Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Cadence sat on her front porch, long unused baby monitor sitting beside her. Izzy was old enough that she didn’t need the surveillance of a smaller child, but Cadence liked to know that she could at least hear what was going on inside the house when she ducked outside.
Or maybe she just wanted to think she’d had a good reason for keeping it, she thought wryly as she sipped her glass of white wine. She had thought for a long time that she’d need it for her next baby, but life had shown itself as having other plans.
She sighed, although it wasn’t too heavy.
Sometimes thinking about her fertility struggles felt like pressing on a bruise, like she needed to prod at it to see if it still hurt.
And, yes, there was still some pain there.
She suspected there always would be. But it wasn’t agonizing any longer. It was more like an ache.
Things were changing, she thought, taking another sip of her wine. Moving ahead. And yes, change could be hard, but it could be good too.
Her thoughts turned more cheerful. If everything stayed the same, after all, she never would have met Eleanor, whom she now counted as one of her closest friends. There wouldn’t be a bookstore coming to Magnolia Shore. Diana wouldn’t be expanding her horizons.
And, of course, it was every parent’s joy to watch their kid grow up… even if it was sometimes twinged with the sense that they were growing rather too quickly for comfort. Still, Cadence loved watching Isabelle get bigger, loved seeing her interest blossom and her personality develop.
So yes. Change was challenging. But it was so, so beautiful too.
She was startled out of her thoughts by her phone buzzing on the porch swing beside her. She flipped it face up and then blinked in surprise.
Why was Tyler calling her so late in the evening?
Despite her confusion, she did not hesitate before answering.
“Hello?”
“Tell me the truth,” he said without preamble. “Are you really that busy with the gallery, or did you just need an excuse to say no? Because, listen, Cadence, it’s okay if you don’t want to, I just… I don’t know. I just need to know.”
There was something fractured and vulnerable about his question, and it made her heart start aching in an instant.
It also made her know with absolute certainty that she did need to tell him the truth, the whole truth.
“I… it’s a little bit of both,” she confessed. “I am busy with the gallery, but I probably am also using that to distract me from… other things.”
Tyler laughed, but the sound was a little bit sad. “I might know something about using work to distract from my feelings.”
She smiled. “Yeah, tale as old as time, right?” She took a breath.
“It’s just really hard. It’s not like I have a super long history with getting through breakups or anything, but it seems like it’s so much harder when there’s a kid involved.
Because we can’t just focus on our feelings. There’s Izzy to consider.”
“I know,” he said. “And it goes without saying that she’s the most important thing.”
“It does,” she agrees. “No matter how things have gone between us, I’ve never, ever doubted that we both think Izzy comes first.”
“Me neither,” he assured her.
“But I can love her to the moon and back and recognize that having a kid involved makes things more complicated,” she said. “You and I see each other, what, every two days? But it’s not like we really see each other. It’s just…”
“Procedural,” he supplied.
“Yeah. So we’re not getting any distance for perspective, but we’re also not connecting or anything.
And so it’s just this nonstop kick in the pants,” she let out a humorless little laugh.
“I guess the long story short is… I’m scared.
Realizing how far we had drifted, it—it shattered my heart.
And I’m afraid that if I open up again, it will break me even worse the next time. ”
There was a long, careful pause. When Tyler spoke, there was no judgment in his tone.
“I get that. I… I guess my fear brings me to a different conclusion, but I get what you’re saying.” He didn’t say that he was disappointed, but she knew him far too well not to hear it in his voice.
“I’m sorry, Ty,” she said softly.
“Hey, no,” he said at once. “Don’t be sorry. I asked for the truth and you gave me the truth. I appreciate it.”
There were a hundred things more she wanted to say.
She wanted to apologize again. She wanted to tell him she missed him.
She wanted to tell him she cared about him.
And those things were so true… but it wasn’t fair to him.
It wasn’t fair to either of them, but especially to Tyler, who came to her, open-hearted, only for her to turn him away.
“Okay,” she said. It was all she could say, really.
“Thank you, Cadence,” he said. “Really.”
His kindness made Cadence feel like absolute mud.
“I’ll talk to you soon, okay?” he said.
“Yeah, okay,” she agreed. Again, it was too little. “Goodnight.”
“Night, Cadence,” he said.
After they hung up, Cadence spent a long minute staring at her phone. Part of her wanted to call him right back, to take back everything she’d said.
But that fear held her back.
With a sigh, she went inside, dumped the remainder of her wine down the sink, and went upstairs. As she went through her nighttime routine, she felt her phone like a siren, calling to her.
But she held strong. She was strong enough not to call him back.
But she wasn’t strong enough not to grab her wedding photo of her and Tyler, pulling it from where she had tucked it away in her pajama drawer when it had become too painful to see on her dresser every day. Looking at it ached now, but… less.
She looked at their smiling faces. It was an incredible photo, one of the candid shots their photographer had gotten, not one of the staged ones. Cadence was grinning up at Tyler, who was laughing at something she’d said.
They looked so happy. Young and bright and with their full futures ahead of them.
Cadence curled up in bed, propping the photo beside her. She traced the curve of Tyler’s smile, the place where his eyes scrunched with his laughter.
When she looked at them this way, it was so easy to see the good memories.
She thought about the honeymoon vacation they’d taken up to a cabin in Canada, a quiet week in the woods just the two of them.
Tyler had laughed that it was an unconventional choice, but Cadence had argued that they lived at the beach, so shouldn’t they vacation elsewhere?
And they’d had the greatest time, hiking all day and curling up in front of a fire in the evenings.
She thought about Izzy’s first birthday, when they’d given their daughter a little cupcake to celebrate.
Izzy had, instead of trying to eat it herself, taken a handful of frosting and smashed it directly into Tyler’s ear.
Cadence had laughed so hard her stomach had hurt, and even Tyler had chuckled…
after he got the frosting out of his ear, which had taken a long, long while.
These versions of them seemed at once so close and so far away.
Cadence closed her eyes before any tears could escape. When she fell asleep, the photo was still clutched tightly in her hands.