I love you, too. It would’ve been so easy to say those words, to let them slip out of where they were gathering in his mouth. But he didn’t. Couldn’t. In some dim way, he understood that if he said those words, he would break, that the ice that was encasing his body, helping him hold his shit together, would crack and shatter, leaving in its wake that dark, vulnerable place where he couldn’t go. He had already had his entire known world turned upside down. This seemingly fragile, powerless woman standing in front of him, with her teary, beautiful face, her longing and her loneliness, her guilt
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