"You were meant to be a dad," she said. "I never thought that far ahead. For us. I mean, I did but those were just big, distant dreams and we had no idea what the world was really like. What was waiting for us."
A bitter laugh shook my chest. The fucking truth of that.
She swiped to another photo. "But I see you now and I know you were meant for this. You're a really good dad."
I didn't know how necessary those words were to me until Audrey spoke them into existence. And maybe it was hearing it fromherthat made them land in the place where I'd needed them most. All I knew was I wanted to give my kid everything,even if I hadn't expected him and I'd missed his earliest days. Even if Penny's family didn't believe I had any place in his life.
"Thank you," I managed.
"What does he want to be for Halloween?"
I twirled her hair around my finger, brushing the ends over my lips. "It's June, Saunders."
She held up a pic of Percy wearing Spider-Man pajamas with a dragon cape on top and carrying a Paw Patrol stuffie. "This kid has known what he wants to be since November first of last year."
I huffed out a laugh. "It changes daily."
"Such a cutie." She twisted in my arms to meet my gaze and her smile felt like an electrical current, all raw, spine-splitting power. I wanted to grab her and shake her and make her see how she was the one in control here. Make her understand. "You know how I know you're really good at this? You have photos of the moments you want to remember."
"Everyone does that."
"Yeah but you took twenty pics of your kid reading a book on the couch. And there's another twenty of him eating a slice of watermelon. Twenty more at the library, in the race car cart at the grocery store, waiting in line for the subway. That's on top of the other eleventy hundred selfies of you two, your sweet little faces pressed together like you'll never be able to hug him tight enough." She pressed a hand to my chest. "You want to remember all of it. Because you love him"—she held her arms out wide—"so much."
I sucked in a breath but my lungs didn't want to expand. Probably had something to do with getting whacked with an emotional two-by-four by the woman who still knew how to reach in and wrap her fingers around my soul.
I gathered her hands in mine, brought them back to my chest. I needed something else from her now and I wasn't aboveusing these hallucinogenic circumstances to get it. "When are you going to tell me what happened with your ex-husband?"
Her whole expression shuttered. Even her shoulders pulled inward. I didn't need the details to know what that reaction meant. But I had to hear this.
Her gaze lowered, she said, "I work very hard at not thinking about that part of my life."
Swallowing down a thorny knot of tension, I asked, "Why?"
"Because it almost killed me." The words fell from her lips like a simple fact rather than the source of my greatest fears. "But I got out and it's over and it's better for me when I don't go back to it."
Everything inside me surged with the kind of brutal energy that made me want to find him, drag him out of his absurd life, and make damn sure he knew she'd never suffer at his hands again. But I knew it wouldn't help. Wouldn't erase those years for her. And it wouldn't fix anything more than scratching a primitive itch for me.
I kept my hold on her gentle, running my thumbs over the insides of her wrists. "You never got my emails, did you? After they sent you to California?"
"No." She shook her head. "What emails?"
Another hard swallow. "That changes a few things."
chapter thirty-two
Audrey
Today's vocabulary word: drift
I rolledover and yelped at the ache rippling through my shoulders, down my back, and around my hips. I hadn't felt this battered since convincing myself I could dig a path along my side yard and lay a brick walkway by myself.
My mouth was dry like chalk and my head rang with a deep, dull headache. I would've hidden under the covers and slept all day if my stomach wasn't twisting in that old familiar way that told me I needed the bathroom more than anything else.
A hand over my eyes to hide from the worst of the sunlight slicing in through the curtains, I shuffled to the edge of the bed. I made my way across the suite like I was trudging through a snowbank and into the quiet dark of the bathroom. I locked the door and yanked some towels off the shelf because these episodes always made me cold. Nothing could convince me that bare feet on frigid tiles didn't set off a chemical reaction that kicked the whole matter into a new level of awful.
I liked to think about my irritable bowel like a bridge troll. I knew what made it angry and, over the course of many years andmuch error, I knew how to cross that bridge without bothering the troll too much. But I also knew that the troll was, by definition, irritable. There would be times that I pissed it off for no discernible reason and I'd just have to deal with the wreckage it delivered.
The troll hated tomatoes and cucumbers, and deviating from my usual schedule. Traveling with a troll was tough but I'd reached a point where I knew myself well enough to manage these issues without too much noise. The real problem was prolonged stress. That fucked it all up. Whenever I found myself on edge for days at a time, emotionally activated and hypervigilant—or married to a self-obsessed, paranoid narcissistic asshole—the troll lost its shit.
