Page 84 of Ruthless Edge

"Tell me," she says.

"I don't know where to start."

"Anywhere."

I look at the curtains. The window. The garden path I can see from up here if I stand at the right angle. "I'm having trouble believing it," I say. "That the whole thing was just Laura. Just interference." I pick at a thread on the comforter. "It's too neat. It explains everything too cleanly, and things don't work like that. There must be more to it. Something I’m not seeing, or don’t want to see."

"Sometimes there is more to it, but sometimes there’s not," Paige says.

"Maybe." I stop picking at the thread. "But even if Knox never knew I was there. Even if everything he said in the garden is true." I stop. Find the next part. "I don't think a guy like Knox would have been into me. The version of me that was there that night. And I don’t think I can be happy with a guy who can’t love me at any size and shape."

Paige is quiet for a second.

"When I was heavy," I say. "I don't think that version of me is someone Knox Carter would notice."

"And that," Paige says, gently, "is your self-esteem talking. Not Knox."

I look at her.

"He sat beside you every day," she says. "He spent time with you. He was, apparently, crushed when you stopped talking to him. He did that when you were a different size than you are now, Emma. That was him. That was Knox paying attention to you."

My eyes sting. I do not cry. I've cried enough in the last twenty-four hours and I'm not doing it again in The Hawthorne in a fancy dress.

"He told you he had an A in class," Paige says. "He didn't need the study sessions. He manufactured reasons to spend time with you. You, Emma. Not a number on a scale."

"I know," I say. Quiet. "I know you're right. I can hear that it's right." I press my hands together in my lap. "I just have three years of a different story and I can't unhear it in one night."

"No," she says. "You can't. That's fair."

"And even if I could." I look at her. "Even if I believed all of it. Knox and I have, well, there's so much. Three years of me hating him. Three years of assuming the worst. He's had to fight for every conversation we've had this semester because I was convinced he was the person who humiliated me, and he wasn't, and I don't—" I stop. Start again. "How do we come back from that? Where do we even start?"

Paige looks at me for a long moment.

Then she takes my hand.

"I can't answer that," she says. "I don't know where you start. I don't think there's a map." She squeezes. "But Emma, you have been running the clock on this all semester. Keeping the distance, staying careful, protecting yourself. And you've been doing it based on something that wasn't true. You don't have to keep protecting yourself from something that didn't happen."

I look at our hands.

"You get to choose," she says. "That's what I know for sure. You have the power over what happens next, not Knox, not Laura, not three years ago. You." She squeezes again. "You can decide this is too much and walk away. You can decide Owen's the better option, or whatever other cute guy comes along. You can decide you need more time. Or you can go downstairs and see what happens." She pauses. "Any of those are valid. Only one of them is what you actually want, and you know which one it is. You've known for a while."

I don't answer that.

She stands up.

She holds out her hand, palm up, and looks at me with her green eyes and her pink dress and her complete and utter confidence.

"Rory and Sienna are down the hall," she says. "We're going down together." She tilts her head slightly. "Do you want to come?"

I look at her hand, then at the door.

I think about the garden path and the cold air and Knox's voice saying I didn't know. I think about a boy who sat beside me every day for a semester and brought coffee without being asked. I think about a woman who spent three years believing something that wasn't true, and about what it costs to keep believing it now that she knows.

Without a word, I stand up and take Paige's hand.

"Let's go," I say.

Chapter Twenty-One