Finally, he huffed out an angry breath but flicked on the indicator anyway, jerking the car onto the shoulder. We hadn’t even fully stopped before I was twisting in my seat to face him.
“This is ridiculous,” I said. “You need to stop.”
“This isserious,” he retorted.
“I know it’s serious.” My hands flew up in frustration. “I’m the one living it!”
“Well, then maybe he should have thought about that before he?—”
“I love him.” The words came out firm and sure.
My dad blinked hard before his expression softened. “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize, but it’s going to be okay. You’re going to move home and we’re going to?—”
“No,” I said immediately.
From the back seat, Nate was watching me with a careful expression on his face, but he still didn’t interrupt. I twisted slightly to look at him. He gave the subtlest of nods, and I sighed.
“I’ve loved him for years, Daddy.” My voice shook, so I drew in a deep breath that didn’t help at all. “Since long before any of this. Before the contract. Before the wedding. Before youand Abram came along and sold me for a lucrative business deal.”
Dad drew his shoulders back. “That’s not what happened.”
“You two made decisions for us just because it was what was best for you, without giving us a chance to voice our opinions.If you had listened you might have learned something.”
Dad blinked at me like he’d never seen me before. “What are you talking about?”
I swallowed past the growing lump in my throat. This part had always been mine. Just mine. My secret world. My safe place. The one thing that belonged entirely to me.
“Nate and I met online years ago,” I explained. “We’ve been talking every single day for over half a decade. At least once a day. Sometimes for hours. Sometimes only a couple of quick texts. But we told each other everything. IamEmma, Daddy. Nate didn’t know my real name until a couple weeks ago and we had never met in person.”
Well, we told each other almost everything, but I wasn’t about to tell him about all that right now.
“I didn’t tell you because it was mine. It was my thing. My special thing, and I didn’t want anyone touching it.” I stared straight ahead as I said it, unable to look at either of them. “I didn’t want opinions, advice, or questions. I just wanted it to be mine. And I knew people wouldn’t take me seriously if they knew I was in love with a man I’d never met. I had to protect myself.”
“With your attitude in business I doubt anyone wouldnottake you seriously,” Nate mumbled dryly from the back seat.
I twisted around so fast, I nearly gave myself whiplash. “Oh my God, shutup,Nate.”
He held up both hands in surrender, looking entirely unapologetic. “I’m just saying?—”
“No,” I snapped. “You’ve saidenough.It was your big mouth that got us into this asinine mess in the first place. And for the record,” I said, turning fully in my seat so I could look at both of my parents at the same time. “You have absolutely no business being upset with Nate or with me.”
My mother blinked at me. My father looked like he might actually combust, but my pulse was thundering in my ears and I wasn’t backing off now. No matter how uncomfortable this was for him to hear.
“You forced our hands. You put us here. Did youaskif we wanted this? No. Did you ask if we were with other people? No. Did you even give us time to sort out our own lives and whatever might’ve been going on with them before you insisted on a marriage? Also no.”
Dad opened his mouth, but I pointed a finger at him. “Not. Another. Word. All of you were pushing so hard for the deal that you forgot to even consider that we might have lives or stuff going on, and we went along with it anyway. You don’t get to be upset with us just because it’s turned out that we did, in fact, have lives before all this.”
He froze so completely, it was almost impressive, but for a long moment, no one said anything. The engine idled, a low vibration humming through the car, and the wind rattled faintly against the windows, but there was no sound outside of that.
Finally, Dad leaned back in his seat with a long, controlled breath, like a man forcibly stepping away from the edge of a cliff.Excellent. Kate: 1. Pete: 0.
Satisfied that he was going to keep his trap shut, I glanced back at Nate. He was watching me with an expressionthat hovered somewhere between impressed and deeply entertained, and while it was unacceptable, I supposed it wasn’t unwarranted.
I turned back to my father. “You owe him an apology.”
Dad’s head snapped toward me. “Katie?—”
“You. Owe. Him. An apology.”
