He walked toward her with his arms open, but she shook her head.

“What if . . . what if I don’t want to show the world who I really am? What if I don’t want the world to know anything about me? What if I’m so tired of smiling all the time and wearing perfect outfits whenever I leave the house and thinking about what the world thinks of me?”

The tears were still in her eyes, but she also looked . . . determined. Like she’d come to some sort of decision.

He didn’t like that look on her face. He didn’t like it at all.

“Olivia. What are you saying?”

She shook her head.

“Max, I’m sorry. I just don’t think I can do this anymore.”

He stepped toward her again, but she took a step backward, and he froze.

“No. No, please don’t say that. You’re mad at me, I understand, but we can work through this. I love you. So much.”

She dropped her face into her hand and wiped away tears before she looked back up at him.

“I love you, too. And I’m not mad at you, not anymore. I was mad, don’t get me wrong, I was furious. But I can never stay mad at you. The thing is, I don’t think we can work through this. You’re impulsive, you’re an idealist, you want to help everyone, and that’s part of the reason I fell in love with you. But . . .” She stopped, closed her eyes, and took a breath. “But I don’t think I can live like that. This is all so hard for me, and I keep trying, but it’s too much.” She sighed. “I wish we could go back to how it was before. When we were just Olivia and Max, two people falling in love. I didn’t . . . I never expected to fall in love with you, you know. I thought we would have a fun little fling and it would all be over. But I kept getting in deeper and deeper. And your job makes everything so much more complicated.”

He felt like his whole world was crashing around him.

“No, please, don’t do this. Fuck my job, this is about us. I don’t have to . . . I would do anything for you.”

Another tear fell from her eye, and she brushed it away.

“You love your job so much, and you’re so good at it, and we need you there, now more than ever. But I just can’t take this anymore. The calls from reporters, the nasty articles, the photographers, the weird comments from clients . . . I can’t keep doing this, Max. Every week it’s something else. And you need the kind of partner who I can’t be—you need someone who looks perfect all the time by default, someone who doesn’t have any baggage, someone who isn’t obsessed with her job, someone who can be a perfect political wife in all of the ways I can’t. I don’t want to mess this all up for you.”

He couldn’t let this happen. He couldn’t lose her.

“Olivia. No. Please. I need you. All I need is you. Please don’t do this. You say you don’t like impulsive decisions, don’t make this one! Take some time, think this through, don’t give up on us.”

She shook her head.

“Max, I . . . We’re just too different. I can’t change you, and you can’t change me, either. I have been thinking this through—I should have listened to that voice in my head every time I agreed to go out with you, or to date you, or to go public with you, or to go to Hawaii with you. Or to . . .” Her voice caught. “Fall in love with you, though that one isn’t your fault. I kept slowly giving in to you, because I loved you, but if I keep doing that I’m going to lose parts of myself. We can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry.”

She walked around him, and opened the front door.

“You should go.”

He tried to think of something else he could say. Some way to change her mind, some way to convince her he belonged to her, and she belonged to him, forever. This had always been his strength, one of the reasons why he’d always been such a good politician. He’d always been able to change minds; he’d always been able to think of the right thing to say, even to people who hated him. And Olivia loved him; she’d said so. He knew her; he should be able to do this.

But somehow the words wouldn’t come.

So he walked out the door.

Chapter Twenty

Olivia fell into an exhausted sleep shortly after Max left. Miraculously, she slept well, but when she woke up the next morning, all she could think about was that frozen, devastated, empty look on his face before he’d walked out the door. And then she hated herself for breaking up with Max. No, she hated herself for falling in love with Max in the first place. She should have headed this off at the pass months ago—she knew this would never work! Why did she even let herself, and him, think it might?

Had she done the right thing? Had Max been right, that she should have thought this through more, that she shouldn’t have given up on them? But no, she’d thought about it for that hour between when she got home and Max showed up. She’d thought about how different they were, and how she’d have to keep conforming to him if she stayed with him. She thought about how determined she’d been at the beginning to not get in too deep, to not get too attached, because if she did, she knew bad things would happen. She should have trusted her instincts.

She loved him so damn much. She never should have let herself get to this place. What a nightmare love was.

She stumbled into the kitchen to make coffee, and as she did, her doorbell rang. Hope rose in her heart—it was Max, he’d come back, he had a solution for everything, he’d figured out a way for them to work after all.

She raced to the door, without bothering to put on a bra or do anything to her hair. But when she stopped to look through the peephole, her heart dropped. It wasn’t Max at all, just some sort of deliveryman. Probably with those shoes, or purse, or dress she’d ordered the week before in her fit of missing Max. She watched through the peephole until the deliveryman put down whatever he was holding and drove away. But when she cracked open the door to grab her package, it wasn’t the box she’d expected. It was a bakery bag.

She sighed and brought the bag into the kitchen.

“I love you” the cake read, in blue letters on top of the chocolate frosting.

Yeah, she knew. She didn’t doubt his love for her, that wasn’t what this was all about—hadn’t he listened at all to what she’d said? She shut the box and took her coffee back to bed.

Three more cakes arrived over the next two days. She stacked them all on her kitchen counter, untouched. She should drop them off at the food pantry, but that would mean she’d have to answer some difficult questions from Jamila, and she’d spent all weekend ignoring her texts. Instead she’d watched marathons of the Real Housewives of New York City, Atlanta, and Orange County. Strangely, these women and their awful relationships all made her feel better about her own choices. That was, until she was in bed in the middle of the night, without Max next to her, without his love and affection and desire for her. He’d loved her, wholly, completely, in a way no one had ever loved her before. And never would again, she was sure of that. How could she have let that go?

She probably should have told him long ago how hard all this was on her. But for so many years, she’d learned how to suck it up, pretend to the world everything was fine, even when she was miserable inside. A lot of times, she even pretended that to herself. She didn’t blame Max for not knowing what a hard time she’d had with everything. But she knew she couldn’t go back to the way it had been.