“Yeah. It’s ... crazy. Thanks for not trying to kill me.”
He laughed. Sort of. “I never wanted to kill you, Daisy.”
“It’s all the rage with men who want to get rid of their wives, so even though that’s a low bar, I feel like it has to be said.”
“I have something I want to talk to you about,” he said.
“What?”
A million possibilities swam through her mind. He was unpredictable. The man she’d known all those years wasn’t that man anymore, and she couldn’t begin to guess what he might say.
“I want you back, Daisy.”
She felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. She would have been less shocked if he’d punched her.
And when that shock settled, all she could think was ... he didn’t even want her. He wanted his company back. Everything Jonathan wanted was about Jonathan.
Maybe she did know him. Maybe she knew him now better than she ever had.
“What?”
“I know I don’t deserve it. But all of this, my injury, my recovery ... it’s made me realize what’s actually important. I got lost in my ego. It was dumb. I thought that a new partner would make me feel excitement again. Make me feel young. But that’s you. You knew me back in high school. You’re the only one who really gets me. You were the one, Daisy. And I want that back. I want our family back. Our home. Our life with the kids. I don’t want to be a part-time dad.”
If she didn’t know him so well, she might have believed he meant he wanted to change. That he wanted to try again because he fully understood the ways in which he had fallen short, and what he would have to do to fix it.
But knowing him like she did, she knew he wasn’t seized with love or regret so much as wishing his life could go back to how it had been. With her doing everything for him. With his life going the way he wanted it to. But even if he didn’t mean that ...
“No,” she said.
“What?”
“I don’t want you back, Jonathan.”
He looked astonished. Honest-to-God astonished.
“But we ... we have a family,” he said.
“Yes, we do. And we’re doing a pretty decent job of making it work while not being together. No, it’s not what I would’ve chosen a few months ago if a survey had been taken, but it’s what I want now.”
“Daisy. You can’t be serious. You can’t ... This is crazy. We can have our lives back.”
“You have Amberly! You asked her to marry you. This is about me having the business. This isn’t about us, and what are you going to tell her?”
“It’s not about the business, it’s about our life.”
“I don’t want that life.”
It was almost worth going through all the pain, the betrayal, just to see the shock on his face now. Just to live in this moment. Where this man could not believe he didn’t own her anymore. Her heart, her body, any part of her.
“There’s somebody else, isn’t there?”
Of course he was that oblivious, even still. Of course he hadn’t put together that she was with Zach, probably because he didn’t think she could get Zach.
Zach, who had been instrumental in making her see that she didn’t have to be the caregiver in the relationship who never got anything in return. In making her understand what she actually wanted out of life and a partnership.
But the honest truth was, she would be making this decision even without Zach.
Because she was a woman who remembered how to run wild, how to howl at the moon just because it was there.
