The Ashes of Our Six Years

On our sixth anniversary, my husband's first love got divorced.

By the time the two of them started drifting back toward each other, I'd already seen two pink lines on a test.

I didn't cry. That has never been how I'm built.

I made a list instead.

Before I left, I wanted him to remember it had taken him six years to thaw me out. Six years to coax a single bloom past the fence I'd spent my whole life building.

And then I wanted him to spend the rest of his life imagining the family we could have had.

Chapter 1

On our sixth anniversary, Margot Vale came back for my husband.

Six years ago, when the Sinclairs were one bad quarter from going under, she'd dropped Cove and climbed into a richer bed before the ink was dry.

Now she was back. Kid on her hip. Asking my husband to give a poor single mother and her little boy somewhere to land.

I watched Cove pull off the pinky ring he never took off. Not in the shower. Not in his sleep. Not once in six years. He dropped it into the catering cart's trash, right on top of the cold, greasy leftovers.

"Fish it out," he said. "Do that, and I'll help you."

Margot stared into the bin. The congealed sauce, the half-eaten plates, her ring sitting on top of it all like a garnish.

The color drained out of her face. Then she broke into sobs.

Cove took my hand. He didn't look back.

"Come on. We're going home."

I thought that was the end of it. Love or hate, I thought he'd finally set her down.

I thought that right up until I found the ring in his wallet.

A few days later he came home drunk, Spencer holding him up by the elbow.

"Mrs. Sinclair, he's had a lot of work dinners lately." Spencer's voice was careful. "Don't be too hard on the boss."

"It's fine," I said. "I've been buried in the creative side anyway. I'll come back to the office once it clears up. Thanks for getting him home."

Something in that sobered Cove right up. He lifted his head off my shoulder and looked at me the way a man checks the temperature of a room before he walks into it.

"Briar. I gave Margot a job at the company. Cleaning crew."

I went still for a second. Then I smiled.

"I believe you."

Six years. Whatever we were, it wasn't supposed to come apart over one woman and one bad afternoon.

I knew his tells by now. The too-careful voice. The job he'd handed her before he asked me. I'd already started keeping count.

My calm did something to him. Whatever speech he'd rehearsed died in his throat.

"She's a gold-digger. Vicious. Nothing like you." He searched my face. "Look how well I'm doing now. She has to be eating her heart out."

I smiled and touched the side of his face.

The bedroom light was low and forgiving. He ruffled my hair the way he used to when we were new, and his other hand went to his shirt buttons, slow, the air going warm between us. For a breath my pulse climbed into my throat. I let it, and then I didn't.

"I just keep thinking," he murmured. "We still don't have one of our own. A kid."

A year ago a doctor had told us there was nothing wrong with either of us. Let it happen on its own, he'd said.

I pressed my palm flat to Cove's chest and eased him back.

"I'm not feeling great lately."

Late, and a low ache dragging at my stomach.

"Then see a doctor." He gathered me in, gentle, like the answer was that simple. "We should have one too, Briar."

Something turned over in me at that word. Kid.

Maybe I should see a doctor.

Cove hadn't lied. Margot really was on the cleaning crew.

Black uniform. Fumbling the recycling into the wrong bins. Even behind the mask you could tell she'd done her makeup, and the perfume reached me before she did.

She froze when she saw me. Her eyes went down me, head to foot, and snagged on the diamond on my left hand. Stayed there.

"Boss is coming up for a meeting," Spencer said. "Wrap it up."

The second she heard Cove was coming, she dropped to her knees in front of me and started scrubbing the floor by my feet.

"I'm so sorry, Ms. Mercer. I'll have it spotless in a minute. Please don't be upset."

Head bowed. Soft. Pitiful. Like I'd put her down there myself.

And Cove walked in to exactly that. I caught the frown. Small, almost nothing.

Spencer let out a short laugh. "Why the sudden knees? You were mopping like you couldn't care less two minutes ago." He glanced at Cove. "Anyone'd think Mrs. Sinclair was the one giving her a hard time."

Cove cut him off. Quiet. Displeased.

"That's enough."

He said it to Spencer.

Not to her.

Chapter 2

In the meeting, Cove couldn't hold a single thought.

I raised the creative vendor twice, and both times his eyes drifted to the glass door.

Halfway through he took a call and stepped out.

The room went quiet enough to hear her through the wall. Margot, crying. The soft, carrying kind of crying that's built to be overheard.

She'd left at nineteen because she was scared, she said. Her family had collectors at the door back then. She'd cried herself sick, night after night. She just envied me, really. That I got to stand beside him out in the open, the good wife, nothing to hide.

Outside the door, Cove was quiet a long time. When he finally spoke his voice had gone rough.

"If you hadn't walked away at nineteen." A pause. "That seat next to me. It was always supposed to be yours."

Around the table, people found somewhere else to look. Then they looked at me.

I clicked my pen.

"The boss is out," I said. "I don't see why that stops us." I nodded at Spencer. "You're his secretary. You know the slate as well as he does. Walk us through it."

We went through it. I killed Cove's pick for the creative contract and cut the design firm he'd been leaning toward.

He didn't argue. He never argued about the work. I'm not sure he'd ever once cared about it the way he cared about who was crying on the other side of a wall.

The deal closed. I spent the next week on the road keeping it on track.

I came back to find Margot's desk had moved. Right up against his.

Not the cleaning crew anymore. His assistant.

She had on a coat in the same shade as mine. Miniskirt. Heels. Hair done like she'd had the whole morning for it. Nothing left of the woman who'd knelt on a wet floor. Night and day.

Her hand stalled halfway to her mouth, lipstick mid-air, when she saw me. Then she shot up and bowed.

"Ms. Mercer, the boss just feels sorry for me. That's all it is, I swear"

I walked past her like she hadn't spoken.

I pushed open his door. Cove was already waiting for me. Before I could get a word out, he reached over and dropped the blinds, shutting her out of the glass.

"I wanted her to see who I am now." He pulled me in, careful, like I might come apart in his hands. "Not the broke kid she left. That's all it was. There's nothing in it, I promise you."

I said nothing. The sentence I'd walked in with, fire her, today, lodged somewhere under my tongue and stayed there.

I'd thought it. Of course I'd thought it. That some part of him had never shut the door on her. I just didn't have proof, and I wasn't going to come apart over a whiff of perfume and a clean little performance of innocence. I wasn't going to be that wife.

He wrapped his arms around me from behind and found my hand.

The pinky ring pressed into my skin. It dug.

That afternoon, Margot's son came to the office.

He went through the receptionist's drawers. Demanded water, then brought it back up across the planner's open laptop. Margot told him to stop, twice, soft, and when that did nothing he was on the floor, screaming, heels drumming the carpet.

I had my assistant carry a message over.

"No kids in the office during work hours. It costs other people their whole day." And: "If the planner has to stay late to replace that machine, the overtime comes out of your performance pay."

Margot's face crumpled. Her chin dropped. The tears were already loading.

The boy was eight. He watched his mother's face fold, and he picked up a glass and threw it at me.

I didn't get my arm up in time. The rim caught my wrist, and a bruise bloomed there, dark, almost at once.

He didn't stop screaming.

"You did this! You broke them up!" His voice cracked high. "My dad left my mom because of you!"

The office tipped into chaos. Cove came in fast.

And I watched where his eyes went first. To Margot, on her knees, arms around her boy. Then, after that, to me.

"Daddy!"

The kid threw himself into Cove's chest and buried his face there.

And over Cove's shoulder, where only I could see it, he looked right at me.

And he smiled.

Chapter 3

The whispering started up around us. Cove had never looked more out of place in his own company.

"Is he yours?" I kept my eyes flat on him.

"...No. Of course not."

But before the words came, I watched his gaze cut to the boy. Watched him scan that small face, fast, for anything of himself in it. Only once he was sure there was nothing did he hurry to deny it.

"Kids say all kinds of things." Margot's eyes went pink again. "His dad's been gone a long time. He probably just felt safe with Mr. Sinclair, that's all it is. I'm so sorry, Ms. Mercer. Please don't hold it against him. He's so little."

"Briar. Let's get that wrist looked at."

Cove's whole face had gone soft with worry over the bruise.

Margot startled. Then she set her jaw and raised her hand at the boy like she meant to slap him.

"Look what you've done, upsetting Ms. Mercer"

Cove caught her wrist before it could land. Told her not to hit the child.

The three of them. Stern mother, gentle father, the boy tucked between them. And me, the cruel woman crowding in on a family.

Cove pressed a cold pack to my wrist. I kept my head down and watched him do it.

The worry was real. So was the tenderness.

So was the way he'd thrown himself between me and them a minute ago, on her side of it.

After all these years, was it hate, or just a wound that had never set right?

Could he even tell anymore?

"Briar, don't be hard on them. Margot's had it rough. It's not easy, a woman on her own with a kid." He kept talking. "And the boy's just shy, a little spoiled, but he's not a bad"

I cut him off.

"Am I the reason their life is hard?"

"If he's so shy of strangers, why did he run straight into your arms?"

"How far did the two of you get. While I knew. Or while I didn't."

He caught up, a beat too late, to what he'd just admitted.

"Cove. Can I still trust you?"

That stopped him cold.

"That ring. The one she gave you, back then." I held his eyes. "Don't lie to me."

Chapter 4

Everyone at school knew the story of Cove Sinclair and Margot Vale. The kind of love that came in loud and left louder.

Back when he was untouchable, the heir with a different luxury car idling at the gate every week, he chased her across campus like it was the only thing his money was good for. Threw a punch for her once, made it ugly, made it the kind of scene people repeat. Even after she left him, he went right on believing she was exactly what she looked like. Innocent. Simple. His.

Then the Sinclair money ran dry. The accounts upstream froze, the creditors downstream wanted blood. The family went under, and his parents didn't survive what came after.

It snowed hard the day it ended. Nineteen years old, he knelt in front of her and begged her to wait for him. Told her he'd lost everything and she was the only reason left to keep going. Swore he'd never make her suffer it with him. Just asked her to wait.

She walked off on a new man's arm without sparing him a single glance.

Loud, and louder. Everyone knew.

So the first time I actually saw Cove Sinclair, I couldn't make the legend line up with the delivery guy leaning his head in over my counter.

"Is seventy-eight up yet?"

I nodded and handed him the order.

For half a year, that was all we were. Him at my counter. Me handing over the food.

Then one afternoon a pack of drunk guys decided they wanted my number, and when that didn't work, my wrists, my arms, whatever they could get a hand on.

I stood there rigid. Didn't dare move. Didn't dare cry.

Cove swore once, low and filthy, shucked off his jacket, and threw himself into the middle of them.

He never had a chance. He came out of it with his left shoulder out of the socket and his knuckles split open.

"At least I didn't have to pay them off. Your dean's a decent guy, turns out."

I looked at him, mid brave-face, and for some reason the tears just came.

No one had ever put themselves between me and anything before.

"Hey. Hey, don't cry."

"It doesn't hurt. See? Doesn't even hurt."

"You don't believe me? Hit me. Go on."

He grabbed my hand and swung it into his own bad arm. It obviously hurt like hell. He hissed through his teeth, and that made me laugh.

When he saw me laughing, he laughed too.

"There it is. You're a lot better looking when you laugh."

The dean smoothed the whole thing over and lined up a work-study spot for me at the library. Cove and I became friends.

He was sure those guys would come back, so he walked me to my dorm every night. My dorm was less than a hundred yards from the library. We weren't even at the same school. He went two years out of his way.

In those two years, he confessed to me four times.

I liked him. I knew I did.

But my parents were divorced and there were debts behind me, and they'd made me careful in a way I could never explain to him.

He never got discouraged. Every no just had him scratching his head.

"Okay. Let me think of something else."

Losing the money hadn't touched whatever ran loud and bright in him.

I was the slow, careful one. Even with a garden of ten thousand roses blooming for him behind my ribs, I couldn't make myself hand over a single stem.

It took him two years to thaw me out.

Freshman year, Cove had put money into his roommates' little game startup. Later he built one himself and dragged me into playing it.

It was simple. A small figure wandering around, collecting things to use as keys, unlocking its way forward. The figure used a dandelion for a parachute and kept fireflies in a jar for light.

Simple. I couldn't put it down.

The strange part: the figure had no gender. But it had a star sign.

Virgo.

I asked him why. He just smiled.

"Beat the last level and I'll tell you."

The last level was a barren island floating in the sky, guarded by a creature called the Time Beast. You couldn't wound it. It wouldn't take gold. Not one of the keys fit the gate.

I was stuck there for weeks.

The day before graduation, he asked if I'd cleared it.

I told him it was impossible. I'd tried everything and the thing just wouldn't let me through.

He told me to give the monster a rose seed.

So I did. And the barren island filled, edge to edge, with roses in full bloom.

The game was won.

Graduation was the next morning. Cove asked me to say a proper goodbye.

We walked two laps around the field, and then the sky opened up.

We bolted for the cover of the library steps, soaked to the skin.

The rain came down like a wall. Thunder rolled over all of it.

But his voice, when it came, was perfectly clear.

Chapter 5

He looked at me, serious.

"You've turned me down four times now. The first time, you said our signs didn't line up. The second, you said you didn't like men."

"The figure in the game is me. No gender. A Virgo. A perfect fit for a Taurus like you."

"The fourth time, you were afraid that even if we got together, we'd still end up apart."

"I know about your family. The divorce, the debts, all of it. I know you don't let yourself feel safe. So believe me when I say it. The day I make enough money, I'm marrying you. We'll have a family, a happy one. I'm going to be good to you for the rest of my life."

He pulled in a breath.

"...But the weather's awful today. So I already know you're about to tell me no again."

He looked wrecked.

The third time I'd turned him down, I'd blamed it on a gray sky and a bad mood. Today the rain was coming down in sheets. The worst kind of weather.

"I haven't figured out much these years. Just that life's a flash flood, and if we don't hold on to each other, the crowd carries us apart for good."

"I'm giving you the game. Wildrose. Take care of yourself, okay? I don't think we'll get to see much of each other after this."

"So so that's it, then. I should get back to packing."

He couldn't make himself look at me. He was already braced for the no.

I took his hand.

"Then let's go together. Okay?"

His eyes went from disbelief straight to something like joy.

After graduation we scattered the way everyone does. Cove started a game studio and named it Wildrose.

After the rose that grows where nothing's meant to. After the seed I'd sent to a dead island that bloomed it back to life.

He put the company in my name. Like the promise it was.

To chase funding we rode four hours of trains, there and back. Broke enough that we lived on the cheapest noodles we could find, and takeout was a splurge. No badge to get into the industry expo, no money for ads, so we stood outside the convention hall in hundred-degree heat and handed out flyers ourselves.

The year Wildrose cleared ten million, he dropped to one knee in the middle of the office while everyone cheered.

He slid a three-carat ring onto my finger.

"Briar, I know exactly what it tastes like to be betrayed. So I am never going to let you down."

"I'll give you a home. I'll never once make you sad."

Six years is not a thing you set down lightly.

Cove let Margot go. Threw out the ring she'd given him. Things almost slid back to the way they'd been.

Except the bruise on my wrist. The cold wouldn't let it heal.

We had a quiet agreement not to say her name, and the agreement was exactly what made her feel like she was everywhere. Not a word about her, and still it was like every sentence got run past her first.

For Christmas, Cove booked somewhere expensive.

"I'd been saving it for your birthday."

He cut into my steak for me, easy, practiced.

His phone lit up. A message.

He glanced at me first. Then he looked down and answered it, a smile tugging at his mouth that he didn't seem to feel happen.

When he caught me watching, he put the smile away fast and said it was a client.

I nodded. Propped my chin on my hand and looked at him, then out the window.

His face had barely changed in all these years. If anything, the time had only set his features harder, surer of themselves.

I'd thought my wrist had mostly healed. Picking up the fork, there it was again. The dull ache.

Outside the glass, a couple stood peering in.

The place was pricey. The boy wanted it to look like nothing in front of the girl he loved, and she tugged his sleeve, gentle, and shook her head. They had a single steaming tray of food-cart fries between them, shoulders hunched against the wind, grinning at each other.

They had nothing but that tray and each other.

For some reason, I envied them more than I knew what to do with.

Chapter 6

Cove finally set the phone down.

"Let's head back. I'm full."

He kept me on the inside of the sidewalk and tucked my hand into his coat pocket along with his.

He'd been doing it on purpose all week. Being with me like we were brand new again. Dates, long walks, falling asleep tangled together after a movie.

Lately I felt heavy all the time, and still I slept badly.

Cove kissed my forehead and shut off the projector.

The phone under his pillow kept lighting up.

He tried saying my name.

I pretended to be asleep and didn't answer.

Careful not to wake me, he rolled over, felt for the phone, and slipped out onto the balcony to take the call.

Maybe he wasn't even talking to Margot. But I couldn't trust him anymore, and that was its own kind of answer.

He left. I sat up in the dark and thought for a long time.

I'd turned it over and over, how to fix this.

But I couldn't unsee it. The way he'd nodded, red-eyed, when I asked if the ring had been hers.

He'd thrown the ring away. The pale band it had worn into his finger over the years was still there. Still loud.

I asked myself if I was making too much of nothing. There'd been no actual affair. Maybe the late-night calls weren't even about her. Maybe they really were work.

But I wasn't going to become the paranoid wife who comes apart at the first shift of wind, clawing at some sweet-faced girl over a man.

A love that isn't sure of itself isn't love anymore.

He could have cut her off the first time she showed up. He could have kept his distance. Instead he used my trust and took an inch, and then another.

Somewhere in that long dark, I stopped trying to fix it and started working out how to leave.

Cold air came in through the window and cooled, degree by degree, the heart it had taken him six years to warm.

And even with every reason laid out clean in front of me, it still hurt.

I didn't want to cry. My eyes didn't ask permission.

Six years, and I still hadn't gotten a home of my own.

Our six years were plain as tap water. All that quiet warmth, the leaning into each other to stay warm, it looked like nothing held up against the thing carved into him and her.

I couldn't even dig up a single unforgettable moment to prove the universe had ever insisted on us.

We met like ordinary people. Fell in love. Came apart.

What he had with her was something else.

The grand reunion. The man on his knees too late, chasing her through the ashes of what he'd burned down. The first love that owns a man for the rest of his life.

The pregnancy cut my plan to ask for a divorce clean in half.

Two lines on the test, stark as anything, and no idea what to do with them.

If it weren't Cove's, I wouldn't have wanted a child at all. I'm afraid of pain. Afraid of dying. Afraid of doing a bad job of raising a whole person.

Cove's family had fallen, but he'd had parents who loved him.

Not like mine. Once the money was gone, mine just fought. I was the stone in the road on the way to their next better life, kicked back and forth between them, and somehow I grew up anyway, scraped and stumbling.

I used to think a home only needed the two people standing in it.

But Cove had stepped into the role of father a hundred times already, in his head.

When we renovated, he'd set aside a room for a child. Painted it pale green, since we didn't know yet whether it'd be a boy or a girl.

He'd wanted an expensive Lego wall. I couldn't stand to spend the money, so he talked me into a chalkboard instead. Then he built a whole row of shelves and pointed at the empty boards, lit up.

"Bottom shelf, picture books. Next one up, storybooks." His hand leveled off in the air. "And when they're about this tall, SAT prep."

I laughed at him. A man who hated studying, already picturing his kid as a straight-A scholar.

But he said it again, and again. And somehow, I started to hope a little too.

Chapter 7

I sat in the empty nursery a long time, thinking.

I thought about my parents after the divorce. How they'd torn away everything there was to tear from each other, screaming the whole time. Everything except me. Me, neither of them wanted.

Cove had waited six years for this child. But he wasn't a grown man playing father. He was still the nineteen-year-old on his knees in the snow in front of Margot.

I decided to give him a chance.

"I'm pregnant." I set the test results down in front of him. "One month along."

Cove froze, then caught me under the arms and eased me into a chair like I was made of glass.

"Don't stand. Don't work. I'll have the driver take you home this afternoon. You rest. You take care of yourself."

I leaned into him and asked him, soft, to come away with me. Ithaca would be getting its first snow soon. We'd met there, fallen for each other there, all those years back. I wanted to go and see it.

Cove would have done anything to keep me happy. He took two weeks off work.

Then that same afternoon he was already dragging me to the mall. Maternity clothes. A stroller. Flashcards printed with picture books. The salesclerks clocked the brand-new-father glow on him and sold to it for everything it was worth.

He held up a pink onesie and a blue one, grinning like an idiot, and asked me which.

I just watched him. We don't even know yet if it's a boy or a girl, and you're already buying pink?

"Boys can wear pink!"

He got almost childish about it. He bought both.

Back home, he held the maternity dress up against me. The styles were all so girlish, a white doll-dress with a ruffled hem.

"It's just like when we started dating. You used to wear white dresses like this." He couldn't stop smiling, gone somewhere back in it. "Then you'd smile at me, and I'd want to hand you my whole heart."

I sat on the couch hugging a throw pillow, head tipped, watching him run himself ragged.

He'd even swapped my slippers for the non-slip kind, and he knelt to change them for me. One knee on the floor. Exactly like the day he proposed.

Sunlight came through the window and lit the fine dust in the air gold.

He went back and forth, and the empty nursery filled in, piece by piece. Everything for a baby is so small, so careful. A mobile of little stars over the crib that chimed whenever the air moved. Picture books shelved by age, every color there is. Corner guards on anything with an edge.

Overnight the place went from Scandinavian-bare to a children's playground.

Over the crib he mounted a small camera. A baby monitor, he said, so we'd catch every sound the baby made, day or night. He tested it twice, talking into it, listening to his own voice come back, pleased with himself.

The care in it stopped me.

Cove said, his eyes going red, that after he lost his parents he'd ached for a whole family. Eight years he'd ached for it.

Cove stayed close. He barely touched his phone.

He wanted to come with me to the prenatal checkup, but I told him I'd just been, and it was flu season, better to stay clear of hospitals.

I still slept badly.

I got up one night and found him on the balcony, on the phone, dragging a hand through his hair.

I heard it through the door. That familiar crying on the other end, and a little boy fussing.

I watched him, quiet. Cove startled and hung up fast.

"Why are you standing there? Aren't you cold?"

"Not cold. Bad dream. I came for water."

"You're not going to ask who I was talking to?" He offered it up, careful.

"I trust you." I touched the side of his face.

By a thread of moonlight, I saw it clearly in his eyes. The guilt.

So he wasn't incapable of it after all.

He pulled me in and buried his face in my neck, his voice gone rough.

"Briar. I promise you. I will never let you down again."

Chapter 8

Ithaca got its snow.

He must have blocked her. He held my hand the whole way there and never once looked at his phone.

Fresh snow, soft, creaking under our boots. Under my down jacket I'd worn the white dress he loves.

It came down hard, and it made children of everyone. I left a trail of prints and kept turning back to smile at him. When he saw me happy, the corner of his mouth tipped up too.

The little strip of food places by campus had been redone since our day. The grill stall where I'd worked was long gone. I found the spot from memory anyway. It was a phone-repair counter now.

"Back when you stood up for me. You really didn't think about what it might cost you?"

"I thought about it." He ruffled my hair. "But you were terrified, and you still held the line. Wouldn't cry. Wouldn't ask anyone for help. So stubborn."

"Stubborn, and it got me in one shot. I just never figured a girl that stubborn would end up my wife."

He was smiling, talking about the old days.

"You remember I chased you two years. Two whole years. The first time you turned me down, you said our signs didn't match. The second, you said you didn't like men. The third, bad weather..."

I let him talk, and I smiled.

"The last time was right before graduation. I told you I was going to buy Wildrose and put it in your name, told you to take care of yourself, that we probably wouldn't see each other again. And you grabbed my sleeve and went red and didn't say a word. I still see it. The fourth time. How did you turn me down?"

I looked at him like I was reading out an ending that had already been written.

"Cove. Even if we stay together, we'll still come apart."

He flinched. And then he was more frightened than I was, hurrying to stop me.

"We won't. We won't come apart."

We took a room at a hotel near campus.

We were a couple in love. By day we'd split something cheap and hot, the last piece of fried chicken pushed back and forth, each of us insisting the other take it. By night we walked the field where we used to meet, and the evening wind couldn't cool the heat off our faces.

The place did the work on him. Piece by piece, he remembered how he'd met me, how he'd fallen. He told it with that excited, green look, and it laid itself right over the nineteen-year-old he used to be.

So he did remember it. Every part of loving me, he'd kept.

So when, exactly, had the hand let go?

If our love at first sight, our saving of each other, all those years of getting through it together, was as precious as he said it was, then why couldn't any of it stand against one unforgettable betrayal?

It snowed again that night. Colder. People hurried past with their heads down.

Under a streetlight, I had Cove close his eyes.

I studied his face. Six years, and almost nothing had changed. Still the face I'd loved. As if all six years had been one drowsy afternoon's dream, and any second now he'd lean out a window and tell me to bag the order faster.

My hand came up, almost to his cheek. I made it stop.

Snow caught on our brows, our lashes. There was something in it of growing old together. Two heads gone white in the same storm.

He really did make it hard to let go.

But that was all right. I knew myself. I knew I might cave.

So I'd given myself one test I couldn't talk my way out of.

That night, weeks back, he'd slipped out of bed and driven off into the dark. I'd pulled the footage from his dashcam. As long as that drive had nothing to do with Margot, I'd forgive him. All of it.

I opened the file.

Chapter 9