Layla - Colleen Hoover Page 0,99

life, and how I felt like so much changed in Layla. It’s like she became a different person after that surgery.

She did.

She was a completely different person. Her entire personality changed; the way I felt about her changed. And now that I’m looking back on it, there are even similarities between the Layla who woke up from the surgery and the Sable I dated. Sable had bulimia. Layla became obsessed with her weight after surgery. Sable was obsessed with social media, and . . . me. Layla became obsessed with building my platform. Sable suffered from a number of mental illnesses, and the more days that passed after Layla’s surgery, it seemed like Layla was starting to suffer from those same mental illnesses. And the day we arrived here, I knew it was Layla who punched that mirror. I didn’t understand why she’d do it, but I knew she did it.

When Layla woke up from that surgery, she was not the same girl I fell in love with.

But all the things I loved about Layla in those first couple of months of knowing her are the exact same ones I started to notice in Willow. Her personality, her mood, her playfulness, the familiarity in the way she kissed, her strange and random facts. I used to tell Layla she was like a morbid version of Wikipedia.

That’s also one of the things I recognized and liked about Willow.

That triggers another memory that should have been an obvious clue.

“On the bed, upstairs,” I say to Willow. “The night you were watching Ghost. I said, ‘You are so strange.’ But I also said that to you when I first met you. Because . . . I was fascinated by you and enamored with you, and then when I met Willow, she felt so familiar, and . . .”

I can’t finish my sentence because it feels like the cinder block that has been weighing down on my chest has just lifted.

I no longer feel like I’m falling out of love with Layla, because I’ve been falling in love with her this whole time in Willow.

Layla is Willow, and now that I’m looking at her, I have no idea how I didn’t see it before tonight.

I take her face in my hands. “It is you. This whole time I’ve been falling back in love with you. The same girl I fell in love with the moment I saw you dancing like an idiot on the grass in the backyard.”

She laughs at the memory—a memory she owns. A memory we share together. A memory that doesn’t belong to Sable.

A tear rolls down her cheek, and I wipe it away and pull her to me. She wraps her arms around me. I had no idea how much I missed her until this very second. But I’ve missed her so much. I missed what we shared in the first two months we were together. I’ve missed her since the night she was shot.

I’ve had this constant hollow feeling inside me since that night, and for so long I’ve felt guilty for feeling that way. For feeling like I lost her when she was still right in front of me. I even felt guilty for the way Willow reminded me of her.

That guilt is gone now. I feel justified. Every choice I made . . . every feeling Willow filled me with . . . it was all justified, because my soul was already in love with hers. It’s why I felt an inexplicable pull to this place. To Willow. Even when I thought Willow was Sable, I still felt that pull, and it confused me.

It all makes sense now.

I press my lips to hers and I kiss her. I kiss Layla. As soon as she kisses me back, I feel everything I used to feel when I would kiss her. Everything I thought I’d lost. It’s right here. It’s been here all along.

I keep touching her face between kisses, amazed to finally see it. It’s why there was such a huge difference every time Willow would take over Layla. It’s why Willow seemed more comfortable and confident in Layla’s body. It’s because it was hers all along. It never belonged to Sable. Sable has seemed uncomfortable in it since the day she woke up from surgery.

Willow is smiling through her tears when she says, “This explains why I was so relieved when you showed up here, Leeds. It was because I missed you, even though I couldn’t remember