Unbreak My Heart(19)

“I don’t mean it like that,” London grits out.

I park my hands on my hips. “Then how do you mean it?”

“You’re so willing to drop everything when someone wants help.” She places her palms together. “And that’s part of what makes you a beautiful, wonderful woman. But don’t lose sight of yourself.”

She’s wrong. I didn’t lose sight of myself. I was helping a friend. “Kana asked me to come back here and look after him. Ian was very explicit in his instructions. He didn’t want her to watch him die. He said he couldn’t bear it, so she asked me to look after him in his final days. How was I supposed to say no to that?”

She softens. “You weren’t. But look at you. You’re still all tangled up in their family.”

I spread my arms wide. “News flash: I’ve been tangled up in their family for a long time. It’s been that way since I can remember. You can thank Mom and Dad for that.”

She laughs. “True, that. Parents are always to blame.”

“I blame them, then. I absolutely blame them for dragging us up to Los Angeles every time they wanted to hang out with the Petersons. It’s their stupid fault I fell for him, and it’s their fault I had to go to freaking Japan to get my degree.”

“I’m with you. We can blame them for everything,” she says with a smile. She opens her arms. “Bring it in for a hug.”

I sigh heavily but step closer. “Don’t think you can make it up to me so easily.”

She wraps her arms around me, her silver bracelets jangling near my ears. “You never stay mad.”

I huff, because she’s right.

“I worry about Andrew,” she says in a soft but firm tone. “He’s a mess, and he probably thinks you’re the one to rescue him.”

I flash back to the other night, to the way he climbed over me, moved me under him. How he kissed me—like he was pouring his soul into me. I could taste his grief, salty and bitter. But it tasted like wild desire too. Like getting lost and being found. Like I wanted another serving, and then another.

Maybe I want to be needed that badly, and that’s the big risk. I desperately want to heal him, but I know I have to keep those instincts at bay for my own mental health. And honestly, for his too.

“I promise I won’t try to Florence Nightingale him.”

London brushes a strand of my hair. “Good. He’s so consuming sometimes, and you give so freely.”

“I can handle it. I’m not the one going through something.”

“We’re all going through something.”

I give her the side-eye. “Losing your rose-gold iPhone doesn’t count.”

“That was awful,” she howls. “Especially since it had my special engraving on it. No one ever found it.”

“It’s gone to the great iPhone graveyard in the sky.”

“I mourn it daily. Life hasn’t been the same.”

I shoo her to the door. “Go, or you’ll be late for your pickup, and you’ll lose a shoe while running through the airport, and that’ll be the next terrible thing you endure.”

She shudders. “I do like my shoes. That would be awful to lose one.”



*

That afternoon I print my boarding pass for tomorrow.

Three years ago, I boarded the same flight.

Andrew took me to the airport then, and we were those people. The ones you walk past and think oh please. The long, never-ending goodbye. The final embrace that lasts too long. The last kiss—his hands holding my face. The tears streaking down. Then the staring out the little oval window for hours.

I was only twenty-two. What did I know about falling in love at twenty-two? But what does anyone ever know?

When I arrived in Tokyo, I missed him with a profound ache I didn’t think I’d ever get over. Letting go of someone you love when you’re still loving them is a special kind of awful, like a bruise that twinges every second of every day.

But then, the ache ebbed and the longing dimmed.

We did what we promised each other. I became absorbed in my studies and the world in which I lived, and it stopped me missing him so badly. Time worked its magic, since time is the only thing that can.

But did it?

As I fold the boarding pass and slide it into my purse, I ask myself if my sister is right—am I too tangled up in him? Or have I never truly unraveled myself?

Sure, a big part of me wants to dive headfirst back into his kisses and spending all my nights in his arms.

The problem is, in a few weeks, we’ll still face the same challenge—the ocean between us.

And a whole lot more, since life is a cruel bitch, and she’s upped the ante this time around by breaking my man in a whole new way.

My man.

He still feels like mine. I don’t want him to be anyone else’s.

But I have to be stronger than my own wishes. Loving him the way I want might not help him.

And loving him truly might mean letting him heal independently of a healer.

Independent of me.





13





Andrew



Ian adopted this dog two years ago, and she’s named after the greatest Dodgers pitcher ever, Sandy Koufax, a lefty like Ian, and a fighter too.