A/N: This story is not " She said she hated him, and he never forgave her. He needs to get over it." It's a lot deeper than that, so if you don't get it, which is perfectly fine, please review or PM me and I'll try my best to explain it to you. Anyway, thanks for reading and don't forget to review!

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, how many times have we gone over this?

Lily missed James. Missed his arm around her shoulders, his lips on her forehead as she nodded off, feeling his eyes on her when she wasn't looking, his voice saying his name. She missed him. She didn't think someone could miss someone so much without even really knowing them. Maybe if she had truly known him she could have prevented this. Stopped him from leaving her. Just disappearing without so much as a goodbye. Just a note, left on their coffee table.

I'm sorry.

The parchment was stained with seven little tear stains, smudging the ink. Two were Lily's, five were from James. How could she have not seen this? Seen how much he was hurting. But his best friends didn't see the pain behind his smile. Beautiful smile.

She wondered if he missed her too. Missed her whispered songs in the middle of the night when worries kept him awake, missed her lips against his, hard and rough, because sometimes he couldn't feel and she just wanted him to feel, missed dinners in silence until she would smile at him and then say something that would leave them laughing till they were crying, or she was crying. He never cried anymore. Always joked that she had made him cry so much in school he didn't have tears left. She knew it was unhealthy, but wouldn't say anything.

Sometimes Lily wished she could have been awake when he left, just so she could see the tears shine in his eyes. Something she hadn't seen since seventh year, when she found him on the astronomy tower, cigarette in hand, tears sliding down his face. Earlier that day she had said three words she had never forgiven herself for saying, three words he could never forget that rang around his head everyday causing doubts and fears and that numb feeling he hated so much.

I hate you. It wasn't yelled. Just spoken. With so much conviction and disgust, there was no other way it could have been taken, other than as the truth. Except it wasn't. The conviction was desperation and the disgust was fear. So she apologised, expecting to be forgiven and loved again. She was, but it wasn't forgotten. Never forgotten, still believed.

So Lily sat on their bedroom floor, wrapped in his old quidditch robes. Tears streaming down her face, unlike his. She knew he'd be back. When, she couldn't quite place. Maybe a week, maybe a month, maybe a year. But one day he would walk through the door, collapse into her arms and cry out the thousands of broken hearts he held in. Until then, she would sit and wait. Maybe write Remus, Sirius or Marlene. Because she wasn't hurt enough to stop living, stop crying, stop feeling. Only some words could cause that kind of fracture and I'm sorry were the wrong words.

She knew the right words to break someone, just not the right ones to bring them back.