“He said that?” Edward said
quietly. “When was the last time you even looked at yourself in the mirror?”
“Yes.”
Edward didn’t say anything for a long time. He just looked at the table. I saw his jaw move.
“And you believed him,” he said.
“I looked,” I said. “He was right.”
Edward looked up at me.
“Hannah,” he said. “No. He wasn’t.”
That was all he said. He didn’t make a speech. He didn’t tell me I was beautiful or any of the things people say when they want you to stop crying.
He just said, “He wasn’t,” like it was a fact. Like the sky is blue. Like water is wet.
I thought about that sentence for weeks.
Edward knew about the girls too. He’d met them a few times. At school events. At a spring carnival where June threw up a whole funnel cake on his shoes and he just laughed and
