ay to ease the pain he’d caused and repair the damage he’d done.
And when he wound his way around a laundry service cart in the hallway and approached Mia’s door with no answers, he surveyed a spot on the floor at the bottom of the wall beside her door and prepared to sit. But when he put his hand against the wall for support to help him get to that spot without falling on his face, he noticed a gap between the door and the frame. Following that space to the door handle, he found it ajar.
Alarm jumped in his chest. He checked the room numbers first, and when he was sure it was hers, Rafe put his fingertips against the door and eased it open. “Mia?”
A female voice with a Spanish inflection returned some sort of answer Rafe didn’t understand, and he opened the door wide enough to find a woman in a housekeeping uniform pulling sheets from the bed.
She smiled at him. “Oh. Hello. Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay.” From the short hallway leading to the room, he scanned the space. All her things were gone. Her suitcase, her computer, all her charging cords.
She was gone? Mia was gone?
“Is your room?” the housekeeper asked in broken English. “You need be here? I go?”
A wave of sadness hit him so hard, tears flooded his eyes in an instant. He blinked fast to hold them back and rubbed a hand down his face. “No,” he told her, his voice rough. “Thank you. It’s fine.”
Rafe backed out of the room and kept on moving until he hit the wall across the hallway, where he stood and stared at the floor, trying to figure out what the hell was going on inside him.
He’d assumed the texts and voice mails he’d left after talking with Joe at the hospital had gone unanswered because she’d been asleep. But that obviously wasn’t the case. And while he knew she had every right to be hurt and angry and even to move on with her life and never look back, he never realized until this moment that he never thought she really would.
He’d also never realized just how devastating that would feel. How very different it felt for him to walk away from someone—even Mia—than to be the one left behind. And how often Mia had experienced that. All because she’d loved Rafe too much to fully give herself to anyone else.
Lifting both hands, he covered his face and rested his head.
Should I just let her go?
The thought twisted the knife in his gut. Rafe couldn’t ever remember a time when he’d reached out for Mia when she hadn’t been there.
“I won’t accept anything less than 150 percent in any of my relationships anymore. And this time, I’m going to be the one to walk away.”
She’d made that hard call in the face of extreme pressure. Rafe knew it had to have been one of the hardest things she’d ever done. And now that she’d taken that step and made the break, maybe it would be better for Mia if he just…
“Are you fucking meditating?”
The familiar grouchy voice pulled Rafe’s head up and to the left. He moved too fast, and his head swam. He pitched sideways and grabbed the nearest doorframe, catching himself.
“You think you can communicate telepathically with her or something?” Tate prodded in that bitchy, condescending tone he used when he was annoyed and fed up. But at least he wasn’t livid. At least he wasn’t coming after Rafe, pinning him to the floor, and beating the shit out of him again. “’Cause if you get down on your knees and start chanting, I’m calling security.”
“Shut up.”
A room door between them opened, and an older man looked out, his face scrunched into an irate scowl. “Both of you shut up. People are still trying to sleep.”
And he slammed the door.
“Not anymore,” both Rafe and Tate said in unison. Then laughed at the same time.
And just like that, the ice was broken. But the chunks were still floating between them, cold and sharp. And Rafe didn’t even care. He just wanted Mia. Only he hadn’t figured out if going after her was the right thing to do.
Rafe walked past the complainer’s room and leaned his hip against the wall between Grumpy’s door and Mia’s. His lifelong friend stood there, far more contrite today. Joe had a way of pulling both him and Tate back to earth quickly. But their fights had always been with others, never with each other. And their fights had never been this extreme, this hurtful, or this personal. Rafe didn’t know what would happen to their friendship, which was another painful spot in his life.
“We were going to tell you—” Rafe started.
“After the season ended,” Tate finished. “I know.”
So he’d talked to Mia. That part was good, though Tate didn’t look relieved or happy or even any more settled.
Rafe added, “And we didn’t mean for it to—”