him, let alone seem obsessed with my ex when I’m with the guy I like. Plus, talking about him doesn’t exactly cast me in the best light. I mean, what kind of idiot gives her husband that kind of control? And why would someone like you want to be with a girl like—”
“Shea.” He cut her off. “What do you really want? Not six months or two weeks ago—but now? Your lawyer said what happened today made your divorce as good as done. For all I know, that means you’re leaving town.”
Dev didn’t consider it to be a good sign when all the tears that had threatened to spill over finally flowed down her cheeks. This seemed like it was shaping up to be the part where she let him down hard—where she told him how much their time together had meant, but that they were on different paths. His mind flashed to Delilah and how she’d been right the first time about him and unavailable women; and how she’d been dead wrong the day before, when her talk about he and Shea being meant for one another had given him false hope.
“Dev—" Shea whispered haltingly. He had no right to be upset. All along, he’d known she was there temporarily. Only, he’d thought he had more time.
“All my life, all I ever wanted was to get away. I thought New York was gonna be my launching pad to the world. It was supposed to be this stepping-stone and, instead, it turned into a prison. And I told myself I was never gonna be tied down again. But being here doesn’t feel like being tied down—it feels like living my life and being free, Dev Kingston, with you.”
For only a second, Dev rode high on the words he’d been desperate to hear. The longest moment of his life had convinced him of her imminent rejection. He’d rejoiced when that hadn’t come, then bristled when she spoke the Kingston name.
“You know the most fucked up part about all of this?” Dev’s hand still held hers tight, but he swallowed a sob and bowed his head. “My name isn’t even Dev Kingston. All this shit I’ve been giving you about knowing who you really are, and I can’t even say the same.”
Shea frowned in confusion, then squeezed his hand tighter as she took in his distress, sniffing back her own tears in order to look at him. He waited for her to ask the inevitable questions—the why’s and how’s—it still felt too big and complicated for him to explain. But instead, she reached her free hand toward him until her cool fingers touched his face, wiping away tears he didn’t know had fallen. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d felt so raw. But something in her look gave him hope—the way she smiled a little and blinked up at him with her big, brown eyes.
“I don’t care what your name is, as long as I can call you mine.”
40
The Epilogue
Shea
“Dad?”
Shea’s single, choked-out word was met with utter silence, though she was certain it was her father who had picked up the phone. Some three months before, she’d sent a letter, then an email when the letter had gone unanswered. It seemed right that today, of all days, she should call.
“Happy Birthday,” she said quietly.
She waited for either of the two things her father might do, to happen: he would either give her shit for calling or hang up the phone. That was how it always was with him—no kindness given freely. Even the courtesy of a conversation was one he would set her up to earn.
“You haven’t called me on my birthday in ten years,” came a voice that sounded slower and rougher than she remembered.
Give me shit, it is, Shea thought to herself.
The fact that she’d even gotten him talking was a tiny victory. Her mother—who had at least been responsive—had clued her in to the fact that he might.
The letter had been addressed to both of them, even though everyone knew the source of their rift: Shea and her father’s chronic inability to get along. But Shea had been largely estranged from her mother all those years as well.
While her dad had been domineering, her mother had been passive. It had always struck Shea that standing idly by while her daughter was forced to take crap from her husband made Dawn Summers complicit in the family discord. Coming to terms with the dysfunction in her own marriage since starting