“Hmm.”
What did “hmm” mean?
“Not everyone responds to it well. Especially with how old Liam is and how old I am.”
Harlan cocked his head back. “What do they do?”
“Leave, usually. Stop getting to know me. If you’re my parents, you never speak to me again.”
I felt stupid for letting that little detail out. It was too vulnerable, too much information for what Harlan was to me. Only the people who knew me best knew that. Certainly no one at work.
But Harlan’s response surprised me. “Assholes.” His eyes darkened, brows lowering. “Aren’t most parents itching to be grandparents?”
“Well, they weren’t,” I chuckled. “And I’m not particularly either.”
“Liam’s just barely an adult.” He whistled. “Eighteen, huh?”
“Eighteen,” I said, bobbing my head and idly dragging my toe in an arc on top of the water.
“You were young,” he suggested. “When you had him.”
“Twenty,” I confirmed. “Barely older than he is now.”
Harlan’s gaze passed over my face. “Where’s his dad?”
“Jeff’s around. He was just here earlier celebrating with us.”
“But you’re separated?”
“Divorced twelve years,” I said, reaching for my own seltzer can and taking a sip. “Jeff remarried, but I’m a free agent.”
“Is it hard to date as a single mom?” He kept peppering me with questions, and I wasn’t sure what was at the heart of it. He was trying to figure me out, I supposed.
I laughed. “Oh, absolutely. Guys are the worst. They’ll act like they’re cool with me being a mom, we fuck, and then they vanish into thin air. It’s like sex with me turns them into ghosts.”
His brows knit. “They’re missing out.”
“Yeah. It’s their loss to not know Liam.”
Harlan watched me more intently with those midnight blue eyes. “They’d be missing out on you too.”
I shivered as a cool breeze blew through the patio, and I sank back down in the water. “Nice of you to say that.”
“No, really,” he said, gesticulating with one hand out of the water. “We’re all a sum of our experiences, right? Think about the bus. That shifted how I see everything. I wouldn’t be right here, right now, if that hadn’t happened. And the same way, Liam is a major part of your life. Part of what makes you who you are today. To ignore him is . . . to ignore you.”
I clenched my jaw to stave off the urge to cry. “The bus changed you?”
Harlan had been directly across from me, but scooted over one seat. Our legs now made an L shape in the middle of the hot tub. “Yeah. Definitely. I had to really think about what I want from life. What I would have felt like I missed out on if I’d died or if my life as I know it had been taken away.”
I nodded and waited, because he seemed to have more to add.
“I was on the phone with my ex-girlfriend. I’d been coddling her for a while since I told her I was done. I was afraid she’d go off the handle, and I don’t want bad things to happen to her. But it had been months of me placating her feelings. I broke up with her because she didn’t accept all of me. It took me almost dying from her distraction to see it more clearly. It’s not my job to manage her emotions or to change myself for her. I need to go for what I want out of life.”
“You want someone who likes you for who you are.”
“Exactly.” Harlan’s foot drifted up my leg and he rolled his lips between his teeth. “And you deserve someone who doesn’t think of Liam as a downside. Being a mom is another cool thing about you.”
“Another? Are you kissing my ass?”
