“Hello?”
“Tell me the truth,” he said without preamble. “Are you really that busy with the gallery, or did you just need an excuse to say no? Because, listen, Cadence, it’s okay if you don’t want to, I just… I don’t know. I just need to know.”
There was something fractured and vulnerable about his question, and it made her heart start aching in an instant.
It also made her know with absolute certainty that she did need to tell him the truth, the whole truth.
“I… it’s a little bit of both,” she confessed. “Iambusy with the gallery, but I probably am also using that to distract me from… other things.”
Tyler laughed, but the sound was a little bit sad. “I might know something about using work to distract from my feelings.”
She smiled. “Yeah, tale as old as time, right?” She took a breath. “It’s just really hard. It’s not like I have a super long history with getting through breakups or anything, but it seems like it’s so much harder when there’s a kid involved. Because we can’t just focus on our feelings. There’s Izzy to consider.”
“I know,” he said. “And it goes without saying that she’s the most important thing.”
“It does,” she agrees. “No matter how things have gone between us, I’ve never, ever doubted that we both think Izzy comes first.”
“Me neither,” he assured her.
“But I can love her to the moon and backandrecognize that having a kid involved makes things more complicated,” she said. “You and I see each other, what, every two days? But it’s not like we reallyseeeach other. It’s just…”
“Procedural,” he supplied.
“Yeah. So we’re not getting any distance for perspective, but we’re also not connecting or anything. And so it’s just this nonstop kick in the pants,” she let out a humorless little laugh. “I guess the long story short is… I’m scared. Realizing how far we had drifted, it—itshatteredmy heart. And I’m afraid that if I open up again, it will break me even worse the next time.”
There was a long, careful pause. When Tyler spoke, there was no judgment in his tone.
“I get that. I… I guess my fear brings me to a different conclusion, but I get what you’re saying.” He didn’tsaythat he was disappointed, but she knew him far too well not to hear it in his voice.
“I’m sorry, Ty,” she said softly.
“Hey, no,” he said at once. “Don’t be sorry. I asked for the truth and you gave me the truth. I appreciate it.”
There were a hundred things more she wanted to say. She wanted to apologize again. She wanted to tell him she missed him. She wanted to tell him she cared about him. And those things were so true… but it wasn’t fair to him. It wasn’t fair to either of them, but especially to Tyler, who came to her, open-hearted, only for her to turn him away.
“Okay,” she said. It was all she could say, really.
“Thank you, Cadence,” he said. “Really.”
His kindness made Cadence feel like absolutemud.
“I’ll talk to you soon, okay?” he said.
“Yeah, okay,” she agreed. Again, it was too little. “Goodnight.”
“Night, Cadence,” he said.
After they hung up, Cadence spent a long minute staring at her phone. Part of her wanted to call him right back, to take back everything she’d said.
But that fear held her back.
With a sigh, she went inside, dumped the remainder of her wine down the sink, and went upstairs. As she went through her nighttime routine, she felt her phone like a siren, calling to her.
But she held strong. She was strong enough not to call him back.
But she wasn’t strong enough not to grab her wedding photo of her and Tyler, pulling it from where she had tucked it away in her pajama drawer when it had become too painful to see on her dresser every day. Looking at it ached now, but… less.
She looked at their smiling faces. It was an incredible photo, one of the candid shots their photographer had gotten, not one of the staged ones. Cadence was grinning up at Tyler, who was laughing at something she’d said.
