“You don’t get to do this, Adam. You don’t get to give up.”

“I’m not giving up—”

“Bullshit!” she said, standing up so fast the chair behind her scraped across the floor. “This is bullshit—” Her fist pounded on the table. “After what I did for you—” Her voice cut off again in a strangled sob.

I sat, fighting the emotion rising up, clenching my own fist at my side, willing myself to calm down when I wanted to stand up and start shouting, too.

“Sit down,” I said quietly.

She folded her arms across her chest and didn’t move. Our gazes met and the betrayal I saw there—it sucked all of the fight right out of me. I pulled my eyes away, leaned forward, put my head in my hand.

“Did you just hear yourself?” I said, my own voice shaking with emotion. “After what you did—you think you did it for me, for your mom, for your friends. Because somewhere inside of you, you can’t let yourself believe are worth putting yourself first for your own sake.”

Emilia turned for a moment, her back to me, then reached out for the chair, and instead of pulling it back to the table so she could sit down, she pushed it over. It clattered across the stone floor and she had her face in her hands.

“This fucking sucks!” she said, and then, with a kick that might have done more damage to her than the chair had she connected with more than a glancing blow, she lashed out again. “So now…I get to live—hooray!” She threw her arms up in a mock cheer but her eyes and cheeks were drenched with tears. “But I don’t have you. And I don’t have a baby.”

“Emilia—”

“No, you don’t understand.”

I swallowed. “You’re right. I don’t.”

Our eyes locked and the minutes stretched out into what felt like an eternity when I couldn’t breathe. “You need help. I can’t help you. And you are incapable of asking for help. Therefore, this situation is impossible.”

“What about you?” she hissed. “Is everything so perfect in there?” She pointed at my head.

“No, it’s pretty fucked up in here, too.”

Then she really started to sob, so much that she couldn’t even stand up straight. She doubled over as if in physical agony and seemed to be gasping for breath. I was worried she was going to lose her balance and fall over.

I shot out of my chair and went to her, pulling her into my arms. “Breathe,” I said.

But she was gasping so quickly that I thought she might pass out, her face buried in her closed fists. On instinct, I tightened my hold around her and miraculously she almost immediately calmed down. Her breaths came at a more measured pace and her sobs slowed until, minutes later, there was just congested breathing punctuated with a quiet whimper. My shirt was now drenched with her tears.

Finally she spoke, her face pressed against my shoulder. “I can’t believe that it ends like this. Is that life’s way of playing a sick, cruel joke?”

“It’s not the end, Mia,” I said.

“Then what is it?”

“I don’t know. It’s just…time…time we need to take to get our shit together.”

“Why can’t we do that together?”

“Because we’re both pretty messed up in our heads right now. I think we have to work on ourselves first.”

Another period of silence and then she stiffened in my arms, gently pulled away. I let my arms fall slack and she took a step back. Yanking off her bandana, she mopped her face with it, avoiding my eyes.

She cleared her throat and when she spoke, her voice was calm. “How long?”

I took a deep breath. “I think you should go home to Anza. Spend some time with your mom before her wedding…maybe go talk to your old therapist.”

“And you’ll stay here and work? How will that be working on things?”

“I haven’t thought all that through yet, but I have some ideas.”

I met her gaze and wished I hadn’t. Her eyes were stricken, haunted. I wanted to abandon this plan. I was hurting her. Too much.

“And then what?” she asked.

“There’s the wedding in June. We’ll see each other then.”

“That’s two months from now,” she rasped. “You honestly think that the best way for us to communicate with each other about our issues is to…not see each other?”

“Emilia, we’ve been put through a lot of shit in a short period of time. We need to try to heal from it.”