“Family is the most important. Remember you told me that when you asked me to marry you?”
Family was what mattered most in this world. I couldn’t bear to be the person that came between Ace and his father.
“You’re my family,” he said so vehemently that I felt its force throughout my body. He looked over toward the river.
I followed his gaze with mine and found Aiden standing at the water’s edge, still attempting to skip stones. It appeared he’d managed to make friends with a few other boys who were there with their families.
We turned back to each other at the same time. “And Aiden. You’re both my family, Savannah.”
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t want a divorce.” His voice was thick with emotion. “I never did, which was why I never filed. I could’ve found you all those years ago. All it would’ve taken was one call to Micah or another PI. But I wanted you to come back on your own.”
He inclined his head.
“When the Air Force assigned me to the base here, the place where you and I first met, I knew, deep down, it’d be where we came together again. Don’t ask me to sign those papers.”
I had to close my eyes to stop the tears from falling. Try as I might, a few managed to escape. He’d just said the words I longed for, for so many years. I wanted to scream out the wordYesmore than anything.
This was so much better than a proposal. He was asking me to stay. To continue being his wife.
But I couldn’t say yes.
My son’s well-being rested on me doing the right thing for him.
“I—"
“Mama, Mr. Ace, look,” Aiden yelled, interrupting my response.
Ace and I looked over at him.
“I did it. I skipped a stone across the entire river. Come look.” He waved us over.
Ace gave me another look, but I was speechless. There was too much left unsaid that I wanted desperately to tell him. But how could I bring him into this situation?
We were so close to getting the happily ever after we both wanted. How was I going to burst his bubble again?
I dropped my hands from his shoulders and stepped out of his hold. The space between his eyebrows wrinkled, but when Aiden called us both over again, we turned toward the river.
I would have to figure this out, and soon.
CHAPTER25
Savannah
I sighed as I stepped out of the shower and started to dry off. Ace had taken Aiden to school that morning before heading over to the base. I only had to work a half-day, thankfully, since I was dragging.
A few days had passed since Ace, Aiden, and I had spent the day at the river. While Ace hadn’t brought up the divorce again, there was an apparent strain between us.
I went back and forth on whether or not to tell him about the situation with Aiden’s birth father and Vincent Reyes. Would he even believe me? It sounded insane even to me. If I didn’t have the very distinct memory of Reyes coming to my apartment door in Philadelphia with a gun to tell me that he was assigned to kill my son, I wouldn’t have believed it myself.
Maybe it was time I shared the truth with Ace. Keeping things from him had never worked out well in the past.
“Who is it?” I yelled when the doorbell sounded. Then I rolled my eyes at my ridiculousness. Whoever was at the door probably couldn’t hear me from upstairs, anyway.
Instead of yelling out again, I grabbed my phone off the nightstand and checked the app connected to Ace’s security system. I did a double-take when I spotted a figure that looked suspiciously like Ace’s father standing at the front door.
My heart pounded as I quickly finished dressing into my work scrubs and headed down the stairs. The doorbell rang again just as my foot touched the bottom step.
