My First Love Returned, His Stand-In Begged Me to Stay novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Ten Years

Selah's POV

Bree drove me to the river at one in the morning and didn't ask what I planned to say.

"I'll be in the car," she said. "If I hear glass, I'm coming in."

The workshop door was propped open with a block of oak, and the lights were on.

Kip stood at the long bench with his back to me, putting chisels into a canvas roll.

Half the shelves were already bare.

He heard me and turned around.

He still had his gray suit trousers on, and his shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbow.

"You're packing," I said.

"My truck leaves at six."

"I didn't ask you to leave."

"You didn't ask me to stay either."

I shut the door behind me, and the whole room smelled of cedar and linseed oil.

I had planned a speech in the car, and it was gone.

"Ten years," I said.

"Yes."

"You sat across from me at every dinner for six years. You held my hand through every storm. I said that poem to you in the dark, and you let me think you'd learned it from a VanAlen."

"I never said I learned it from a VanAlen. You decided that, and I didn't correct you."

"That's worse!"

My voice cracked off the brick.

"I told you he was the best thing that ever happened to me. I told you you were the nearest thing to him I'd ever find. You were the first love, Kip. You were him, and you sat there and let me say it."

"I did."

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