“Did it?”
“Hell no,” he says. “What makes it such a good story. Maria climbed the school walls to meet Morris every night. One night, they got married before she snuck back in. He showed up the next morning, asked for his wife, surprising everyone when Maria said it was her before riding away with him. They went on to have a good life and a lot of years together. Didn’t bode well for the reputation of the boarding school though.”
“Hm.” I imagine it all playing out in blurred images of black-and-white characters. “Why do you like that story so much?”
“Reminds me that even the stories with the most unplanned beginnings can have a good ending.” He looks at me then. “Maybe even ones where one person neglects to tell the other about a baby for eight years.”
What I hear:I don’t hate you.
“How mad are you?” I ask, slinking my arm around his until our fingers tangle together. “On a scale of one to ten?”
“Four thousand.” It’s a deserved number. “Doesn’t mean I take anything back I’ve said since you’ve been here.”
I should have known Nash Fletcher would make me swoon at a time like this.
“I’m sorry, Nash.” I swallow. “I’m really, really sorry.”
His slight nod lets me know he hears me, and I grab his face and kiss him until he kisses me back. Until the way his mouth moves lets me know we’ll be okay. If the antique shop goes under. If I’m scraping pennies off the street to pay for Mom’s surgery. And now: as we figure out where we go from here. With Bennie.
Forehead to forehead, he says, “We have a kid.”
“We do.”
“And you’re a pain in the ass.”
We both fight smiles at this.
“I am.”
“I’m pissed.” His eyes let me know he means it. “Really pissed.”
“I know you are.”
“But I know why you did it.” It stuns me to silence. “You were right about a lot of what you said. I was immature. A little selfish with how I wanted to live. The traveling. The houses that weren’t homes. Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have dropped it all, but it also doesn’t mean it would’ve come easy.”
My heart trips over itself at his ability to so easily see transgressions and understand mistakes. He waited, I lied, and he forgives me. Just like that. If today me could meet eight years ago me, I’d slap that bitch across the face and demand she never let this man go. Force her to see they’d figure it out together.
He squeezes my hand then pulls me to stand. “We better go get Cap and Sunny before they drink all the liquor in that place or kill Jonathan.”
Ialmostforgot about that shitshow.
At the nearly empty restaurant, Sunny and Cap are singing karaoke—it’s not a karaoke bar—and Jonathan is gone. The waitress informs us that he was dumped into a cab after he started arguing with the bartender when the bartender cut him off.
Poor guy.
He’ll recover—from me and the hangover he’s going to wake up with. We might not belong together, but he didn’t deserve this.
“Hey, fam,” Sunny shouts into the mic with a slur. “Cappy baby, what song you wanna sing?”
He waves his cane through the air. “Always did like ‘Sweet Caroline.’”
The familiar notes play and their terrible voices collide like cars in a head-on collision; Nash and I sing right along withthem. We also close the place down, Nash buying round after round for everyone in the name of fatherhood.
Cap shocks me when he raises his glass and says, “Best job I never knew I wanted.”
He smiles at me, and I smile right back.
Ed was a great dad and a good man and taught me a lot of wonderful things, but maybe I needed a Cap in my life to teach me how to live a little and chase impossible things.
