“What if he never forgives me?”
“If he can’t see that your heart was in the right place this whole time, he doesn’t deserve you.”
“Maybe I don’t deserve him.”
“Dani, stop it. You made a mistake. You’re allowed to do that.”
“I should have told him the truth. I lied to him, just like his ex did.”
“Okay, let’s not go down the road of comparing yourself to his ex. How about you come with me to Kylie’s apartment? We can binge-watch Jane Austen movies and gorge ourselves on vegan ice cream.”
“Will there be wine?”
“Sure. Let me just go tell Nate that we’re leaving. Don’t move, okay?”
In the end, Nate and Nova ended up coming with us. After the shit show of a family gathering we’d just had, Nate refused to let his wife or daughter go anywhere without him. I probably should have cared more about what happened while I was crying in the hallway, but I couldn’t muster the energy. I didn’t ask about the outcome of the conversation between my family and Hayden’s, which I’d run out in the middle of. Nate didn’t seem particularly happy, but he didn’t look like he was on the brink of murdering anyone, so it must not have gonethatbadly.
I’d ask later. Maybe tomorrow.
Nate dropped Sierra and me off at Kylie’s apartmentwithout a fight. Probably because the apartment was completely warded against demons.
Nate had set up the wards years ago during his job as Sierra’s guardian, back when she had lived here. She’d accidentally gotten on a duke of Hell’s bad side, and Nate had been assigned to protect her.
As soon as I stepped through the door, Kylie enveloped me in a hug. “I’m going to kill him,” she murmured.
“Please don’t.”
“No promises,” she said as she moved to the kitchen to get the wine and ice cream.
True to Sierra’s promise, we spent the night eating sugar and watching romance movies set in the early 1800s. Around the time the first movie finished, there was a knock on the front door. Kylie slipped out, keeping the door mostly closed as she did so that I couldn’t see who was on the other side. She came back a couple of minutes later with a small leather suitcase that she handed to me.
“Why don’t you get changed,” she suggested. “It might make you feel a little better.”
I doubted changing my clothes was really going to help in this situation, but I took the suitcase anyway.
Inside, there was an old nightgown that I’d left behind when I moved in with Hayden, a few dresses that also hadn’t made the moving cut, several pairs of oversized flannel pajama pants, and half a dozen men’s T-shirts.
I lifted one to my face and inhaled. It smelled of Miles’s cologne, and I tried not to be disappointed that the shirt was his and not Hayden’s. This was betteranyway. Miles had always smelled like comfort and friendship to me, and that’s what I needed right now. Not more memories of the man who’d left me crying in the hallway without a backward glance.
Once I was dressed in the shirt and pair of flannel pants, I returned to the couch in Kylie’s living room to continue our movie marathon.
Eventually Sierra left to go back home to her husband and kid, but Kylie stayed up until five in the morning with me, letting me cry on her shoulder and enabling my wine-and-ice-cream intake.
She offered me the bed in her spare room, but I refused. The idea of sleeping in a bed alone felt wrong, and some stupid part of me felt like if I stayed on the couch, I wasn’t really going to bed and this day wasn’t really over. There was a chance it could be fixed.
I fell asleep sometime in the early morning, and when I woke up again, the apartment was quiet. The TV had been turned off, and Kylie must have covered me with a blanket. There was no sign of the ice cream or wine we’d consumed either.
My phone buzzed against the glass coffee table next to me, and I reached for it, a tiny bubble of hope blossoming in my chest.
The bubble burst a second later when I saw the string of notifications filling my screen. There was a message from Kylie telling me she’d gone to church but to help myself to anything in the apartment. A couple from Sierra and Piper asking if I needed anything. One from Maggie asking if we could talk. And a bunch of missed calls from Miles.
There was nothing from Hayden.
A part of me wanted to call him, but what could I say? Nothing had changed in the past twelve hours. I was still an angel. I’d still kept secrets from him.
So I called Miles back instead.
“Dani? Are you okay?”
