Our Anniversary Trip Was Their Repeat Trip Chapter 06

Our Anniversary Trip Was Their Repeat Trip Chapter 06

thought about how I was supposed to react.

In the end, I answered a beat too late. “Then… congratulations?”

Ethan’s face darkened, a dangerous edge entering his expression.

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“I said no.’

On their last night in Los Angeles, Ethan and the others had been sitting together.

Without thinking, Ethan kept lighting up his phone, waiting for the screen to go dark, then lighting

it up again.

One of his friends teased him.

“We haven’t seen you in forever, Mr. Caldwell. You can’t even give us a few minutes of

conversation?”

“You seem distracted. Are you waiting for a message from someone?”

Olivia answered for him, with no emotion in her voice.

“Who else would it be? His girlfriend.”

Ethan smiled and didn’t deny it.

“Yeah.”

“She got sick a few days ago. I’m still a little worried.”

Olívia set down her wineglass. After a long pause, she asked quietly, “Ethan, are you serious?”

She finished without looking at him.

“I lied to you the other night.”

“I broke up with my boyfriend a while ago, and I’m not getting engaged.”

“I only said it to provoke you. Seeing you with someone else made me realize I still cared.”

“Ethan, I finally figured out that after everything, you’re still the person I care about most.”

“What about you?”

“Do we have any chance of starting over?”

There was a trace of regret in her eyes, and nostalgia in her voice.

“Do you remember? When we saw that pod of whales in Monterey, we said we’d be together

forever.”

She turned toward him. Colored lights fell across Ethan’s face, leaving one side bright and the other shadowed, but he looked lost in thought.

Olivia never heard him answer. She already knew what it would be.

Ethan had gone still because her words had finally made him remember what he had overlooked.

On the drive back from Fisherman’s Wharf, I had sighed in disappointment.

“It’s too bad we didn’t see a whale breach.”

So he had heard me after all.

Olivia left, and while the party around him stayed loud, the space around Ethan went quiet.

He lowered his head, checked the weather, and booked another boat, hoping to make up for the disappointment in my voice.

I shook my head.

“You remembered too late.”

“Once I’ve missed it, I’ve missed it.”

“I don’t need it anymore.”

Ethan didn’t understand. Could being a few days late really matter that much?

My head hurt, so I finally laid everything out.

“Ethan, it matters.”

“What matters is that, in every single one of these moments, I couldn’t see that you cared about

me.”

“The second Olivia appeared, I became invisible.”

“It’s not that I needed to compare myself to her.”

I sighed. “But you put effort into everything for Olivia. When it was my turn, there was nothing

“From the hotel arrangements to the people we ran into, everything remembered the two of you, as

if you’d never really broken up.”

“I’m your girlfriend. I wanted you to spend time with me. I wanted us to have a good vacation together.”

I imitated his voice, and it sounded painfully stiff.

“But you said no. You didn’t want to. You weren’t willing. You weren’t interested.”

“I wasn’t actually trying to force you to do anything you didn’t want to do.”

“So if you didn’t want to, fine. But why did everything have to be something you’d already done with Olivia? And why were you willing to do it all over again with her?”

“Why were you willing to leave me alone in a hospital just to be with her?”

“Everywhere we went, our trip reminded you of Olivia. You couldn’t see me.’

“And that was before we even ran into her.”

“The two of you were off in your own world. I couldn’t get into it, and you couldn’t see why I was hurt. You made me apologize, then gave my gifts to someone else.”

“Ethan, you humiliated me.”

“You were trying to one-up each other, so you casually announced that you were going to marry me. You made me put on my own engagement ring and left me standing there alone.”

“In front of everyone else, you made me feel worthless. Do you know what your college friends said? They said that after you and Olivia broke up, both of you had simply settled for whoever came

next.”

“I was disappointed that I didn’t see a whale breach. But maybe it was a sign. Maybe it was telling me from the beginning that we weren’t going to have many beautiful moments together.”

“Maybe you do like me.”

“But what you feel for me is too fragile. The moment you run into someone you once loved, it falls

apart.”

“I was the one who said we should break up, but you were the one who made the breakup happen.”