In spite of everything, though, when I laid eyes on her, everything seemed to lighten—in my own mind anyway. I hadn’t realized how much I’d looked forward to seeing her again and how much I missed her, because I hadn’t allowed myself to dwell on it. I’d been burying myself in work.

“Hi,” I said, taking a menu and glancing over it.

“Hey,” she said quietly, setting her phone aside and looking up at me.

“How’s it going?”

She shrugged. I waited. That was, apparently, the only answer I was going to get.

The waitress came and I ordered my favorite—the two-taco carne asada plate. Emilia ordered a lemon-lime soda.

“You aren’t hungry?” I asked

She seemed to pale even more at the mention of food. “Not really.”

I clenched my jaw and released it, frowning. At that moment, a stab of pain went directly through my left eye. I pressed my finger to my brow just above it, tried to power through, ignore it.

She studied me. “You okay?”

“I’m fine. Why aren’t you eating?”

She shrugged again. “I just don’t feel like eating.”

When the waitress came back with our drinks, I ordered a bowl of soup for Emilia. She scowled, but didn’t object.

“So…what did you want to talk about?”

“I told you in the text. I promised Peter that we’d talk about Christmas. You and I are going to have to find a way to get along on Christmas because they’ve already told us both that they want to spend it together, and regardless of how either of us feels about it, I’m not going to avoid spending the holidays with my family because of you.”

She rolled her eyes. “I could just not go. That will make it easy.”

I stiffened. “I’m also not going to take a giant ration of shit from your mom or Liam because I’m the one to blame for you not being there.”

She poked her straw into her soda a few times and shrugged. “Christmas isn’t for over three weeks. Why talk about this now?”

“Because I’ll be gone for a while and I’m going to have to fight to make it back in time.”

Her hand froze. “Gone? Like…where?”

I rubbed my forehead again. The headache was starting to tighten in my temples. “Back East. Lawsuit stuff…”

“And the congressional hearing? They’re going through with that? I thought those were just blog rumors.”

I blew out a long breath. “Nope, apparently not. Someone got a good scoop. Sorry it wasn’t you.”

She pursed her lips in thought. “I don’t give a fuck about a scoop. You’ll…you’ll be okay?”

I stared at her for a long, silent moment and nodded. “I’ll live. What about you? Apparently you’ve stopped eating…”

Her eyes avoided mine. I looked around and slipped her a padded envelope. She looked at me with a question in her eyes.

“It’s the medicine you left at my house. I had the empty syringes disposed of properly.”

Without a word she tucked the envelope into her backpack. And she sat quietly, fidgeting. This was my gesture—to show her that I trusted her. To show her that I trusted when she told me she wasn’t abusing drugs. It had taken me long hours of deliberating to decide what to do. In the end, I handed them back to her with a cold fear at the back of my throat, giving up what little control I had to prove something to her.

“Are you—do you want to talk?” I said, clearing my throat.

She looked up into my eyes and I felt a stab of something. That painful jab of constantly missing her. She watched me with wide eyes for a long moment, then shook her head.

“Emilia…” I reached my hand across the table and covered one of hers with it. It felt soft, cool to my touch. “If you need anything. Any help. You know you can come to me, right?”

She looked away and blinked. After a long tense moment she shook her head. “We were supposed to be talking about Christmas,” she said in a tiny voice.

Slowly, oh so slowly, I pulled my hand back. I rubbed a finger along my bottom lip. “We can’t screw this up for them,” I said. “We need to act like grown-ups for their sakes. God knows they both deserve a little happiness in their lives and who are we to decide that it shouldn’t work for them just because we turned into a disaster?”

Her dark brows drew into a frown and it almost looked like she would get emotional, but she nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “It’s not fair to them. And they deserve to be happy. Mom deserves to have someone.”