Page 88 of His Bittersweet Regret

“It must be awful for Kathy. She went from feeling like a victim for what your dad put her through to being seen as the villain in the scenario. That has to rankle a bit. I think she needs time to understand how that one wrong affected her, and how the choices she made were all her responsibility afterward. I knew, when she hadn’t reached out to apologize to me yet, that she wasn’t following the steps in recovery. At the very least, she wasn’t acknowledging that she had things to apologize for.”

“That’s something I should have realized too,” Marsh admitted. “My father did.”

“He’s a wise man.” Marsh gave me a knowing look that said he couldn’t truly be wise considering the fallout from his misstep.

“Even wise men make mistakes, Marsh.”

He blew out a breath and nodded his head in agreement. “You got me there.”

I shifted in my seat, so that I was angled away from Marsh a little more than before, then I scooted until my back was leaning into his side. Hesitantly, he wrapped his arms around me and held me there next to his body.

“I’ve missed you so much,” Marsh muttered against my hair.

“I never stopped missing you, even when I was angry.”

“I don’t deserve that.”

“There are a lot of things we might not deserve in life, but some of them, we get anyway.” I elbowed him gently in the stomach as I said it.

We sat quietly in one another’s arms on the couch for a bit. “Marsh?” I finally asked.

“Yeah?”

“I don’t want to pretend like we don’t have a history. We share a son. The memories I have of us, from before you left, they are things that I cherish. I don’t want to pretend to have another first date, first kiss, or whatever else. That isn’t our truth, and I don’t think that’s how we should do this.”

“I thought you would want a fresh start,” he argued.

“Yes, but we can have a fresh start while still acknowledging that we also have a past. Parts of it were wonderful, some mundane, and others heartbreaking. To forget or pretend away any of that will take away from who we have become and I don’t think that’s wise. I think, maybe that’s where your parents went wrong. They tried to pretend their issue away and sweep it under the rug instead of dealing with it in a healthy way and moving on to a different future.”

“How did you become so wise?”

“I’ve always been wise, you just didn’t want to acknowledge that because it would mean you’d have to figure out how to use a hamper for dirty laundry.”

He reached down to my sides and tickled me. “I see what you did there,” he suggested as he continued his torture while I giggled and squirmed on his lap.

In the middle of giggling over the tickles, a yawn managed to escape me, and Marsh stopped what he was doing, stood, picked me up in his arms, and carried me back to his bedroom.

“Come on, I think we need to sleep on everything and start fresh, without hiding the past, in the morning.”

“That sounds like a great plan,” I agreed.

33

Marsh

I woke to the sounds of Austin’s whimpering coming through the baby monitor that was on the nightstand by my bed. To my surprise, Opal was still there, snuggled up against me. The sigh of relief I breathed was one I would never take for granted again. It also made me realize that I couldn’t go back to a world where she wasn’t in my arms at night.

“Sleep, baby.” I whispered as she turned at the sound of the noises our son was making. I quietly got out of bed and made my way to the nursery where my boy was bright-eyed, and a little red faced. He was just on the brink of shouting out his demands when he noticed me and quietly whimpered his displeasure instead.

“I got you, little man. No one likes to wake up with shit caked to their balls,” I told him. I’d swear that he grinned at me, but considering the state of his diaper, it was probably just residual gas. “You have to help me convince Mommy that it would be best for all of us if she just stayed here.”

My son cooed and giggled, as if he not only understood, but agreed. If only it was that easy. “Maybe it is that easy,” I mumbled out loud in the same quiet voice I used for Austin in the middle of the night.

Once I got Austin back down, I went out to the living room and picked up my phone to dial Dave Brewer, my attorney. Normally, I’d feel bad about calling in the middle of the night, but Dave was a self-proclaimed night owl.

“Brewer here. What can I do for you?”

“Hey Dave, it’s Marshall Kennedy.”

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