Yes, but would she want it in a year? Five years? Twenty years?
Reno was speaking again, “—and if you don’t get your butt off the bench and get back into the game in the next forty-eight hours, you’re going to lose her, even though she’ll be right here.”
The line clicked dead.
Dillon sat in Cal Hendricks’s driveway, the heater slowly warming up his hands, the morning sun rising higher in the sky.
Tessa said no.
To everything.
To a gigantic trust fund. To a music academy for Makayla. To her mother. To that whole world and the fancy life she’d left behind.
Lexi’s voice tried to surface. He waited for the line that had been ruining his life for three years — you have nothing left inside you — and it came. But it was faint. Worn. Like a song he’d played so many times he could no longer remember why he ever liked it.
And this time, as she whispered to him, he didn’t hear Truth with a capital T. He only heard one woman’s bitter parting shot meant to cause maximum damage. And oh, had it ever.
For three long years she’d managed to shut him down, lock him in a spiral of self-loathing and self-doubt. And he’d let her do it. Heck, he’d done it to himself.
In a moment of clarity, he realized he’d been punishing himself all this time for failing Lexi. Yes, he’d let her down. But no, he hadn’t misled her about the kind of life she would have as a country vet’s wife. He’d never been anyone other than himself from the day they met. She’d known exactly who she was marrying.
Another realization struck him with the force of a revelation. Lexi’d thought she could change him.
As he looked back now with that in mind, he saw how she’d tried the whole time they were married to make him into the man she’d wanted him to be.
Was he wrong for not letting her succeed? After all, he was the first to admit he had a stubborn streak a mile wide.
He sat there a while longer, thinking hard about it.
At the end of the day, he wasn’t sorry that he hadn’t changed for her. He took helping animals and other people seriously. He believed in his work. Believed in his principles. His biggest mistake had been not realizing Lexi’s values and beliefs were so very different from his.
They’d been doomed from the start to fail as a couple. They’d both been too young and naïve to see it back then, but looking back now, it was crystal clear.
And with that final realization came a measure of peace. Neither of them were bad people. They were just different. Her parting shot to him hadn’t been born out of cruelty at all. She just didn’t understand him any more than he’d understood her.
And with that, her voice finally, at long last, fell silent in his head.
He started the truck.
He had appointments all morning at the clinic. Bonnie Watson’s puppy finally getting a clean bill of health for his ear infection. A cat that emphatically did not want its annual wellness check and vaccinations. The Hendricks calf again, who had decided not to nurse and required a phone consultation. It was all routine. The work calmed his hands and his mind.
At eleven, Hank walked in carrying two coffees from Rose’s. He set one on Dillon’s desk. He drank his own, watching Dillon, saying nothing.
Dillon drank the coffee. It was strong and bitter, exactly the way he liked it. Hank had remembered. Sometimes brothers could surprise a man.
His phone buzzed with an incoming text. He picked it up half hoping and half dreading it would be Tessa.
It was Makayla.
A photo, taken in her bedroom mirror. An eleven-year-old girl in a floor-length navy skirt and a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, hair in a French braid she had clearly done herself, holding her violin against her shoulder. She was smiling at the camera with the careful, controlled smile he recognized as her performance face — the one she used around adults she wasn’t sure of yet and must also use at violin recitals.
Below the photo: Talent show is tomorrow. Are you still coming?
He stared at the screen until it dimmed.
His hand was not steady when he typed back.
Wouldn’t miss it.
