Hallie slipped through the front door, and Christian closed it behind her, blowing out a deep breath to steel his composure before facing Sabrina again.
“Carrie was right, then,” Sabrina said when Christian reentered the kitchen, Hallie’s expression still plaguing him. “You’re in love with her. I can see it in your face.”
Christian didn’t deny it. His silence was answer enough.
“But what about us?” Sabrina asked. “We were a family.”
“You should’ve thought about that before you abandoned us.” Heran a hand down his face, the exhaustion hitting him with a force that literally dropped him into a chair across from her.
They fell into a silent standstill charged by years of frustration, disappointment, and resentment. Christian stared at his hands in his lap, unable to tune out Sabrina’s quiet sniffles but not willing to muster the strength to get her to leave.
“The girls don’t remember me.” Her voice cracked, and a gasp followed the heavy realization. “They don’t know who I am.”
“That’s the tricky thing about choices, Sabrina,” Christian said dryly. “They come with consequences. You can’t just pick and choose the ones you want to deal with.”
She leaned forward, piercing him with pleading eyes. “How do I fix this? Is there any hope of reconciliation?”
“Any hope of saving our marriage died the day you walked out that door.”
“What about the girls? I want a relationship with them.”
Over my dead body.He’d sell himself to the devil to protect his girls from the pain Sabrina had caused. And he’d protect Hallie from her too.
But was that the best solution? He couldn’t just kick Sabrina out, lock the doors and refuse to answer the phone. What if the girls grew to resent him for refusing to let them get to know their birth mom?
He balled his fists in his lap to keep his anger contained. “If you sincerely want to get to know the girls, we can work something out. But I need time to explain to them what’s going on. This will be a big shock for them. We’ll talk after Thanksgiving.”
“But that’s two days from now.”
“And you’ve been gone for three and a half years,” he hissed through his teeth. “You can wait a little longer.”
Her shoulders slumped, and all indignation fizzled out with the movement. “Okay. After Thanksgiving.”
“I need to go check on them,” he said, ending the conversation. “Do you have a place to stay?”
Because you’re not staying here.And paying for a hotel didn’t sit well with him either. But he couldn’t leave her with no accommodations.How come after all the damage she’d done, he still felt a pull to make sure her needs were met?
“I’m crashing with some friends in the city.” She followed him from the kitchen.
“Okay then.”
With nothing more to say, Christian promised to call after Thanksgiving. Once he’d closed the front door behind her, he pressed his back against the wood, sliding to the floor. He desperately needed to check on the girls, to make sure their world hadn’t been rocked after the bombshell dropped on them tonight. But with his own world imploding, how could he possibly support them?
Lowering his face into his hands, he let the reality of the situation spin around him. Sabrina was back. She wanted a relationship with the girls. Just when his life was looking up, his ex had managed to send him spiraling back to rock bottom.
Would he ever be free from the demons of his past?
Three days.
That was how long Hallie had lived with this nagging dread—the kind of dread that camps out in the bottom of her stomach, creating enough nausea to make her uncomfortable but not in any danger of throwing up.
Christian hadn’t called her once since she’d left his house on Tuesday. She missed him. But more than that, she worried about him. And them. She’d thought their talk at his mom’s house had transformed this relationship into something solid.
But now she wasn’t so sure.
And his comment about how she was already acting like a mom changed her perspective. As she’d spent the few weeks since that day with the girls, a miraculous thing had happened. She’d gone from deciding to be open about a more permanent place in their lives, to really wanting it.
So why, at the exact time she’d finally accepted the possibility of being their mom, did Sabrina have to return and seriously undermine that? What did the woman even want?
