Page 21 of Working for the Runaway Bride

“Carter.”

“Forget it.”

“Where is Molly?”

“I don’t know.”

“Call her.”

“She needs time to calm down.”

“She needs a fiancé who doesn’t humiliate her in her own home.”

“And I needed a father who wasn’t in prison.”

The words stop me more effectively than a fist. Silence swallows the line. I release the edge of the desk and look down at the crescent-shaped marks my fingers have left in the wood. There are some accusations a man can defend himself against. That isn’t one of them.

Carter knows it. Worse, I know it.

My years in prison are a weapon he rarely uses, which only makes it hurt more when he does. I wasn’t there during the years that mattered. I wasn’t there to teach him how a man treats a woman, how he keeps his word, or how he faces the consequences of his mistakes. I was locked behind concrete walls and steel doors because I made my own bad choices.

His mother sent pictures at first. But by the time I came home, he had learned how to live without me.

I spent years trying to close the distance, but there are some gaps a man can’t repair with fishing trips and birthday presents. I tried to teach him integrity after he was old enough to resent me for believing I had any right to teach him at all.

Maybe this is my fault. Maybe I left him alone too long. Every ugly thing I see in him now grew during the years I wasn’t there to pull it out by the roots. But Molly didn’t put me in prison and shouldn’t have to suffer for what my absence did to my son.

“Go to hell.” He hangs up.

I lower the phone and sit in the silence. My pulse pounds hard enough that I feel it in my jaw. Every instinct tells me to drive to Carter’s house and demand the truth in person. It would take twenty minutes. Fifteen if I ignore the speed limit.

I could stand on his porch and give him the piece of my mind he deserves. I could remind him that marriage isn’t a game, that trust is easier to destroy than rebuild, and that the kind of woman who fills a classroom with love doesn’t deserve to come home to another woman in her living room.

Only one thing keeps me in my chair. He’s my son. And this burning desire to protect Molly shouldn’t be a feeling at all. I’m in the wrong and I know it.

CHAPTER

FOUR

MOLLY—FIVE DAYS BEFORE THE WEDDING

Five-year-olds don’t care that your wedding is supposed to happen in five days. They don’t care that you found your fiancé with a half-dressed woman in the living room you share. They don’t understand that sometimes a person can have her entire future ripped away and still be expected to show up at eight o’clock with a smile and explain why glue sticks belong on paper instead of in someone’s hair.

They care that the blue crayon is missing. They care that Ava got the sparkly scissors first and that the class caterpillar—which is actually a moth caterpillar, despite what the label on its plastic habitat claims—still hasn’t built its cocoon.

Today, I am grateful for every tiny emergency. They keep me from thinking. Mostly.

I cried while I sat on the edge of a hotel bed and stared at the patterned carpet. I cried in the shower, where I could pretend the water on my face came from somewhere else. I cried when I took off my engagement ring and placed it beside the cheap plastic cup on the bathroom counter.

“Miss Molly!” Lily shouts from the reading rug. “Someone’s at the door.” I turn. Grayson stands in the hallway. My breath catches before I can stop it.

He’s wearing dark jeans and a gray work shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. The name of his garage is embroidered over one side of his broad chest, and a pair of sunglasses hangs from the collar. His hair is dark with silver at the temples, slightly mussed as though he’s been dragging his hands through it.

There’s grease along one forearm. He looks completely out of place surrounded by construction-paper flowers and finger paintings. He also looks like the one person I’ve been trying not to think about all morning.

“Grayson.”

Twenty-two small heads turn toward me. Then they turn toward him.