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Carter set down the knife, placing both palms on the kitchen counter before looking me in the eye.

“First of all, go get your damn phone and plug it in. Second, I don’t know Andi as well as you do, but from what I can tell, she’s got a good head on her shoulders. If anything, don’t you think you should trust her enough to be there for you while you heal? Kind of like you wanted Sarah to confide in you?”

Shit.

Carter went back to chopping veggies, and I buried my head in my hands long enough to allow his comment to sink in.

“I’ll be right back.” I stood up, trying to remember where I could have left my phone.

A few moments later, I found it. Placed on my end table next to my bedside, I snagged the device and the charger.

When I returned to the kitchen, I plugged it in and waited for it to eventually light up. And to no surprise, the moment it had enough juice in it to function, it sounded off with every notification I’d missed over the last couple of weeks.

Pulling up my text messages, the only ones I cared about were Andi’s and if she’d even reached out to me or not. Everything work related would have to wait. I told who I needed to I’d be out of the office for a bit due to a personal matter. So, passing over every contact in my inbox, my eyes finally landed on the unread text thread from Andi.

“Fuck,” I mumbled under my breath.

“I take it that little redhead had a few things to say.” He smirked as he continued to make dinner.

I shot a death glare in the direction of my best friend—which probably wasn’t the smartest idea since he was the one holding a knife.

Glancing back down at my phone, I pulled up her name to see I had well over a dozen texts from her. With my days a little jumbled up, the first one was sent on what I assumed was the morning after.

I continued to read through each message, and the more days that passed, the more I could hear the pain in her words grow. I felt like the biggest piece of shit there ever was.

Andi had every right to say some downright hurtful things to me, and I wouldn’t blame her if she did. I kicked her out of my house without a second thought, for fuck’s sake. But each text from her was rawer than the next. She wanted to make sure I was the one who was okay, when I know now that she had to have been hurting pretty damn badly.

When I got to the bottom of the text thread, my heart stopped beating. My stomach bottomed out, and everything inside me twisted in a way that caused me actual physical pain.

My fingers fed through the loose strands of hair hanging over my forehead, and when I pulled hard enough, I hoped to feel the pain anywhere else besides the inside of my chest.

“You don’t look too good, man. What did she have to say?”

Tears pricked my eyes as the guilt continued to flood to the surface.

“She … The last text she sent me was to tell me she loves me.” I stared at those words and imagined what Andi looked like in the moment as she considered sending the text.

In my head, her intoxicating smile was gone, and with her broken heart on her sleeve, she sent that last message with a sliver of hope lingering in the air only for me to crush it because I never got the message.

“How does that make you feel?”

Fucking Carter with the therapist bullshit again.

“Like a dick. A fucking asshole. Look,” I turned my screen so he could read the text.

“What the hell does she need to be sorry for? I was the idiot that didn’t know how to handle myself. I was the dumbass who let my phone die and told myself she’d be better off without me.”

“Maybe she just feels sorry for you. Maybe she hated watching you go through what you did, and when you didn’t allow her to be there for you, she just felt … sorry.”

“Dammit, man. I don’t know how the hell to even come back from this.” I turned my phone over, so I didn’t have to see all the words etched with her misery.

“Do you want to? Is the end goal to be with her?” Carter asked the one question that I hadn’t allowed myself to think about until now.

The end goal had never been to be with anyone else. I swore I’d die as a widowed bachelor. But I knew from the moment I met Andi she was different. The more time we spent together, the more I had gotten to know her, and the more that she actually allowed me to get to know her, my mindset started to shift.

Every day she was around, the more my past became my past. I’d finally learned how to separate the early years that I never wanted to relive, the present time spent getting to know Andi, and my future—that hopefully would involve her. I finally started to live again. Live for what could be and not what had already happened.

After all of the years I’d felt dead inside, and as if I were just rolling through the motions, I longed for that electric feeling again. The feeling that only Andi was responsible for bringing back into my life.