Heartbeat Repeating - E.M. Lindsey Page 0,23

leather because Avery had given him a lecture about baby cows so long and so detailed that every time he sees a pair now sitting in his drawer he hears his impassioned voice close to tears.

“You don’t even buy sustainable,” he’d said. “You just buy whatever costs more.”

There was some vindictiveness in his purchase. The gloves had cost fifteen-hundred dollars even though they weren’t authentic, but Avery didn’t even get angry because he found out the company Alejandro purchased from donated some of the proceeds to charity.

Avery has a way of reducing him in ways no one has ever been able to—not even Connor. And he doesn’t let himself think about that very often.

Right now, though, Avery has no place being there with him. At least, that’s what he tells himself as he sits on top of a picnic table with his feet on the bench. He has a take-away tea clutched in his hands, the bag string flittering in the breeze as it’s pinched by the plastic lid, and he tugs on it.

The park is virtually empty. When they took Gabrielle there in winter, none of the other families had showed—but she never minded playing alone. It was the last place they took her before she was too sick to leave the house. She hadn’t been able to walk well, but she kept shaking off their hands as she made her way across the dead, frozen grass. She’d fallen three times, but she made it and there was a triumph in her small, round face that Alejandro would never forget.

She sat in the little bucket swing and closed her eyes, and he wished she was old enough to tell him what she was thinking there with her face turned up to the cold winter sun. Maybe she was just getting ready. She was always too damn much for this world anyway, but if he could have just asked…

“You’re early.”

He can’t help but brace himself against the sound of Connor’s voice. It would be easier if he could hate him. If the sight of him churned his stomach. The grief broke them, but it broke a marriage that was already cracking, and it would have happened regardless. And he couldn’t begrudge the man for taking what was freely offered—in the end.

Connor crosses the distance between them and sits on the bench a few inches away from Alejandro’s calf and says nothing else. He looks the same, even smells the same, but Alejandro knows it’s an illusion. Loving again, living again, it changed the person Connor was into the man he was always meant to become. And for all that Alejandro envies him, he’s happy for him.

“I couldn’t deal with my parents,” he eventually says, which is the truth. Connor nods because he knows, probably better than anyone. Alejandro’s mother had turned her own grief into affection that neither man was ready for, and it was one of their first big, devastating fights after Gabrielle was gone.

And it was absurd even then, because they were both on the same page, but neither man knew how to keep going with any semblance of normalcy.

“How is Alba?” Connor asks, like he does every time they meet.

Alejandro twists the cup in his hands then sets it down and grabs his phone out of his pocket just for something to do. “Quite well.”

“And Roberto?”

He tries not to smile, but it’s hard, because he can recite this conversation in his sleep, and something feels like it’s about to snap. “We don’t have to do this.”

Connor blinks at him, thrown by the shift in routine just as much as Alejandro is. “Do what?”

“Make small talk. Ask me questions about them.”

“They were…” Connor stops, because his old argument is that Alba and Roberto had been his family once too, but it’s not really true. He’d never really dropped his guard around them, even when things between them were the best they’d ever be.

Connor had come from old money, unlike Alejandro’s parents who had worked more hours than a single day had to get to where they were. And the comparison feels pointless now because regardless of the work it took to get there, they have more than Connor’s family would see in generations, and Alejandro knows that divide affected their marriage too.

But Connor had never wanted what Alejandro’s parents had, and he made it clear when he rejected everything Alejandro tried to offer in the divorce.

“I care that they’re okay,” he finally says, and it sounds honest. “I