“You mean, what about us?”
Could he really want something again with me? Is a second chance possible, after all that’s happened?
“Do you want anything to change?” he asks.
“It seems like it’ll have to,” I say cautiously. Because there’s no way things can be exactly as they were. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he wants—
“Do you remember when we decided to move in together?” he asks, and I blink, surprised. Of course I remember. He gives me a wry smile. “We were almost done filming, and you were asking me if I might want to move closer to where you lived, and I said that would be nice, and we started talking about me getting an apartmentin your neighborhoodbecause neither of us was brave enough to admit that we wanted to live together.” He smiles, and my whole body warms. “We’re doing it again, I think. Circling the issue.”
I return the smile. “Yeah, we tend to do that.”
He draws in a deep breath. “I’d want to try again. If you think you could give me another chance.”
That flicker of hope turns into a bonfire. For a moment, I can picture it. Blake living on the ranch with me. Walking five dogs at once. Wrestling with the kids in the living room. Falling asleep with his arms around me at night.
But. “Would you really want that? I mean, I’m medicated now, but the OCD is still a thing. It’s more under control, and I’m better at dealing with it now, but—”
“That doesn’t bother me. I never would have left you if I knew that’s what it was. I thought you were unhappy with me. I had no idea it was a disease, and if I had known, I never would have left.”
I close my eyes, the emotions overwhelming. It’s so hard to understand how it couldn’t have mattered, how it couldn’t have changed how he felt about me.
If he can be brave, though, so can I.
“I’d like to try again, too,” I say. “If you’re sure you want to. But I don’t even know what that would look like, with the kids and the press and the movie.” As soon as anyone outside this room gets wind of what’s happening, we’ll be on the cover of every entertainment magazine worldwide. And how the kids will react is hard to guess.This isn’t exactly something any of us anticipated.
“What would you want it to look like?” he asks.
I hesitate, not even sure how to wrap my mind around this question.
He smiles. “We could lay out all the options and list the pros and cons.”
I let out a little laugh. “You know me well.”
“Okay, we could date casually. But I think the con for that is I’m not sure either of us would be capable of it.Too much history.”
I look down at the floor, feeling a prickle of fear. “You’re sure you wouldn’t want to see other people?”
He squeezes my hand. “No. No way.”
I smile in sheer relief. “Me neither, so that’s a pretty big con. I’d say casual dating is out.”
“So on the extreme opposite end, we could immediately get remarried.” He ducks his head close to mine. “Just to be clear, those statements I made about never getting married again don’t apply to you.”
Remarried.
I could be married to Blake again. We’d be together like we always should have been. A family, like we were.The idea—not to mention the very fact that it’s somehow a real possibility and not some dream I’m about to wake from—makes me lightheaded.
But it’s not just Blake and me that we have to consider.
“If it weren’t for the kids, I’d say yeah, let’s just elope and fight for our marriage again like we should have the first time.” I run my thumb along his, feeling his skin under mine. “But we can’t do that to them, can we? We need to take it a little slower, make sure they’re okay with it.”
He nods. “Okay. So we’ll hold off on that until our family is ready.”
Until. He says this like it’s certain, not something he needs to consider. “You’d really want that?”
“I never wanted to get divorced in the first place.”
I press my lips together. “Neither did I.”
