Free All for This by Lexi Ryan

dibs.”
    “Nothing?” Maggie asks. “Are you sure?”
    “I didn’t break it off with Max so I could be with Nate.” Though I’m sure Max believes I did. I’m sure everyone in town will think I did, once word gets out.
    “What did he say when you told him you were pregnant?” Nix asks.
    “He wants me to move to LA.”
    “What?” Liz squeaks. “Like you’re going to totally throw away your business—your life —for him?”
    “You can’t blame him for trying,” Maggie says.
    “He’s only interested because of the babies. When I went to LA and told him I wasn’t going to marry Max, Nate still said goodbye. He doesn’t want to be with me—not enough to fight for me when it counts.” And not enough to figure out a way to make it work that doesn’t involve my moving across the country.
    “I’m not sure you’re being fair, Hanna,” Nix says. “When you went to LA, he thought you’d chosen Max before the accident.”
    Maggie nods. “I think he was trying to let you go since you wanted to be with Max.”
    “I didn’t walk away. I let you go.”
    Is that what Nate meant? He let me go so I could be with Max?
    “I still don’t understand why I chose Max,” I say quietly, and the admission fills me with guilt. “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t know how I could have chosen Nate either. It’s an impossible choice. My missing memories are leaving me with a lot of unanswered questions. I still have four days of my life that are missing. I wish I knew what happened in those days.”
    “Have you thought any more about how the accident may have happened?” Nix asks.
    Liz tenses. “What do you mean by that?”
    Nix just studies me, so finally I say, “Nix thinks my injuries were too severe to be from just a fall. She suspects that some of them were…inflicted intentionally.”
    “What? By whom?” Liz asks. “How?”
    I nod at Nix, silently giving her permission to talk about it, and she takes a breath. “I think maybe there was foul play—a fight with punches thrown, that kind of thing. I’m not excluding the possibility that Hanna took an accidental fall down the stairs, but given the state of her injuries, I suspected there might be more to it than that. Not knowing Max very well, I immediately asked about him.”
    “We can rule out that possibility,” I say softly. “Max would lay down his life for me.”
    “What about Meredith?” Maggie says. “You were stealing her man.”
    Cally snorts. “I’m no defender of Meredith, but a fistfight? That doesn’t seem her style.”
    “True,” Liz says. “She might break a nail.”
    “I’m not convinced there was anything more than a fall,” I say. “I wasn’t eating and I could have passed out and fallen.”
    “Even if that’s true, that doesn’t answer the question about how you came to choose Max,” Liz says. “I think it’s reasonable to want to know, even if you aren’t marrying him.”
    Maggie’s frowning into her wine. “Am I the only one who thinks it seems unlikely that Hanna would give her virginity to Nate and, less than a week later, decide to marry someone else?”
    “Maybe,” I say softly. Nix, who was about to chime in, shuts her mouth. “Maybe I wanted to make love to Nate for the same reasons any woman wants to have sex with a man she loves. I know that might be hard to understand, but I do love them both.” I look at my friends’ and sisters’ faces. “Letting go of either one of them seemed impossible the day Nate told me I needed to make a choice.” It still seems impossible , but I don’t say that aloud.
    Liz refills her wine. “Maybe it came down to which guy could give you the future that you want.”
    “Probably.” I thought of that too.
    I don’t want to leave New Hope for LA or anywhere. How would a real relationship with Nate even work? Would he want me to move to LA or would our life be a series of two- or three-day visits here and there? Him coming to New Hope when he didn’t have