deliberate, careful, like we were both afraid of saying the wrong thing and shattering whatever fragile peace we’d managed to maintain.

I watched her move around the kitchen—rinsing dishes, wiping counters, organizing things that didn’t need organizing—and tried to memorize the details. The way her hair fell across her shoulder when she leaned over the sink. The unconscious grace in her movements. The small scar on her knuckle from where she’d cut herself opening a can of cat food for a stray she’d tried to rescue last year.

All the little things that made her uniquely, perfectly Ainsley.

All the things I might not see again if something went wrong tomorrow.

Later, in bed, we lay wrapped around each other like we were afraid the other might disappear in the night. Which, in my case, was exactly what was going to happen.

Her back pressed against my chest, my arm around her waist, her fingers tracing patterns on my forearm that felt like Morse code for all the things we couldn’t say out loud. Her breathing was too controlled, too measured, like she was working to keep it steady.

“I love you,” she whispered into the darkness, and her voice broke just slightly on the words.

“I love you too,” I replied, my lips against her hair, breathing in the vanilla scent of her shampoo and trying not to think about how this might be the last time I got to hold her like this.

The last time she trusted me completely.

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