Rhylee pulled her into a tight hug. “I’m sorry. Now that he’s gone, maybe you’ll get back there again. Not quite as content as you were—but maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe he’s not the one for you, but he’s a good reminder to everybody who loves you that you deserve a life of your own.”
Kenzie nodded against her cousin’s shoulder because she didn’t have the strength to tell Rhylee she was wrong.
Danny Kowalskiwasthe one for her. He was her Mr. Right. He’d just come into her life at the wrong time.
* * *
Danny might be the worst liar in the family, but he felt like he was doing a pretty good job of pretending he was happy to be gathered with his family in his grandparents’ backyard.
He could have used more time before dragging himself out of his house into the sunshine and fresh air. It had only been a week and a half since he’d left the campground—and Kenzie—for what was going to be the last time this summer. But a Father’s Day barbecue was planned in the family group chat, and his mother made him confirm in a one-on-one text message that he’d seen those plans. He couldn’t pretend he didn’t know.
Amid the laughter and conversation surrounding him, Danny did his best to fill the emptiness inside of him with burgers, dogs, two kinds of potato salad and alotof watermelon.
“I wish your brother was here,” his mother said when they reached the dessert table at the same time.
Rob and Hannah had stayed at the campground and were going to come down for a belated Father’s Day dinner with Mike and Lisa midweek. There had been a conversation about just putting a closed sign on the office door for the day, but the campground was full and they hadn’t wanted to leave it unattended. Since Joey and Brian both had kids, Rob had volunteered to sit this barbecue out.
Nobody had asked Danny, of course. He wasn’t sure if they were back to not involving him in the day-to-day running of the campground, or if they didn’t want to offer him the excuse to see Kenzie again so soon.
“You’ll have a nice dinner with them, though,” Danny said when he realized his mother was looking at him, waiting for him to say something. “One with no cooking or cleaning or sunscreen, too.”
She laughed, nodding. “I love our big barbecues, but I also like a nice dinner out, so I guess this worked out well for me after all.”
“We’ll figure it out in the future. This is the second year, but they’re getting to know a lot of the seasonal campers. There’s a guy that Brian said might be able to watch over the place a few weekends a year, but it’s early for that yet.”
“We thought about taking this barbecue up to the campground, but it’s a lot for a day trip. It would be hard on your grandparents and the little ones.”
It would have been hard on Danny, too, being right down the road from Kenzie and not being able to see her, but he only nodded and kept his mouth shut.
After grabbing a blond brownie, he left Lisa to manage the kids who’d wandered over, looking for yet another helping of sugar, and headed for shade. There were a couple of folding camp chairs under a tree toward the back of the yard, as far from the rest of the adults as he could get without actually leaving, and he made his way there to eat his brownie in peace.
A few minutes later, he realized he’d made a huge mistake. He should have hidden the other chair so it wasn’t an open invitation for somebody—namely Joey—to join him in the shade. It was too late to pull the chair away now, though, because leaving a guy holding a sleeping baby with no place to sit was too much, even in his current mood.
Joey managed to lower himself into the chair without jostling Julia, and then his entire body seemed to relax into it as he sighed. “This potato gets pretty heavy when she’s asleep.”
A genuine smile curved Danny’s lips when he looked at his infant niece. “It’s funny how who she looks like changes every day, or even when she’s awake or asleep. When she’s sleeping and her face is relaxed, she looks more like Ellie and Nora.”
“She has my eyes, so when they’re closed, you don’t see me as much. But she looks a lot like Nora when Nora’s being quiet or sleeping. You guys get a very animated version of her, so you don’t see it as much.”
Danny chuckled, looking across the yard to where Nora and Oliver had given up on dessert and were playing some kind of game involving one of them bouncing a ball off the fence and the other having to catch it. Luckily, his grandparents Leo and Mary had long ago embraced the first rule of having a possibly raucous backyard barbecue—invite the neighborstothe event so they were on the fun side of the fence.
“How areyoudoing?” Joey asked. “You’ve been pretty quiet.”
Danny decided to pretend he didn’t know what his brother was really asking. “This book really beat me up so it’s taking a little long to climb out of the post-book quiet time, I guess. Just having a little me time.”
Taking walks, without Kenzie. Sitting on the back porch, without Kenzie. Eating, without Kenzie. Living, without Kenzie.
“Come on, Danny. Are you wallowing in quiet time, or are you wallowing in regret?”
So much for pretending. “I’mdrowningin regret, Joey. But just because I have regrets doesn’t mean there’s anything I could have done differently.”
The sound his brother made was pure skepticism. “I’m pretty sure that’s what regret is—wishing you’d done something differently.”
“Me going up there is just hurting me, and, more importantly, it’s hurtingher.”
“Does walking away hurt you both more, though?”
Yes.He refused to admit it out loud, though, because he’d never hear the end of it.
