“Hardin, please calm down. I’m sorry for everything I’ve done to you, and most of all I’m sorry that I complicated your life, and I’m sorry for all the fighting and back-and-forth, but you have to know this wouldn’t work. I thought”—I smile a pitiful smile—“I thought that we could make it. I thought ours was a love of the novels, a love that no matter how hard and fast and tough it was, I thought we would survive anything and everything and live to tell the story.”
