“How bad it looks?”
He covered his face with both hands.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“That’s the problem, Ryan. You’ve had four months to think about what to say. You’ve had four months to decide whether to stop. You’ve had four months to tell me the truth. And you did none of those things.”
He started crying.
“I never wanted to hurt you.”
I remembered his words in the hotel lobby.
She doesn’t know about the pictures.
I remembered his face when he saw me on the airplane.
I remembered the way he’d looked around the cabin, hoping I wouldn’t discover him.
“You didn’t want to get caught,” I said. “That’s different.”
He looked up.
“I love you.”
For a moment, the words hurt more than anything else.
Not because I believed him.
Because I remembered how much I had wanted to hear them during the months when he was growing distant.
