With that, she stood up, poked me hard in the middle of the chest, and said, “Get your shit straight, or you’ll lose them.”
The first time I saw her, three weeks after she moved out, was completely by coincidence.
I’d spilled coffee on my shirt in a moment of distraction—I’d been thinking about her, and hadn’t remembered that I had a cup of coffee in my hand when I’d lifted said hand to rub at my chest where my heart still ached—I had a Holt and Baker sized hole in my heart that didn’t seem to ever heal.
I’d gone home in a rush, changed my shirt, and had just been leaving my apartment when I heard her laugh.
Then my chiropractor neighbor Stacy’s door opened, and Holt and Baker had exited, while talking about ways that Baker could help Holt sleep better.
“He’s not sleeping?”
Baker’s eyes had jerked up from Stacy and her whole body swayed toward me.
I stayed where I was as Stacy placed a steadying hand on Baker’s arm, simultaneously holding her back from me while also holding her up.
“Copper…” Baker had smiled, looking uncomfortable. “What are you doing home?”
She’d obviously been avoiding me.
Had she come at a time that I would’ve been home, there was no chance that I wouldn’t have known that she was there.
That encounter was why I was currently with Audric in a shitty part of the city, thinking about buying a house that I most certainly didn’t need or want.
“You don’t have to buy it.” Audric looked dead. “You can just stay here. I can just move into the other one.” Audric pointed to the house beside the one we were standing in.
I glanced at Audric, who’d already moved out of his other house spur of the moment.
I should tell him no.
I should tell him that I was fine, and that I was just worrying over nothing.
But I wasn’t fine.
I was so freakin’ far from fine that it was laughable.
“I’m not sure I should do it,” I muttered.
“Why?” He leaned forward, his gaze on mine. “Can I tell you something, and you swear you won’t tell anyone else?”
I glanced at my brother and friend.
“As long as your life isn’t at stake, I’ll take the secret to my grave,” I admitted.
Audric swallowed. “I never loved Laney.”
I blinked, surprised. “What?”
“She loved me with her whole being, and I didn’t feel even an ounce of the same feeling toward her as she did for me.” He swallowed hard. “This was Laney’s dream. To have a family. To build a home here in her grandparents’ old place. She wanted her kids to grow up on the same block she had so many memories of. But I hate this stupid block. I hate this stupid house. I hate that house, and the one behind me. I want nothing to do with any of them. I want to go back five years when I proposed and take it back. Laney would be alive right now if I hadn’t asked her to marry me.”
“Your daughter, though,” I said. “I…”
“Lottie isn’t mine.”
My mouth all but fell to the floor. “What?”
“I agreed to the marriage. I didn’t agree to sleeping together. I just, I never saw her like that. I owed it all to her—my life, my everything—I agreed to the marriage because she wanted it so bad. But I wouldn’t sleep with her. One day, she came up pregnant with Lottie, and I just didn’t ask questions. I allowed it, because that’s what made her happy. I owed it to her.”
Audric’s story wasn’t one that I knew well.
