“PROMISE ME YOU’LL START DOING something for you.”

It’s that line, that one little sentence, that’s fucked with me all night. It’s why I burned my salmon, why I knocked over a new bottle of Blanton’s, my favorite bourbon. It’s why I left the shower running for a good ten minutes before I realized I never got in.

I think about the small things she does for me. The way she goes out of her way to take care of things, the way she worries about me. As much as I love being with her physically, the way she feels against me, this part of her is what hits me in a way I haven’t felt before. It’s what I can’t shake, what I fear will leave a hole when she leaves.

When she leaves.

“Shit,” I groan, pressing my hands against the glass door to the patio. I’m all tied up, a complete fucking wreck, and I really don’t even have the energy to try to straighten it out.

Shoving off the glass and turning towards my briefcase on the kitchen table, I pull out a few files I need to work on. I glance at them and realize—I don’t care. Not like I should. Something is off and it’s not Landry Security or Lincoln’s contracts. It’s something else.

I slam the files on the table and they hit it with a smack. Something rolls out of my briefcase and drops to the floor. A wide grin tickles my lips. Laughing, I scoop it up and hold it in the air. A roller bottle with a label for “Stress Relief ” catches the light. “Mallory,” I whisper. “Damn you.”

I could call up a woman and try to distract myself. I could . . . try to replace her. My brothers’ words rip through my mind, leaving a trail of awareness behind.

I can’t replace her. I don’t want to. Hell, I couldn’t.

There’s no way to switch her out for another woman. It would take two, three, maybe even four to amount to all the things she’s becoming to me.

Before I can contemplate that too much, my phone rings. I don’t even look at it. I just answer it, my brain too fogged up by my realization to think straight.

“Hello?” I ask, preoccupied.

“Graham?”

The phone wobbles in my hand and I almost drop it to the floor. Surely I’m wrong. I must be so twisted over Mallory and stressed out that I’m imagining things. That has to be it.

“Graham?” she asks again. Her voice is clear this time and exactly how I remember it.

I force a swallow, my emotions strung all over the place. I’ve waited to hear her voice for years, wondering what I would say to her. Now that she’s on the line, I have no idea what to say at all.

“Vanessa?” I ask.

“It’s me,” she says breathily. “I wasn’t sure if you’d remember my voice.”

Images of her lying in my arms, of her smile, and then of her husband’s face standing at the end of her bed flip through my mind. My stomach knots.

“Why are you calling me?”

“Lincoln’s wedding is all over the entertainment channels and magazines. He looks so much like you did back then.” She pauses. “How are you, Graham?”

“Vanessa, I . . .” I scrub my hands down my face, searching desperately for some calm in the center of this storm. “So you see my brother on television and you think, ‘Oh, I’ll call up the guy I fucked over years ago’?”

She’s taken aback by my tone, and frankly, so am I. Whatever I thought I’d say before isn’t what I’m feeling right now.

“Where’s your husband?”

“We split up a while ago,” she admits. “I should never have married him in the first place.”

“No, you shouldn’t have,” I say. “You probably fucked him up too.”

“What?”

The anger I’ve felt towards this woman boils to an all-time high. “Did you have no conscience at all? You were married, Vanessa. Married. Do you have any idea what that even means?”

“Graham . . .”

“Then you fuck with me, both literally and figuratively, because it wasn’t good enough for you to get my cock. You had to go worm your way into my life, cause problems for me with my family.” The more I say it out loud, the clearer it becomes.

“I loved you!”

“You didn’t love anyone but yourself. I doubt you even understand what love means.” As the words tumble from my lips, I laugh. “I didn’t understand what love meant until recently.”

A long pause settles over us, my outburst giving us both time to think. I remember all the ways I felt about Vanessa and all the ways I feel now towards Mallory. They’re completely different. Black and white. But one wasn’t love and the other . . . might be on its way there.

“I was thinking I might be in Savannah in a few weeks. I thought maybe we could meet up. Say hello.”

“No.” It’s a simple answer, a one-word shut down.

“You don’t even want to think about it?”

“Vanessa, I wish you the best. I can honestly say that with no reservations. I hope you have a terrific life and get everything you want. But none of that has anything to do with me.”

“I’m not asking to date you again or—”

“Good. Because we didn’t date then and we aren’t about to do anything now. We aren’t friends,” I say over top of her objections, “we aren’t acquaintances. We aren’t anything.”

“You can’t say that.”

“I just did. Goodbye, Vanessa.”

I end the call and place my phone on the table. I imagine Vanessa’s perfume on my skin and her smile looking back at me. I can’t.

Picking up Mallory’s roller ball, I roll it onto my forearm and breathe in the scent of lavender. I’m sure it’s less to do with the oil itself and more to do with the woman that gave it to me, but as soon as fragrance hits my nose, my frustration starts to melt away.