Will you stop pacing. You’re making me dizzy,” Meredith complains as I pause from taking another loop around my living room and glare at her.

I’ve done nothing but walk in circles, muttering to myself about how stupid I am, ever since I walked through the door of the guest house thirty minutes ago at the crack of dawn and found Meredith sitting on the couch with a cup of coffee in her hand, smirking at me.

“And for God’s sake, stop mumbling and tell me why I caught you sneaking in here with a glow on your face, flushed skin, and sex hair,” she finishes, taking a casual sip of her coffee and hiding her smile behind the lip of the mug.

We haven’t spoken about anything of importance since she stormed away from me the other day, fed up with me and my unwillingness to confide in her. As much as I want to growl at her for the sex hair comment, I miss talking to my friend. Arguing with Eli, arguing with Meredith, quietly seething about Landry and our sham of a relationship and the…whatever that was that happened with Eli in the middle of the night has piled up on top of the wall I’ve built and brought it crashing down into rubble at my feet. I’m tired of not being strong. I’m tired of not standing up for myself, and losing myself in Eli just proves how weak I’ve become. As much as I wanted it, as much as I loved every minute of the way he instinctively knew how to touch me, I feel like an idiot for allowing it to happen.

“I was with Eli last night.”

Meredith laughs, leaning forward to set her mug on the coffee table in front of her.

“Pretty sure I already got that memo. I guess it’s a good thing you refilled your birth control prescription. How about you tell me why you seem to be pissed about it.”

I sigh, walking around the table and flopping down on the couch next to her.

“You know why, Mer. I mean, I just broke things off with Landry. And even though she basically fired me and has been keeping her distance, my mother still has the power to ruin things. I can’t afford to take that chance,” I explain.

“Nice try. Tell me why you’re really pissed.”

With a huff, I turn my body to face her and cross my arms over my chest.

“That is why I’m really pissed. Do I need another reason?”

She shakes her head at me, mirroring my pose.

“First of all, fuck Landry. You said it yourself, you broke things off with him, so who cares? Second, your mother has been ruining things for you your entire life. You’re pissed because Eli got under your skin and you think it makes you look weak,” she informs me.

Just like always, she reads my mind and knows exactly what I’m thinking and the root of the problem.

“He hurt me and he broke my heart and he still hasn’t explained why. A few minutes alone with him and I suddenly forget about all of that, and what’s more, I didn’t even care. As soon as he touched me, I didn’t care that he left and I didn’t care that the only explanation I got was some stupid lie about letters he wrote me,” I tell her, throwing my hands up in the air in irritation. “I walked into that tack room and found him having a nightmare. It was horrible and I couldn’t think about anything but taking away his pain and making him forget what he went through.”

Meredith reaches over and grabs my hand, giving it a squeeze.

“Tell me how you felt, when all of this was happening with him. Not how you feel now, after it’s done, how you felt in that exact moment when you were together.”

I don’t even have to close my eyes to remember how good it felt to be in his arms again. How perfect it was to hear his voice, speaking so softly and lovingly. My body still tingles from the orgasm he gave me, and my heart beats faster thinking about how he still knew the exact way to touch me to give me pleasure, like he’d memorized it all those years ago and never let it slip from his mind.

“Flawless. Beautiful. Wanted,” I whisper, answering Meredith’s question.

My eyes fill with tears when I think about how many sleepless nights I spent thinking I’d never feel his arms around me again, how many times I screamed and cried, wishing for just one more moment with him to hold his face in my hands, stare into his eyes, and feel whole again. Feel loved again. Feel alive again. I’ve been dead inside for so long, and in just one night, he brought me back to life.

She smiles at me and gives my hand another squeeze before pushing herself up from the couch and holding one finger up in the air.

“Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”

I watch her move quickly across the room and down the hall to the spare bedroom. Running the tips of my fingers over my lips while I wait for her, I realize they still feel swollen from Eli’s kisses and it fills me with so many mixed emotions that I don’t know how to handle them.

He touched my leg like it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He didn’t cringe or look away, and when he told me I was beautiful, I could see it in his eyes that he meant every word. When the sun came up and filled the tack room with bright morning light, I scrambled off his lap and walked away from him without a word. I was embarrassed that I let myself get so carried away with him. That I let things go that far without making him talk to me. I waited all this time to finally hear the reasons why he left me and I threw them out the window as soon as he ran his hand without hesitation up my thigh, told me he needed me and that dreaming about me was the only thing that kept him going for all those years.

I’ve been so starved for how he used to make me feel back when we were together. I’ve tried so hard to replicate those feelings with Landry, but it’s pointless. Landry doesn’t make me feel flawless. He never makes me feel beautiful, and he certainly never makes me feel wanted. I’m his ticket to winning a seat in the state senate. I come from a family with money, power, influence, and everything he needs to attain his goals. He’s using me to get what he wants, just like I’m using him to keep Eli and his family safe. Even though our relationship is one built on a foundation of lies, I still hoped I could someday feel something with him.

After being with Eli again, I know now that he’s the only one who can make me feel alive. He’s the only one who makes me want to be stronger and be the person I used to be. I just don’t know how to do that, keep him protected and forgive him all at the same time without losing my sanity.

“I brought these with me just in case,” Meredith says, pulling me from my thoughts as she rushes back into the room, cradling a shoe box in her hands. “And before you scream and curse at me, you should also know I looked at them already.”

She tosses the shoe box on top of the coffee table, and it slides across the surface until I have to grab it before it topples to the floor at my feet.

“You brought me a pair of Louboutins? Um, thanks?” I question uncertainly, picking up the brown box with white cursive writing on top and resting it in my lap.

“Sadly, no,” she tells me, wringing her hands together nervously in front of her as she looks back and forth between me and the box. “Just open it so we can get the screaming and cursing over with.”

With a roll of my eyes at her dramatics, I lift the lid and look down inside the box, the smile immediately slipping from my face when I see what’s inside. The lid drops from my fingers and my hand shakes as I slowly move it toward the stack of letters spilled all over the inside of the box. The first letter is addressed to me, in care of Meredith at her New York apartment, the return address in the upper-left-hand corner of the envelope from a military barracks post office box in the States. Quickly flipping through all the letters, dozens and dozens of them, I see they are all addressed the same way, with the first five coming from a barracks PO box and the rest coming from several different generic military PO boxes.

“Oh, my God,” I whisper, swallowing past the lump in my throat and blinking rapidly to keep the tears from falling down my cheeks.

He was telling the truth. He wrote to me. And according to the postmark stamp on the letters, he started writing a few weeks after he left for deployment and continued doing so for months. Just like he said. Just like he tried to explain before I called him a liar and stormed away that day in the studio. I was so angry after I searched my mother’s office, wanting to believe he was telling the truth and maybe she hid the letters from me. I was pissed when I came up empty-handed and assumed he had lied to me just to get me to easily forgive him and let him back into my life. I let that anger take over this morning when I walked away from him, still believing he had been lying and I’d just shown how weak I was by not forcing him to tell me the truth before I let him touch me.

I can’t stop the tears from sliding down my cheeks as I grab the letter on top of the pile, pull out the folded piece of notebook paper from inside the already torn-open envelope, and read the three sentences written in the middle of the page in Eli’s messy handwriting.

My tears continue falling steadily down my face as I quickly pull out the letters in the next five envelopes, each one with phrasing similar to the first one, aside from each of them being written a week or so apart.

Crumpling the letters in my hands, I hug them to my chest and squeeze my eyes closed as I try to catch my breath through my sobs. He was telling the truth and it hurts so much more now that I know it. It breaks me in half seeing his handwriting, reading his words, and knowing that he really did try to fight for me. I don’t even care why he left the way he did at this point. Knowing he hated himself for what he did and tried to reach me even while his life was on the line in a war zone makes me ache for him and how he must have felt when I never responded.

“Say something,” Meredith says softly after my tears finally subside and I’m able to breathe again.

I open my eyes and look up at her, my best friend, the only person in the world aside from Eli who knows me inside and out and saw what I went through when he left. Saw what his leaving did to me and what I allowed to happen to my life when he was no longer in it, hating everything about myself because I just couldn’t stop loving him more than I hated him. I gave up my life to protect him and I’d do it all over again without question, but if I had seen these letters, if I had known what was going on in his mind after he left, I would have done all these things without losing everything of myself in the process. I would have done it in remembrance of his love for me and not out of some twisted sense of duty toward his honor and his family’s good name.

“How could you keep these from me?” I mutter brokenly, the tears threatening to come back when I pull the letters from my chest and look back down at Eli’s words. “How could you do this to me when you knew? You knew how much it killed me when he left. You’ve been sitting on these letters for six fucking years!”

Tossing the crumpled pieces of paper into the box and setting it down on the table in front of me, I shake my head at my best friend, questioning everything about our friendship. I wrap my arms around my waist, hunching over as I choke on a sob, never thinking in a million years my best friend would betray me and do something like this.

“Forget the last six years; you’ve been here for over a week. You’ve seen me wrestle back and forth with Eli being here and determined to get back in my life. Even though I didn’t come right out and say it, you knew I’d given everything up for him and how hard it’s been thinking I’d done all of this for a man who just threw me away and you STILL waited to give them to me. Why?”

Meredith’s eyes fill with tears and I have to look away from her face before I do something stupid like give her a hug and forgive her immediately. She’s the one who lied. She’s the one who hid things from me and let me feel so twisted and confused.

“I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t make up for anything, but I am. When the first letter came, you had just been in your accident and I was on my way out the door to the airport to get to you,” she explains, swiping a tear from her cheek. “I didn’t even open it, I just tossed it on my counter and left. When I got back to New York a few months later after spending time with you and seeing you so broken and hurting and losing everything you’d worked so hard for, and then finding a stack of more letters from him in my mailbox, it pissed me off. I thought he was going to hurt you again. I was afraid of what was inside of them and I didn’t want you to hurt anymore.”

She moves around the coffee table and squats down next to my legs, resting her hands on my knees.

“I didn’t trust him, Shelby, and I just didn’t want you to hurt anymore. I wanted you to heal and move on.”

“Did you read them?” I whisper angrily.

Her eyes widen in shock before they quickly fill with hurt as she shakes her head.

“No, of course not.”

I scoot away from her on the couch, her hands dropping from my knees as I move to stand up, putting as much distance between us as I can. I want to understand what she’s telling me and try to put myself in her place if the situation were reversed, but I can’t right now. It’s too new, too raw, and hurts too much that she would do something like this to me. That she would keep these letters in a fancy shoe box in her closet all this time and never say one word to me about them. Never let me know that Eli wrote to me after he left, regardless if what was in those letters was just something else that would hurt me. I deserved to know that the man I loved, the man I grieved and the man I did everything for, tried to fight for me. I deserved to know he thought of me as much as I thought of him. I deserved to see those letters for myself and make up my own mind about my well-being. I don’t know if I’d still be in the same place, living the same miserable life, if I had seen those letters years ago, but I deserved the chance to know the truth.

“Shelby—”

“Don’t.” I interrupt her, avoiding her eyes as I slam the lid on the shoe box and lift it into my arms. “I can’t do this with you right now.”

I see her nod her head out of the corner of my eye. I hug the box to me and walk out of the room and down the hall, slamming my bedroom door shut behind me and wondering why everyone in my life seems to think they know what’s best for me and why they all think it’s okay to make my decisions for me. Tossing the box onto the bed, I clutch my hands into fists, tip my head back, and scream at the top of my lungs. I let the anger, the betrayal, the hurt, and the disappointment come pouring out of me until my voice is hoarse, my knees give out, and I sink down to the floor, out of breath and out of giving a damn.

The walls have officially crumbled on this house of lies and I’m finished. I’m done being taken advantage of and used for everyone else’s agendas. This is my life and it’s about damn time I start living it again and making my own damn decisions.