Chapter 2
kelsey
“What are you doing here?” The words scraped out of my throat, rough and accusatory. Years of therapy and finally feeling as though I was healing, and all it took was the sight of Teddy’s face for all the rage and hurt to come bubbling back to the surface.
My wet feet were going numb the longer I stood, but I couldn’t move. Couldn’t process anything beyond the fact that my ex-husband stood in my driveway—no, not mine, someone else’s driveway—looking like he’d rather be anywhere else.
He raised his arm, the light hitting a large brown paper bag. “Addie texted and asked if I’d mind picking up chicken parm while they settled in.”
The Romano’s bag might as well have been a grenade for all the damage it threatened to do to my carefully reconstructed life.
No surprise they’d convinced him to bring chicken parmesan—my favorite, once upon a time when favorites mattered, and we ate dinner at the same table instead of in separate states.
His hazel eyes narrowed, taking in my wet feet and lack of coat. “Didn’t mention you’d be here, though.”
“Me?” A laugh bubbled up, sharp and bitter. “The only reason I agreed to come at all was that I was told you lived down near Durango. You were supposed to be five hours away, not—” I gestured wildly at the space between us, which felt simultaneously too vast and not nearly vast enough.
His jaw muscle flexed, a telltale sign that he was grinding his teeth. “Been living here since right after—”
He didn’t finish. Didn’t need to. Right after the divorce. Right after he’d packed up his life and disappeared into the mountains without so much as a forwarding address. Not that I’d asked for one.
“Well, this has been fun.” The cold had moved past my skin and taken up residence in my bones.
Teddy shifted the bag to his other hand, and I caught the way his leather kutte pulled across his shoulders. Still wearing it, even when no one was around to see it. Some things never changed.
“Speaking of…” He glanced past me into the warm glow of the cabin, then back to my face. “You gonna make me wait out here to see my kids? In a blizzard?”
“Please.” I rolled my eyes. “It’s hardly a blizzard.
More like aggressive sleet.” But even as I said it, ice pellets stung my cheeks, and wind whipped hair across my face.
Teddy’s presence made everything feel more intense—the cold, the awkwardness, the stupid flutter in my stomach that had no business existing after two years of silence.
“Kelsey.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, sounding put out, like I was the unreasonable one. Which was rich, considering he was the one who’d given up on us first.
“The girls aren’t here,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. Partly for warmth, mostly for armor. “Their flight to Dallas got canceled due to weather, so they’re still in Austin. Supposedly, they found another one early tomorrow morning.”
“Supposedly? Addie texted me not an hour ago, saying they were here.” Understanding dawned on his face, followed quickly by something that looked suspiciously close to amusement. “Jesus Christ. They set us up.”
“Give the man a prize,” I muttered with a slow clap.
We’d been played. Expertly. By our own children.
He lifted the bag again, and the smell of garlic and marinara chose that moment to waft toward me. “Least they made sure we didn’t starve while they parent trapped us.”
My traitorous stomach growled. “This is ridiculous.” I was talking to myself more than him, but he nodded anyway. “They can’t just—we’re adults. Divorced adults who have successfully avoided each other for two years.”
“One year, ten months,” Teddy corrected. “And successful is a bit of a stretch. You sent my lawyer a Christmas card photo of you and the girls last year.”
“That was a mistake.” It hadn’t been. I’d been feeling petty and wine drunk when I’d addressed the cards. But he didn’t need to know that.
We stood there, the space between us filled with everything we weren’t saying.
The sleet picked up, driving sideways now, and Teddy hunched his shoulders against it.
He looked older in the porch light—more lines around his eyes, more gray threading through the long dark hair that escaped the low knot he’d always favored.
Still beautiful in that rough-hewn way that made me as bubbleheaded at fifty-one as I had been at fifteen.
My mother’s voice echoed in my head, all Southern propriety and social graces. You don’t leave a dog outside in weather like this, Kelsey Dawn, much less a dinner guest.
Even if that dinner guest was my ex-husband. Even if having him in my space—temporary as it was—felt like inviting a tornado into a house of cards.
“Come in, Theodore.” The formality was childish, but I was feeling prickly. “The girls would be disappointed if I left you to freeze to death.”
He stopped mid-step toward the door, a barely-there smirk I knew too well playing at the corner of his mouth. “Theodore? What are you, my mom now?”
“God knows I cleaned up enough of your messes to earn the title.” I turned on my heel, not waiting to see if he’d follow. “And take off your boots. I’m not mopping up after you.”
His low chuckle followed me inside, a sound I’d forgotten. Or maybe I’d just buried it with everything else I couldn’t afford to remember.
The kitchen shrank the moment Teddy entered it.
Not literally—it remained the same modest galley with its granite counters and narrow butcher block island.
Then again, maybe I’d just forgotten how much space he took up—not just physically, though his broad build and six-foot-two frame certainly commanded attention.
I became hyperaware of every movement, every breath, the way my body automatically adjusted to accommodate his as we fell into patterns worn smooth by decades of practice.
He set the Romano’s bag on the counter and started unpacking the food containers one by one while I grabbed a couple of serving spoons from an enamel canister next to the stove.
We moved like dancers who’d memorized the steps so thoroughly that muscle memory overrode the fact we hadn’t performed together in two years—or one year and ten months, as he’d been so quick to point out.
“Forks are in the drawer to your left,” I said without thinking, then caught myself. This wasn’t our kitchen. This wasn’t our home. And I had no idea where anything was.
But he pulled open the drawer all the same. Different kitchen, same layout. Same silverware drawer. Countless hours of dinner preparations, thousands of shared meals, and now here we were, strangers playing house with takeout containers.
The space between the counter and the small island meant we had to slide past each other. Once, twice, three times, we managed it without contact, just the whisper of air between us. But the kitchen was too small for two people who were trying so hard not to touch each other.
I found the plates on the open shelving to the right of the sink and rose onto my toes to grab them. Without a word, Teddy moved behind me, the heat of his body seeping through my sweater.
“I’ve got it.” His fingers skimmed the small of my back as he reached around me, the kind of casual touch that used to occur on an almost daily basis. But now the contact shot through me like an electric current.
I was close enough to smell the leather of his kutte along with the unmistakable scent of pine and spice—the cologne he’d worn since we were kids. One that never failed to remind me of Christmas.
The smart thing would have been to step aside. The safe thing. Instead, I leaned back into him with a soft sigh, the tension instantly leaching from my body.
The plates trembled in his grip above us. His chest expanded against my back, and I felt more than heard the soft curse he growled into my hair. For one terrible, wonderful second, his fingers tightened on my hip, and he tugged me closer.
Then reality crashed back in. We jerked apart the same way we had when we were teens, and my parents flashed the porch light at us.
My hip connected with the handle of the silverware drawer hard enough to make me wince while Teddy collided with the island at his back, nearly losing his grip on the plates in his haste to escape.
“Sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t sure what I was apologizing for. The touch? Leaning in? The last year and ten months? All of it?
“Don’t.” His voice came out deeper than usual. He cleared his throat and nodded to the table. “Let’s just eat.”
He set the plates down with more force than necessary, the sound of ceramic clattering against the counter as loud as gunfire in the sudden silence.
I transferred the chicken parmesan onto our plates, willing my hands to stop shaking.
One dinner.
I just had to get through one dinner.
Then, I’d pawn him off on the girls, and things would go back to normal.
Teddy dumped the breadsticks into a glass mixing bowl and deposited them on the table before grabbing a couple of glasses. We moved around each other with exaggerated care now, maintaining a buffer zone that felt both necessary and ridiculous.
Once everything was laid out, he stripped off his kutte and draped it over the back of his chair, leaving him in a fitted black Henley. It should have been illegal for a man in his fifties to look that good. My mind drifted to the wine cabinet in the laundry room before I thought better of it.
We sat across from each other at the small dining table, and I immediately regretted not insisting on the breakfast bar where we would have been seated side by side, able to avoid eye contact. Instead, we were face-to-face with nowhere to look but at each other.
The only sounds were the scrape of knives against ceramic and the occasional clink of a fork finding its way back to the plate. We ate like prisoners, heads down, focused on the task of consumption rather than companionship.
Five minutes in, Teddy gestured at the breadsticks with his fork, a grunt that apparently passed for communication in his world.
“I’m sorry, did you say something?” I kept my tone light, sweet even.
Another grunt, more emphatic this time, fork now actively pointing.
“Oh, you want the breadsticks?” I leaned back in my chair, making no move toward the mixing bowl that sat directly between us. “Interesting way of asking.”
His jaw tightened. “Pass the damn breadsticks, Kels.”
“Thirty-two years, and you’d think you’d learn the magic word by now.”
“Magic word?” The fork hit his plate. “Right. Because that’s what was missing from our marriage. Please and fucking thank you. Not the fact that you—” He stopped himself, nostrils flaring, but the damage was done. The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.
“Please, finish that sentence,” I said, my voice deadly quiet. “Tell me what I did to ruin our marriage. I’m dying to hear this version.”
“Forget it.” He reached across the table himself, grabbing two breadsticks and sending the bowl wobbling.
“No, really. Was it the part where I held our family together while you were off playing outlaw with the club? Or maybe when I handled every teacher conference, every therapy appointment, every—”
“Jesus Christ, Kelsey. Can we just—” He dragged a hand over his face, looking older, exhausted in a way I felt every single day. “Can we just eat?”
I wanted to push his buttons. God, I wanted to list every grievance, every night I’d waited up, every excuse I’d made for his absence.
But what was the point? We’d had this fight a hundred times with a hundred different props.
Breadsticks, remote controls, intimacy, the kids, you name it.
The subject changed, but the script remained the same.