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

by Kandi Steiner

“I learned the people we love usually turned out to be one of three things: a home, a holiday, or hell.” — Beau Taplin

Home was the only thing I wanted to find, and now that I was back, I realized how futile that hope was.

She used to be the positive voice of optimism to balance out my angsty teenage depression. So many nights she had brought me some kind of hope, even if I’d laughed at it in the moment she’d given it to me. But tonight, she didn’t attempt to fix the splitting of my soul. She only crawled into the fault line with me, giving me company in the hollow loneliness of it all.

“They’re a memory forever etched into your body,” I explained. “They’re proof of existence, proof that those boys lived inside you, that they were a part of you and, even if only briefly, a part of this world. A part of your life.”

“He really is. And, to be fair, everyone is quiet in comparison to you.” “You calling me a loud mouth?” “Just saying that a room is never void of conversation when you’re in it.”

He just knew me, even though we’d been apart for so many years.

Somewhere along the way, we’d been broken down. I’d thought for years that we’d come back from it, that our love was strong enough to survive, but it wasn’t. And I didn’t want to live an unhappy life any longer trying to make something work that wouldn’t.

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