Chapter 133

TESSA

We walk in silence. Familiar silence. The kind that carries a weird nostalgia I wasn’t expecting.

I’ve done this before—walking side by side in this same parking lot with a man I couldn’t figure out no matter how hard I tried. The memory creeps in, makes me smile, then immediately buries me under a wave of secondhand embarrassment. Time really is cruel, isn’t it?

I still remember it. That ridiculous moment with Aaron: “Can you carry me in too? You were right about the heels, I think I sprained my ankle.”

It was a joke. I never thought he’d actually scoop me up and set me down in the passenger seat, fussing over my feet like some lovesick idiot.

I laugh under my breath. God, how mortifying must that have been for him?

But then it stings all over again, because I also remember the flowers. The ones I never even accepted from the deliveryman.

How must that have felt for him? He never pushed. Never harassed me the way Lyle did. He just… st