I couldn’t breathe.
I couldn’t even look at him.
My eyes remained fixed on the crescent-shaped birthmark beneath his collarbone.
A tiny mark.
A mark I had kissed once when we were young.
A mark I had memorized because, at nineteen, I believed I would spend the rest of my life with the man who carried it.
But that man had disappeared during a violent storm twenty years ago.
His name had been Alexander Bennett.