A soft, prideful smile lights up his face, and it makes something in my chest—and let’s face it, my ovaries—go oomph.
“I almost forgot. She asked that I show you. She’s your biggest fan now, by the way, in case that wasn’t clear.” He pulls out his phone and starts scrolling through until he finds apicture and flips his phone around for me to see. She’s all blonde hair and dark eyes and big smiles, showing off a missing tooth on the bottom. “Her first lost tooth. It happened right after dinner before her bath. Thankfully, she didn’t swallow it. I barely had anything set up for us, and I had to make the tooth fairy come.”
“With you as the tooth fairy.”
His smile twists. “I’m everything right now. Mom and Dad. Tooth fairy and Santa Claus. She asked if the tooth fairy could fly to heaven to show her mother the tooth. I told her yes and then had a moment of panic when I realized that one day she’ll learn there is no tooth fairy and that her mother didn’t get to see her first lost tooth, and then she’ll hate me for lying. I think I need to read more parenting after loss books.”
That last part is said as a joke, as a way to lighten the heavy topic. But it falls flat. My chest pinches, and I soften faster than ice cream in the desert. “I’ll be home tonight,” I tell him. “I want to hear all about how Zoey liked her new preschool and the tooth fairy.”
His eyes hold mine for a long moment before they dip to my lips and then flicker back up. “Thank you,” he says in a low tone that instantly makes goose bumps rise on my arms and the back of my neck. “She’ll love that.”
“Of course.” I don’t move, and neither does he, and I don’t understand any of this. Why I react to him so strongly. I don’t like it. “See you later, Doctor.” I walk away, but he stops me.
“Hey, Little Swan?” I stop but don’t turn back to him. That stupid nickname is growing on me, and that’s not a good thing.
“Yeah?”
He doesn’t say anything, and curiosity gets the better of me. I turn and look at him, but all the softness he had a moment ago when talking about his daughter is gone. I tilt my head when Josh steps in front of me, blocking my view of Aston.
“Hey. Do you have that second now?”
Aston storms off, and for the second time this morning, I’m tempted to take a shot at a man’s nuts.
“No,” I answer evenly.
“Sure, you do. Your next patient just got to the PACU, and you’re done puppy walking your brother’s bestie around.”
“How did you know he’s my brother’s friend?”
He makes a dismissive noise. “Everyone in Boston knows who the Hugheses are, the same as they know who the Fritzes are. Word has already spread around about who he is.”
Yes, everyone knows who we are, but there are plenty of moments I’m glad my last name is Davenport and not Fritz. My mom, Rina, is the baby of the Fritz siblings and works part-time as an ICU nurse across town. She and my uncle Landon have probably kept the lowest profile out of all the primary Fritz children, but the rest of my uncles and even plenty of my cousins are as famous as it gets.
“Whatever. Go away.”
“Come on. Don’t be like that.” He shifts his weight, looking sad and broken. “Have you been getting my notes? You haven’t mentioned them.”
“You mean the ones you shove into my locker? Yes. I’ve gotten them. And then fed them to the biowaste bin.”
He grunts, annoyed by that. “I wouldn’t have to leave you notes if you’d just talk to me like an adult instead of acting like a child about this. I still don’t understand why you left me.”
He just called me a child and doesn’t understand why I left him? Ha. That’s a good one. “Yes, you do. I told you why.”
He shakes his head as if my reasons don’t make sense and never did to him, which is probably accurate. He never saw a problem with how he treated me, and on the occasions that I pointed out how it hurt me or even how he was scaring me, he’d be dismissive and call me oversensitive or hormonal or say I was overreacting or making things up or some other variant of that. Still, I’m all set with the gaslighting.
“Can we just… I don’t know, get a coffee maybe? Sit and talk since you blocked my number and won’t let me call you?”
“There’s nothing to say. It’s been six weeks, and we’re as much over now as we were when I left.”
He grasps my shoulders and pulls me closer. His hand goes for my neck, and my pulse speeds up as adrenaline spikes in my veins the way it would whenever he did that. I swat his hand away and suppress my shiver. That won’t happen again.
He sighs and holds his hands up in surrender. “I miss you. I was angry when you left, and I know I said some things I shouldn’t have that day. You think I did a million things wrong, but you didn’t fight for us, and it hurt. But Skylar, I haven’t stopped loving you, and I haven’t stopped missing you. Come on. It wasn’t all bad with us. Most of it was pretty great.”
I clench my fists until my nails dig into my palm. It’s easy when he looks at me like this and says these things to forget how it was with him. How being with him made me feel. The fear that used to consume me. I think back to that saying that if it costs you your peace, it’s too expensive.
“Do you really not understand that you treated me like shit? That you ridiculed me like I was nothing. That you would yell and berate me and talk down to me and insult me. You’d terrorize and intimidate and shame me. You’d squeeze my neck and use your grip on me like a threat.”
He looks down at the floor. “I don’t recall it being that way. You came down on me a lot too. Nothing I ever did or said to you was good enough. If I didn’t like something, it was like I couldn’t be honest about it. And let’s face it, you’re a bit of a drama queen and tend to overreact and make up things that aren’t actually happening. But regardless, I never meant to make you feel bad if I ever did. Never. Please give me a second chance.”
