gaze finally came to mine, it was my nerves that buzzed the loudest.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
“Don’t thank me,” he said tersely. “I didn’t do this for you. It’s Wednesday and she wanted to see you. I told her about Hadley. I told her about you lying. But I haven’t mentioned anything else about our past together. I’d appreciate it if you would do the same.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Of course.”
His face remained hard and stoic. It was the angry man from her birthday party who could barely look me in the eye, not the man who’d held me and kissed me and made love to me.
I’d come to terms that that man was gone forever.
But this was agony all the same.
“I gave you Mondays as a part of the deal for the painting,” he continued, gruff and to the point. “I’m a businessman. I’ll keep my word. Pick another day of the week that suits your schedule and I’ll bring her over for you to teach her art. I don’t want you at my house. I don’t want you texting me. I don’t actually want anything to do with you. But she does. And despite your absolutely asinine stunt over the last four months, I love my daughter. So here we are. No need to thank me. No need to even acknowledge that I’m here at all because I assure you I wish like hell that I wasn’t.”
And with that, he followed his daughter into my house, sliding past me without so much as an excuse me.
Half of my heart was singing grand hymns of praise.
The other half was withering into nothingness.
This wasn’t about Caven. It wasn’t about the way I longed to curl into the safety of his arms. It wasn’t about the way I missed his smile or his tender touches.
I’d gotten what I’d wanted: time with Rosalee. And while I was grateful beyond all measure for his generosity, two days a week with Caven sounded like absolute torture.
But, for her, there was nothing I wouldn’t endure.
Closing the door, I squared my shoulders, pasted on a halfway-real smile, and said, “At my house, we paint, Rosalee. Fingernails, toenails, pictures, and all.”
She let out a loud squeal that immediately transformed that halfway-real smile into something so genuine that I felt it in my bones.
This was enough.
This would always be enough.
“That’s me!” Rosie exclaimed as I walked her into my spare bedroom studio—Caven only one step behind us. “Daddy, you used to have that picture in your room.”
Used to. I didn’t know that my stomach could sink any lower. I’d wondered if he’d kept it. Clearly, he had not, and I had no idea why that hurt as much as it did. I should have been immune to the pain by that point. But not when it came to Caven.
He grinned down at her. “Yep.” When his head lifted, the grin was gone and he avoided my gaze by retrieving his phone from his pocket and propping his shoulder against the wall.
Right.
He didn’t want to be there. He’d only come for Rosalee.
I walked over to the shelves lined with tubes of paint and grabbed two pinks, a white, and three purples—the palette of princesses everywhere. “So, what are we painting first?”
“A flower like my mommy.”
I froze and, without moving my head, shifted my eyes to Caven. I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but I was even more unsure of what I was allowed to say to her in regard to Hadley.
Caven looked at his daughter, his face so soft and so gentle that I was jealous of its warmth. “When people die, they don’t really turn into flowers, baby.”
“But they get planted in the ground, right?”
He took a step in her direction and used his large hand to smooth the top of her hair down. “Kinda, but it’s called being buried, not planted.”
I held my breath as I listened to them discuss Hadley. In some way, it felt strange to talk about her. In other ways, it felt liberating. She wasn’t a dirty little secret anymore. Hadley and I had more issues than I could list. But she was my sister. And I missed her.
“Oh! What kind of berry?” She looked at me. “Is she a strawberry? We picked strawberries one time.”
God, I loved that kid. I bit my bottom lip to stifle a laugh.
“Buuuuuried, Rosie. Not berry.” His gaze finally lifted to mine. Just like the grin, his warmth was gone. “Maybe, instead of