There Goes My Heart (The Sullivans #20) - Bella Andre Page 0,84

the hint of a spark in her eyes had gone out by the time she said, “It’s too beautiful for me. I can’t take it. I don’t deserve it.” She closed her eyes, looking utterly defeated. “Please, I need to be alone.”

The very last thing he wanted to do was leave her. But he knew he couldn’t force her to change her mind. All he could do right now was let her know one more thing. “The night you told me about your mother, I promised you I wasn’t going anywhere. And I have no intention of being any less bullheaded and stubborn than I’ve always been. I’m not giving up on you, Zara, and I’m not giving up on us either. I’m going to keep loving you, whether you want me to or not, whether you think I should or not. I’m going to hold faith that you still love me too. And every single day, I’m going to show up at your house with a chocolate cake and tell you I love you.”

With that, though it was the hardest thing he’d ever done, he made himself walk out into the raging storm.

* * *

Beth and Ethan Sullivan were getting ready for bed when he moved behind his wife and put his arms around her waist at the bathroom sink. “Everything is going to be okay with Rory and Zara.”

Beth laid her head back against his chest. Looking at the two of them together in the mirror, she gave silent thanks for the millionth time that he’d traveled to her sleepy Irish town nearly forty years ago. She couldn’t imagine what her life would have been like without her amazing Sullivan hero and the family they’d created together that was absolutely everything to her.

But then she sighed as she thought again about the distraught expressions on Rory’s and Zara’s faces before dinner. “I hope it will be.”

Gently, Ethan turned her to face him. “We might not have done everything right as parents, but the one thing I know we nailed was teaching our kids how to fight for what really counts. Even,” he added, “if it’s going to take some of them longer to figure it out than we’d like it to.”

She knew Ethan had shifted to talking about Hudson now. Their eldest son and his marriage woes had kept Beth up many, many nights. Unfortunately, he’d come to Bar Harbor without his other half again. And he definitely hadn’t looked happy about it.

“Moms should be given magic wands,” Beth noted, “like the one Kevin was playing with tonight, so that we can fix whatever our kids need fixed.”

“Don’t you know?” Ethan asked as he put his hands on either side of her face. “You’ve never needed a wand to bring magic into our lives. You do it every single day, simply by being you.”

And as he kissed her, the magic between them was even stronger now than it had ever been.

CHAPTER THIRTY

12:01 a.m.

It was Saturday. The day Zara and Rory had agreed to break up.

For a while there, it had looked like they were going to go back on their agreement—and that true love might prevail in the end.

Only for their relationship to fall completely apart because Zara didn’t deserve him.

When she had first climbed into bed, she’d been too numb to think about everything Rory had said to her before she asked him to leave. Too numb to rewind back to the moment when she’d freaked out in front of Beth Sullivan and fled dinner. Too numb to do anything but stare at the ceiling, which was blurry without her glasses, and listen to the loud sound of her own breathing in the too-silent room.

Even though she knew there was no chance of sleeping without Rory there to be her full-body pillow.

After her mother had died, Zara had tried to drown her grief and guilty conscience by pouring herself into her schoolwork and then her career. But at two a.m., when she finally gave up on sleep and went out to the kitchen table to try to get some work done on her laptop, she not only couldn’t focus on the content of the new emails in her inbox, she also couldn’t stop herself from opening the folder containing the pictures she’d taken for her ads.

Each photo broke her heart a little bit more. The ones where she and Rory were laughing. The ones where they were staring into each other’s eyes. And especially the ones where