What He Doesn't Know (What He Doesn't Know Duet, #1)

by Kandi Steiner

They say there are two sides to every story, and I suppose in most cases, that’s true. But the one I lived inside of? It had three. On the northeast side of Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania, there was a house. But there was no longer a home.

“Books aren’t meant to be in perfect shape,” she said when we reached her room. “They’re meant to be read, to be inhaled like oxygen.” Her fingers ran over the spine again, and she smiled. “This book has been breathed. It’s been loved.”

I wondered, distantly, if I would ever find a woman to make me feel the way Charlie made me feel. Would my future wife know what to say on the hard nights, how to bring me comfort only by existing. Charlie didn’t even have to have the right words that night — she just needed to be there. To exist. With her, with the way I felt for her — that was enough. She’d always been enough for me, even when I’d had to sit on my hands to keep from touching her when we were younger. Five years had separated us then — five long, cruel, forbidden years. I didn’t have the power to change those years, to warp time, to make it okay for a twenty-one-year-old to fall for a girl still in high school. But as Charlie and Cameron said goodnight to everyone, I realized those years weren’t what separated us any longer. I held her a beat longer than normal when she leaned in for a hug, thanking her for what she’d given me that night, and then I shook Cameron’s hand, all the while wondering if what I’d heard about him was true. And I realized it then. He was what separated us now. And he was only a man.

Death changes us. It takes everything we thought we knew about our lives and fast pitches it out the window, shattering the glass in the process. Wind whips in, hard and cold, and throws everything we’d had neatly in place flying around the room. No one is the same once they lose someone they love. They just have to learn to exist in the new world, no matter how messy it is.

“If I am a river, you are the ocean. It all comes back to you in the end.”