Ezra didn't even know what she was apologizing for, when she started. The hand on his cheek had felt like quite the natural progression from the way he'd been curling around her arm. If anyone had overstepped, it was him — egregiously and repeatedly. He owed her the apology, not the other way around. And even if she had overstepped, did she really think that she needed to apologize for it? Could she possibly believe that he wouldn't have welcomed anything like that with open arms?

He knew he ought to have moved on by now. They'd been separated almost as long as they'd been together. His mother had been nudging him to move on last year. Everyone he knew, his friends and colleagues, assumed he had moved on. And most days, he could make a passable show of it, even to himself. But the relationship he'd had with Rosalie wasn't the sort of thing people moved on from.

"Shh," he said as he let his hand drop from her upper arm down to her elbow. He didn't have the mental energy for any more articulate refutation of her apology than that. "I didn't ask you to leave."

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