Lukas looked broodingly out of the window of his office. He was barely aware of the boardroom-size table behind him, full of his colleagues and employees. His mind was full of distracting images. Santanger. The lighthouse where Danielo had died. Hannah, spread before him like the most succulent temptation. And he hadn’t resisted. He’d gorged himself. But it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.
Normally returning to San Francisco was a relief for Lukas. The sanctuary he’d created to remove himself from the past. But not anymore. The past was all around him, whispering that he couldn’t just keep ignoring it.
And yet, memories of Santanger and Danielo weren’t as sharp as they’d always been. If anything, he actually felt a longing, a yearning to go back. Something was shifting inside him—he didn’t want to take on the guilt anymore.
Hannah had been right—what had happened to him, and her, had just been awful tragic accidents. More than most people dealt with in a lifetime, but tragic nonetheless.
Surely if there was any lesson to be learned, it was that life was to be lived to the fullest and seized. And that was something Lukas hadn’t dared to allow himself to think for years. He’d been too afraid of the prospect of loss and grief. He’d been afraid that anyone he got close to might die. As simple and brutal as that.
But now, there was a new fear. A fear that while he remained stuck in this prison he’d built around himself, that life would move on without him. And that he would never know true joy. And that was more terrifying than anything else he’d experienced.
A sense of urgency gripped him as a new future spread out before him, shimmering with possibility. A future that was contingent on one thing though. One person. If she didn’t want to be part of it, then it would all be for nought, and after what he’d done to her, Lukas had no doubt that this would be the battle of his life.
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