Chapter 24
Twenty-Four
It’s ironic to be broke while lounging poolside, but here we are.
“Always wanted a house with a pool,” Cap says from the lawn chair next to me as he sucks on Penny.
Frank nudges my thigh with his nose until I knuckle the spot between his ears. “You don’t strike me as a house and pool type.”
Nash left for a few hours at the office and insisted we stay at his house. “Make yourselves at home,” he said as he left.
I was reluctant—especially after everything that happened this morning—but without admitting I have nowhere else to go except his shed, Cap’s boat, or aimlessly driving around—which costs gas money—I relented.
“Probably right,” Cap says with a chuckle. “You gonna tell me what happened?”
“To?”
“You and him.”
A long breath leaks out of me, and Cap makes an amused sound that bleeds into a cough. “Let your old dad help, kiddo.”
“You’ve been my dad for three days,” I say without heat. “Not sure you can help.”
“Eh. Try me.”
The truth is, I need to talk to someone.
My sisters will be too much. Reese will attack me with business-like bullet points, and Remy will drone on and on about the romance of it all.
And my mother . . . my mother. Even the handful of friends I have don’t appeal to me.
I either keep this bottled up or talk to the man who’s forcing me to call him dad.
“Eight years ago, Nash and I met and fell in love. Five minutes flat, just like you and Mom. Difference is, we got married. Fast. A month fast. Like we couldn’t not, you know?”
“Sure as shit do.”
I drop my head back on the lawn chair. The clouds drift overhead, teleporting me to the split second that changed my life all those years ago when he walked into Old Vines. His wild hair, his perfect face, his ridiculous shirt covered in ice cream cones. He bought that harmonica and stole my heart.
“He drove me crazy—clearly still does—but it was like I couldn’t not be with him.” Just saying it out loud pulls at me like a deep stretch on a sore muscle. Pain and relief at once. Mom was right, I was besotted. We both were.
“Why’d it end?”
“Because it never should have started.”
He looks at me like that’s not good enough, so I tell him the whole story.
About how I saw those pink lines on that stick and knew as sure as life was growing in my belly, our lives would change. I was scared but excited. I wanted it. In less than a minute I saw our whole lives unfold as a family in the same town I grew up in.
“What do you think of babies?” I asked him over dinner, trying to be coy.
“Right now?” He laughed between bites. “They’re great. For other people.”
We got married so fast, we’d never had the big conversations. We didn’t care about them. They were future concerns. Until that moment when the future arrived and everything inside me deflated like a tire on a rusty nail.
He kept talking, oblivious. “And there’s no room for babies if we’re living in DC.
” The world stopped with the scratch of a record.
“There’s a job—I took it.” The crinkles around his eyes from his smile lashed my heart into a million pieces.
“Teaching history in a city with so much of it? Spending our free time lost between monuments and museums for a few months? Can it get any better, Rue Conway?” He always loved saying my first and last name, and I’d yet to legally change it to his—we were only two months married.
What’s the rush when you have forever? Over my plate of then-cold spaghetti, I knew I never would. We were over.
He wanted to go—he always would.
I wasn’t going to DC, but he was.
“A stint away from Fontain?” he asked, so happy. “Who knows where it could take us?”
I knew I couldn’t tell him. Knew as sure as he was looking forward to his next adventure that he wasn’t ready to be a dad.
To be moored in place like a ship made for deep waters.
He loved what he did—this was a city he’d told me he wanted to go to—and I wasn’t going to stand in the way.
I didn’t want him to stay out of obligation only to end up resenting me, or even worse, our unborn child.
I should have given him the chance to decide, but my fear wouldn’t let me.
All at once, every mistake we’d made snapped into focus.
How fast we had moved.
How opposite our visions of the future.
How many big conversations we forgot to have because we couldn’t slow down when it came to each other.
This was the price I had to pay.
Just like the split second it took for me to fall in love with him, everything I loved about him made me see red.
His free spirit.
His lack of foresight.
How okay he was with us living in the tiny apartment in the storage room of Old Vines, littered with his clothes and books and little army men he insisted he needed for battle reenactments with his students.
I did what I had to: I told him we’d made a mistake, he needed to take the job, and I would take care of the divorce papers.
Mostly.
I also cried, called him a slew of names while listing off every flaw he had, and lied through my teeth when I told him I never wanted to see him again.
It was the only way I knew to protect me, him, and the baby I never wanted to grow up thinking she had a dad who didn’t want her.
He fought, but I fought harder. The night ended with him leaving and me spending years thinking one day he’d show up and tell me he was done roaming.
He never did.
We were a flash-in-a-pan love story I’d tricked myself into believing was once-in-a-lifetime romance.
“You didn’t tell him,” Cap finishes.
“I did not.” I sigh. “I thought I was doing the right thing—protecting us all. Panicked. Irrational. Scared.” I throw the ball again for Frank.
“Seeing his reaction today . . .” My voice trails off while I relive how Nash’s instant hurt made me feel like a piece of trash.
“Not so different than Mom, I guess. Maybe if she would’ve told you, everything would have been different. ”
Cap adjusts his hat then sags deeper into his chair. “Might not have gone that way.”
I straighten. “You wouldn’t have followed her if she told you she was pregnant before she left?”
“Meh,” he says, not letting me force him into the pretty answer I want to hear. “Hard to say what our past selves would have done, ain’t it? I loved your mom—would have loved you—but that wouldn’t have stopped me from wanting that treasure.”
I sink back into my chair, letting this reality sink in. My dad who didn’t know about me might not have made a different choice if he had.
“Would you have showed up if I knew you existed but never called?” he asks, the coarseness of his voice at odds with the vulnerability of the question.
“Hell no,” I admit, making him snort. “I didn’t want to come to begin with. Lucky for you, my life turned into a catastrophe, and your gold obsession offered a solution.”
Frank brings me the ball, and I throw it again.
“You think Nash will hate me?” I ask. “When I tell him about Bennie, I mean? You don’t seem to hate Mom. You barely seemed shocked when I showed up.”
“Takes a lot to shock your old dad,” he says with a laugh followed by a cough and deep sniff of oxygen. “And you could probably set a match to this house and Nash wouldn’t hate you. Pretty sure he’s still in love with you.”
“Are you kidding me?” I scoff. “Did you not see how mad he was today? And seeing someone.” Nash’s convoluted You’re wrong echoes. I let the sun warm my eyelids until Frank nudges me with his nose and drops the slobbery ball on my chair. “He thinks us being married is a game.”
Cap closes his eyes and tilts his face toward the sun. “Stand by what I said, kiddo. You fight like that, means you have something worth fighting for. All that hullabaloo at the tree.” He opens one eye in my direction.
“Hullabaloo?” I repeat flatly.
“What it was. And you know I’m right.” He closes his eye then opens it again. “And you’re probably engaged to the wrong man.”
“You don’t even know him,” I defend.
“Know he ain’t here. Know your life’s a mess and you’re handling it alone. Know Nash rearranged his life to help even after you told him not to.”
That . . . is an annoyingly great point. “You sound like Mom.”
“Smart lady.”
Frank settles in the middle of the yard, aggressively chewing the ball.
“She has a brain tumor,” I admit, picking at a string on my shirt as the inevitable shot of emotion knots my throat.
“It’s benign, but she needs surgery.” At the amount of effort it takes for me to say it aloud, I get why she never told us.
I also get how hard it must have been for her to carry it alone.
“She’s a pain in the ass. Even her non-life-threatening illness is dramatic. ”
He chuckles then says, “If it wasn’t a tumor, it’d be somethin’ else.
Bodies get old, kiddo. Ain’t no outrunning it, no matter how fast you are.
You live your life, do the best you can.
Make right choices and wrong ones. Carry regrets and wish the good days lasted a little longer.
Wish for more time. Wish for different time.
Wish you’d spent more time with different people.
” He gives me a pointed look. “But we get what we get, and it all ends the same. All ends too soon.”
He talks about mortality like it’s as easy to accept as the sky being blue. With his next drag from Penny, he offers it to me, and I wave it off.
“Doctor suggested it,” he says. “Said it would help.”
My brows raise. “With?”
“Gettin’ stoned.”
His lips twitch; this bastard is being funny. Against my best efforts, I laugh.
“What was your dad like?” he asks.