I lowered it to my side.
“I’m not starting anything, Laura. I just asked him a simple question.” He lifted his shoulders, assessing me. “So? Are you?”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” I replied, but, oh, I knew.
“You’rehim. You’re the guy my wife was thinking about when she should’ve been thinking about me.”
I squared my shoulders and tipped my head, studying him, as if to ingrain the image of his face in my mind. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand how that’s my problem,” I replied while being so aware that hedidhate me, just as I’d expected.
Hehatedme, and he didn’t evenknowme.
Can I blame him?
Laura hurried to stand before me and held up a staying hand to Brett. “Thank you for dropping off the girls. I will talk to you later.”
“No, I think you should talk to menow,” he said, his voice a low growl. “If you think I’m okay with my daughters hanging around this guy—"
“I have no problem leaving,” I interrupted, but that was a lie. It would be a great feat to leave Laura now after last night. But I would, if she asked me to. I would do it for her.
Brett thrust his finger toward the front of the house. “There’s the door, buddy.”
“Stop, stop, stop,” Laura said. “Brett, trust me enough to know that I wouldn’t put our daughters in any kind of danger, please. Okay?”
I glanced at the daughters in question, seemingly oblivious to the very grown-up problems happening in thesame room they were playing in. They hadn’t even noticed me yet, a stranger in their house.
Maybe I really should leave, I wondered.Let them have Christmas. Let them enjoy their day.
Brett’s eyes flicked toward mine again before he huffed angrily. He turned on his heel, crouched beside the girls, and kissed the tops of their heads. He muttered his goodbyes and hurried out the door, slamming it loudly behind him. The little girls startled at the abrupt noise and turned to face their mother, only to finally notice me—an unknown man—standing beside her.
“Mommy, who dat?” one asked, pointing.
Panic rose from my chest to strangle my throat as twin sets of eyes stared me down with suspicion and confusion. Kids were excellent judges of character. They could smell bullshit from a mile away. I didn’t feel like a good person, despite what Laura wanted to believe, and there was a good chance these kids would agree with me—and then what? There was no way in hell Laura would tolerate me if her daughters despised me, and I’d be back to where I’d started. On a cliff, waiting to fall off.
Or a bridge, if we were speaking literally.
Laura clapped her hands together and crouched to the level of her daughters. “This is my good friend Max. Max and I have known each other for a very,verylong time, and I was thinking maybe you girls would like to be his friends too.”
“Do he like Santa?” the other little girl asked.
Laura shrugged. “Well, I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”
The little girl got up from where she had been sitting on the floor to walk over to her mother. My heart swelled three times its size at the sight of Laura acting as the part of mommy. It was all at once bizarre and wonderful, and it did things to me I couldn’t explain. It made me simultaneously jealous and so much more in love with her that I could hardly stand it.
The little girl leaned in to whisper something into Laura’s ear.
Then Laura turned to look up at me and said, “Lizzie has a question for you.”
“Oh,” I replied, then crouched down beside the woman I’d loved since I was eighteen years old to look into the eyes of her daughter. They were the eyes of another man … but that was okay. They were beautiful just the same. “Well, maybe I have an answer.”
That was when she pulled off the tiara she was wearing and held it out to me. “You wanna wear my princess crown?”
Everything about this little girl looked like her father, so much more than her mother.
We have that in common, I thought.
The shape of her mouth, the color of her hair, and the strength in her nose. But deep beneath the color of her eyes, she held every bit of her mom. The same compassion and acceptance Laura had had that first day in the high school cafeteria was looking right back at me now, and it took every ounce of willpower not to gather that little girl in my arms and hold on tight.
Because there was nothing impure about her, and if her eyes could look at me that way, then it must’ve beentrue. God, if I was going to do this, if I was going to take a chance on something real with Laura, I needed it to be true.
