Exhaustion. Huge boobs. No period. It all added up to one unmistakable sum. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. I’m . . .”
Placing her hands tenderly on her belly, she looked at herself in the mirror as her eyes pooled with tears. I’m pregnant with his baby. She was carrying Colton’s child inside her, a child that she wanted so much and so completely, she thought she might faint from the wave of pure love that swept over her. I’m having his baby. Her heart raced with happiness, even as rivulets of tears rolled down her cheeks.
“I’m waiting for you,” she vowed, thinking of Colton, of her knight, her sweet place, her love. She sniffled softly as she wiped her tears away and smiled at her tummy. “And now I’m waiting for you too.”
***
For a week Colton had been trying to find the right words to tell Verity how sorry he was—that he didn’t mean what he’d said to her in the courthouse, that he loved her as much as it was possible for a man to love a woman, and that the weeks she’d lived with him were the happiest of his whole life.
When the sunshine woke him up, she was the first thing on his mind.
While he worked out at the hospital gym, he composed letters to her.
While he mopped the hallways, he arranged words of apology in his head.
When the bolt sounded on his hospital room door at night, he lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, trying desperately to figure out what to say.
And suddenly fifty days had passed and he had about twenty letters started, piled in the top drawer of his desk, unsent because none of them sounded just right. None of them expressed the profound depths of his regret and remorse. None of them did justice to her love for him and his for her. None of them felt fair if she’d already moved on and started building a new life for herself and Ryan. And none of them felt like they would make any difference anyway, because in his heart he believed she was already gone . . .
. . . that is, until day fifty-three, when he received a letter from Melody.
Written in her cheerful, childlike scrawl, it read:
Dear Colton,
Come and see me.
Let’s eat eggs at the table.
I miss you.
Ryan misses you too.
I love you.
Love,
Melody
xoxox
He blinked at the note, reading it and rereading it ten times before setting it down and rereading it ten more times. Not that it made any more sense on the twenty-first reading, but there was one line that he stared at, his heart and head warring passionately over its truth:
Ryan misses you too.
Was Mel thinking wishfully about the day at the zoo, wishing she could see Ryan again? Or had she transposed the words and actually meant “I miss Ryan too”?
Or—and this is where his heart clutched and he envisioned a hundred yellow ribbons around a fucking oak tree he didn’t even have—did Mel actually mean what she’d written? Which would mean that she was in contact with Ryan and, therefore, Verity. That would mean that not only did they not leave, they were seeing Melody regularly enough for his cousin to know that Ryan missed him.
He didn’t want to feel the sudden exhilaration that made his heart race like hell. Part of him despised the sharp, almost painful, rush of hopefulness that made his breath catch. Was there a chance she’d stayed? Was there a chance she’d not only stuck around, but still loved him enough to keep an eye on his cousin? Could there still be a place in her heart for imperfect, brutal, desperately-in-love him?
Propping up the note on the small desk in his room, he took out a fresh sheet of paper and a pencil, and with one final look of hopefulness at Melody’s improbable news, he started another letter.
CHAPTER 18
Dr. Warren stood outside of Central State Hospital with Colt, waiting for the social worker who would pick him up and drive him back to Atlanta for a supervised visit with Mel before heading home. It grated on him that, after serving his sixty days “with flying colors” (according to the doc), he was required to have a watchdog while he visited his cousin. But Dr. Warren had already send a letter to Judge Stanton, advising that Colt was a fit guardian, so Colt expected for his guardianship status to be reinstated by the end of October at the