“I know, sweetie. And I get that he violated the trust. But he didn’t violate the secret.”

I look up sharply to meet her eyes.

She lifts a shoulder. “You may have never talked to your dad about it, but he knew. And just because he’d never seen those photos before doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t have been able to imagine every horrible thing that pervert did to you.”

Maybe. I don’t know. I push myself off the couch and cross the short distance to the window that looks out over her postage stamp–size backyard. “I almost told my dad myself,” I admit. “I kept hearing Jackson’s voice in my head, and I almost told him.”

“So maybe that means it was the right thing to do.”

“For me to do. It wasn’t Jackson’s place. He—he took a choice away from me.” I close my eyes, suddenly getting it. He grabbed control. Just like Reed had done—Jackson took control from me. Not control I’d surrendered, but control that he’d stolen.

He’d thought that he was doing the best thing for me, and I understand that. I really do, because didn’t I come close to thinking that same thing, too?

But stealing trust—how the hell do we get past that?

“Hey?” Cass moves up behind me and puts a hand on my shoulder. “You okay?”

I shrug, because I really don’t know how to answer that. I feel betrayed. Violated. And profoundly sad. “Are you going to work today?” I ask softly.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” I lie. I turn around so that I’m facing her. “Maybe I was thinking we should play hooky and walk along the beach.”

“You are such a liar.”

I make an effort to look indignant.

She narrows her eyes. “Not that I don’t love to practice my art, but you don’t need a new tat.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” she said. “Every tat I’ve given you is because you either didn’t think you could handle something or because you fought and won. You can handle this thing with Jackson, so you don’t need the ink for that. And so far you haven’t fought, much less won. You haven’t even decided what you’re going to do.”

“Dammit, Cass.” She’s right, of course, but I don’t want to admit it. Because the truth is that this time I want the ink just for strength. And my best friend is basically telling me to suck it up, buttercup, and find the strength inside myself. No crutches. Just me, my emotions, and Jackson.

She crosses her arms over her chest and stares me down. “This battle hasn’t even started. You come to me when it’s over, and if you need the ink then, it’s yours. Until then, you can have me. But not my needles.”

I exhale. Loudly. “Fine. Okay. Whatever.” I grimace. “I guess you’ll have to do.”

She laughs. “Guess so.” The laughter dies soon enough, though, and she looks at me with serious eyes. “So have you decided what you’re going to do? Are you going to talk to him today?”

“I don’t know.” The admission makes me feel slightly ill. This is Jackson, dammit. The man I love. The man I trusted.

The one person in the whole world with whom I feel the most myself, even more so than Cass who is so, so dear to me.

“I don’t know,” I repeat, and that one simple truism scares me to death.

“I get that,” Cass says, but as she speaks, she looks toward the door through which Siobhan left only a few minutes before. “But doesn’t everyone deserve a second chance?”

Do they?

I think about Jackson and the way Cass’s words eerily echo his from a few nights ago. Then I hug myself, because I don’t know the answer.

And I can’t help but wonder how we got to this point. And how the hell we can ever come back.

He’d blown it.

And, dammit, he knew that he’d blown it and wanted to tell her as much.

Not that she was giving him the chance.

She wasn’t answering his calls, texts, or emails.

She hadn’t come in to work on Thursday at all.

Now it was Friday and he knew she was in the building, but he couldn’t find her at any of her usual locations on twenty-seven, thirty-five, or Damien’s penthouse.

“She’s not working from her desk today,” Karen had said on twenty-seven.

“She’s in the building,” Rachel had said on thirty-five. “But I think she may be camped out in the library.”

She wasn’t, of course.