I sit up slowly. “How did she even find out?”
Dee shrugs. “Small towns. Loose lips. Or maybe she saw him falling apart and connected the dots. No one knows for sure. Just that it’s... out there now.”
Fucking hell.
“How is Knox taking it?”
Dee offers me a one-shouldered shrug. “He really is unraveling.”
Unraveling.
That word hits something soft in me.
I haven’t been listening to his voicemails. Not fully. They’re jumbled and messy and too hard to hear. He sounds different. Desperate. One message is just silence, like he couldn’t get thewords out. Another is him muttering something about the walk-in smelling like cardamom.
And one, halfway through, he choked out, “I miss your voice.”
It gutted me.
But still, I didn’t call back.
Because no matter how much I miss him… I can’t be the one to fix him. Not again.
Now I know why he looked like the floor dropped out from under him that day. Why he froze when I said I’m pregnant.
He’s been lied to before. Manipulated. Publicly humiliated.
But I’m not her.
And the fact that he could even think I’d do something like that.
It burns.
He should’ve known me better than that.
I curl in on myself, arms wrapped tight around my belly, this fragile new life tucked safe inside.
I don’t know what my next step is.
Denver isn’t off the table. But neither is this place. This town that drives me crazy, but also feels like home in a way that nowhere else has.
What I do know?
I can’t keep waiting for him to become the man I hope he’ll be.
He either is, or he isn’t.
And right now…
I honestly don’t know which one he is.
Later that evening, I’m still in my room, curled beneath an old quilt, trying, and failing, not to think too hard, when there’s a gentle knock on my door.
“Yeah?” I call, voice hoarse.
Mom peeks in, holding something in her hand. An envelope.
“This was on the front desk just now,” she says, walking it over. “Must’ve gotten dropped off earlier, and I didn’t notice until I went to close up.”
