dress that would hide my baby bump. It was quick, but at the time...it felt right. He was giving me everything I needed, just as I was filling a space for him.
“Jesus,” he mutters. “So you blocked me at the end of July and you were married to somebody else by October?”
I clear my throat. It sounds bad when he says it that way. “Um, yeah.” I have no idea what assumptions he has about that. Maybe he thinks Ford was just some ex of mine, or someone I’d known a long time...not someone I literally went on a first date with the day after I blocked Tyler.
“Did what we have just...mean nothing to you?” His words are lined with pain. I may be playing the victim that he hurt me, but what he feels all these years later seems somehow far worse than whatever reasons I had back then for cutting him out of my life.
It was too hard.
I was too scared.
I found a safe alternative, and I jumped at it.
“It meant everything to me.” My voice is quiet because it’ll shake with emotion if I raise it. “But I had a life to live, and I couldn’t put it on hold for thirty days or two years.”
“I get that,” he concedes. “So once again my career has failed me.”
“Failed you?” I repeat. “How has it failed you?”
“In the only way that really matters, Dani.”
When he says my name, Dani, a shudder runs through me. He’s the only person who calls me that...or maybe he’s the only one I’ve allowed to call me that.
“How’d you meet him?” he asks.
“At work. He started in our marketing department and he asked me to a happy hour. We fell in love.” I say the words, but even now I have no idea if I mean them. I don’t even know what love is except when it comes to Luna. Maybe that’s all the love I deserve in my life, and maybe I’ve come to terms with that. Her happiness is mine. It’s all that matters to me. My own wants and needs take a backseat to hers, and she needed Ford, so I did, too.
Sometimes I think about the future. What if she finds out someday that Ford isn’t her biological father? Will she resent me for the lies, or will she see that I made the best decision I could at the time?
Whenever my mind starts to go down that dark hole, I turn that ship right back around. I can’t think like that. I’ll drive myself mad, and I’m already halfway there.
“Are you happy?” he asks me.
No. “Yes.”
“Then I’ll leave you alone.” He forces the words—practically chokes on them.
No!
The fear that pulses within me that he might follow through on that promise is what drives my next words. “I can meet you while you’re in town.”
My voice is small for such a big promise.
Madelyn, my fourteen-year-old neighbor and sometimes babysitter, will watch Luna. I’ll just tell her I have to run to the store. She’s always great about sitting at our place to do her homework while I run out, especially when Luna is napping.
“You...you can?” he says, his voice full of surprise.
“It’s a terrible idea,” I blurt. “But I’ll do it anyway.”
He laughs, and it’s the first sound of something light in this entire conversation. That sound of laughter...it reignites something that dimmed a long time ago. It reignites old feelings I’ve tried so hard—and so unsuccessfully—to bury.
Despite all that, I’ve made vows to another man, and I have every intention to keep them.
But, as my father used to say, the road to hell is paved with intentions, and I’m already terrified that I’m on the road that’ll take me straight down.
CHAPTER 12
TYLER
I stare at the man in the mirror for a minute. The light is back in his eyes after one conversation that lasted less than ten minutes.
There’s hope where despair lived only moments ago.
There’s excitement where apathy has thrived for two years.
There’s color again in a world that’s been gray since she walked away with the entire rainbow.
There’s life in me again.
I never got the chance to tell her I was in love with her back then. I said it over text message earlier today, and that was the first time I ever communicated those words to her.
We were solid in our plan to avoid commitment until we could actually be together, and maybe it took the last two years to get us here.
Before I go into