“You can’t feel guilt. Just as no one can judge your marriage, no one can tell you how long something like this is supposed to take. Sure, your therapist can suggest things and give you weak timelines, but even if it took another year, that would have been okay.”
I swallow hard, and pull off my winter hat. “Thanks for being a good friend, Leo.”
He purses his lips. “Anything for you, Kid. Anything.”
Closing my eyes, I blow out a breath. We’re stopped at a red light that takes an infuriatingly long time to change. “Anything, is it? Stop calling me Kid.”
He glances at me, eyes roaming my face, and he nods. “Okay. That all?” A sly grin slides across his face.
“No, if you truly mean anything, then you have to stop being so vain, too,” I say.
His smile widens. “Me?” he places a palm on his chest, “Vain? Hardly.”
I roll my eyes. “I admire your ability to change the subject, but that just proves my point. You’re vain.”
“Self-confidence isn’t vanity. You could stand a lesson or two in that while we’re on the topic. I didn’t change the subject. You did. I’m willing to talk about your marriage for as long as you want.” A moody challenge lights his eyes.
I don’t want to talk about it, and he’s aware of it. I want any kind of distraction from it, honestly. “Remember the story I told you back in Bronze Bay? How I was the one who found my biological father fucking his mistress on our dining room table?”
“Well, that’s a mental image that’s never left me. I do recall. Go on,” Leo says, slowing down for a snow plow entering the roadway.
“When my dad saw me that day, standing there watching them because I was so shocked, they covered up, and he apologized as the woman rushed out of the house. She was a coward.” I shake my head. “He told me to let him tell Mom. I only agreed because he said he’d tell her that day. I didn’t want my mom to go another second without knowing what an awful human she was married to. On our dining room table.” I pause, recalling the harrowing memory and how everything changed after that day. It was a turning point in my life. We packed up and moved to Bronze Bay almost immediately after. “I was so confused. Mom was so sad. You remember.” I told him everything back then. Things I should have kept to myself. Sort of like I’m still doing right now. “I vowed that I would never be like my mother. In a marriage like that, completely oblivious her husband was in love with and carrying on with another woman.”
“You’re not like your mother,” Leo says, quickly. “You’re not.” He pulls into Harbour Point base and approaches the guard shack. The lights in the small, narrow building flicker. The guard narrows his eyes at the overhead as he asks for our credentials. We both hand over our ID cards and then we make our way to his usual parking spot. A lot of snow has fallen on the lot since the last time they plowed. It’s still coming down fast. Leo puts the truck into park. “You’re not like her,” he says once more.
I nod. “I know.” I bring my thumbnail to my mouth and bite down. “I’m not like my mother at all. I’m like my father.”
A deadly silence fills the truck. “Why do you say that?” he asks, still refusing to look at me.
“I didn’t cheat on Adam with my body. What I did was much worse. I’m worse than my father.”
Leo sighs. “Don’t do this. You’re upset. Don’t blame your past for things that are happening now. You’re stronger than that.”
“You’re not even curious what that means? You don’t want to know who I cheated on my husband with?”
His breathing speeds and he clenches his jaw. “Don’t do it,” he says, shaking his head. “Not now while you’re angry and upset. Not now.”
He makes the mistake of looking at me. Deep brown eyes reflect back at me. They narrow. He blinks, black, thick lashes. I lose my breath. I catch it again. I revel in the way he looks at me. The way looking at him in return makes me feel. “Oh, because it’s not real or true if I don’t say it out loud? It’s better to hide it?”
Leo stays silent, breathing. In and out, dark gaze searing into my soul. “You can’t take it back once you say it out loud. It changes everything.”
Anger laces with my desire and I feel like I might combust. “What is the point of this second. Right now? If we’re not being honest with each other. I would have ended up here. Right here. Regardless of how much time it took for me to get here.”
He lays his hand on the door handle and turns his eyes to the windshield. “Maybe it’s just that we’re here,” he returns, blinking slowly once.
“Together,” I whisper. “It’s that we’re here together.”
Leo’s cell phone chimes a text. He pulls it from his jacket pocket and looks at the screen intently, almost as if he can’t believe what he’s reading. “Security has been breached,” he says, pulling off his winter hat and pulling his uniform cap from underneath the seat. “The power has been off and on, and I guess they don’t think it’s the weather causing it.”
My heart hammers as I balance the moment we almost had with the new knowledge. “Who texted you? How do they know?”
Leo shoots me a look like I should know how they know and shakes his head. “Well, we’ll just approach this like it is a legitimate breach. That means you have to actually listen to me for once.” When I don’t look at him, he says, “Kendall. I’m serious.”
“Why don’t we just leave? Go back home?” My heart hammers. His cool fingers touch my chin and he points my face toward his.
Leo leans in closer, so close that I can taste his breath and see the spiraling shades of brown in his eyes. He has my full attention now. “You have to do what I say.”
“Yes,” I say, aware of how his thumb and forefinger are close to touching my lips. “Should I be scared?”
