I forced a smile so stiff it felt like it might crack my face in half, really trying to drive home how absolutely unbothered I was.
His silence told me he wasn’t buying it. I could feel his eyes on me—eyes that had always seen straight through my bullshit, even when I’d perfected the performance for everyone else in my life.
I cleared my throat, scrambling for safer ground. “What did your mom want? Everything okay?”
“Yeah, she was just calling to ‘check in,’” he said with an eyeroll. “Pretty sure she’d recruited Piper to her cause. They were trying like hell to get Avery to say Aunt Kelsey.”
“Piper’s there? Like, right now?” I asked with a frown.
Teddy nodded. “Yeah, guess her blood pressure’s been elevated, and Dane didn’t want her on her feet or trying to keep up with an almost two-year-old this close to her due date, so they’re hanging out over there.”
“But the girls just texted that they were at the bakery with Piper,” I argued, the lack of sleep making me doubt myself.
“When’d they text you that?” he asked, confusion flickering across his face.
“Just now. Like, two minutes ago.” After scrolling up enough to hide my last text and all the ones sent in response, I held the phone up as if the timestamp would somehow clear things up.
Teddy’s brow furrowed as he read the texts. “Huh. Ma said the girls were up at the bakery with Dane when I asked to talk to them. Sounds like he’s got them managing the pick-up orders. Maybe they just wanted it to sound more exciting than it is.”
Piper was with Lucy. The girls were helping at the bakery. Everything was fine. Completely normal, everyday stuff that had nothing to do with whatever Teddy and I were currently navigating.
“That’s good. Make ‘em earn their keep.” I forced a chuckle beforefalling back into the role I knew how to play best. “I’ll grab you some coffee.”
Because that was what I did, I took care of things. Made everything look perfect on the outside, so I could convince myself I wasn’t falling apart inside.
Maybe if I tried hard enough, I could pretend that the separate lives we’d built still had room for each other. That the miles between Texas and Colorado could shrink to nothing. That a President’s patch didn’t mean what I knew it meant.
When I tried to step around him, Teddy moved into my path, blocking any escape route.
“You wanna tell me what’s really going on? You’ve been as jittery as a June bug since I walked out here.”
My spine stiffened. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Teddy sighed. “Back to the same fucking song and dance as before.”
I opened my mouth to protest, to offer some deflection about the weather or about needing to start breakfast, but he cut me off.
“How ‘bout this? I’ll start it off. You were holding my kutte.”
There it was. The conversation I’d been trying to avoid since the moment I’d seen the patches.
“I was just hanging it up. It must have fallen.”
Except it hadn’t fallen. We both knew that.
“You saw the patches.”
It wasn’t a question. I met his eyes, seeing the resignation there, the same inevitability I’d been feeling since I’d read that word. President.
I could pretend I didn’t know what he meant. Could play dumb, retreat, rinse and repeat. But I was so tired of running. So tired of pretending.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I saw them.”
The silence between us was so thick it was almost suffocating. Through the windows, the morning sun was turning the snow-covered landscape into something almost painfully bright. Beautiful and cold and so far removed from the messy reality of two people trying to figure out if there was anything left to salvage.
“Say something,” Teddy urged, his jaw flexing and tighteningbeneath his beard. “Anything. Yell at me. Tell me I should have mentioned it sooner. Just—don’t go quiet on me again.”
But what was there to say? That I’d been stupid enough to think these few days meant something? That I’d let myself hope for a future that geography made impossible?
