Another pause.
“Did you have to think about the answer,” he asked gently, “or were you thinking about answering me?”
Charlotte’s grip tightened. “This was a mistake,” she muttered. “You’re already in my head.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” His tone was even, but she heard the tension underneath.
She didn’t answer right away. She couldn’t. The words were stuck somewhere behind years of locked doors. Years of carefully measured survival. But then, slowly, they came. “If you’re in my head,” she said, barely above a whisper, “I can’t get you out.”
“Char…” His voice was soft now. “Put it into words I can understand. Remember, I’m a man. A knuckle-dragging Neanderthal, I think you used to call me.”
She exhaled, short and unsteady. “I don’t have the strength to let you out if I have to. I’ve barely recovered, and risking things again could break me. I don’t have the emotional resilience.”
His silence this time wasn’t sharp. It was patient. Waiting.
“I can’t hurt like that again.” And then—oh God. The flood she’d spent years holding back crept up through her chest like cold water.
“Chuck,” Graham said quietly, the name hanging in the air like a weight. “You’ve never dealt with the grief. That’s why.”
Charlotte snapped, “Why what?”
“Why you were able to turn off our relationship like a light switch. And, more importantly, turn off the relationship with Alex. You can’t let him in.”
Her head whipped toward him. “We were work partners.”
He scoffed. “Wow. You really have worked yourself into the world of denial.”
She turned back to the road, her pulse loud in her ears.
“We spent eight years together, Charlotte. Working hellish hours. You took care of people in trauma all day and then went home and carried five daughters on your back. And on your days off, who was fixing that leaky faucet? Who painted the porch with you? Changed your tires? Stayed late because Ruth had a fever and you needed someone at the house?”
“Graham…”
“No. You need to hear this. On more nights than I can count, after the girls were asleep, I held you while you cried. You didn’t even try to hide it. And, no, we never slept together. But don’t you dare tell me that wasn’t a relationship.”
Charlotte’s throat tightened. She swallowed hard, jaw clenched.
“I loved you,” he said. “I still love you. And I’m not saying that to make things harder. I’m saying it because I need you to understand—you didn’t walk away from nothing. You didn’t go numb just because of Chuck. You shut the whole damn door.”
She blinked, vision swimming.
“I’m hurting for you,” he said quietly. “I’m hurting for Alex. He loves you. I can hear it in his voice, even when he’s trying not to beg.”
Charlotte shook her head, her voice cracking. “I don’t know if I can do it again.”
“Would you rather spend the rest of your life alone than let someone really love you?”
Her knuckles were white around the wheel.
“Don’t tell me you have a full life with the girls. Don’t give me that line. I know you love them. I know you’d do anything for them. But they can’t fill this space, Char. They were never meant to. And, damn it, I don’t think you were meant to be alone.”
The silence that followed gutted her. It wasn’t empty. It was full of things she’d never said. Nights she had buried. Needs she had denied. She wiped a hand across her face, blinking against the tears she couldn’t afford to cry.
“I don’t know how to let go,” she whispered. “Not of Chuck. Not of you. Not of any of it.”
Graham reached across the console, rested a hand lightly over hers on the wheel. Solid. Familiar. No pressure. “You don’t have to let go,” he said. “But you do have to let someone in.”
Charlotte couldn’t respond—not yet. But the words stayed lodged in her chest, beating in time with the ache she'd carried far too long.
