Page 23 of Hero for the Holidays

And suddenly, she was back in that moment. The last time she was here. And he knew it. He had chosen those words so specifically. So carefully. Because they were words that she had spoken to him then.

It was like that first layer of civility had been removed. Like it had been peeled back. This facade that they had created around themselves. This easy tension that made people think they were attracted to each other, or maybe they had dated once. This game they played that hid the complicated nature of it all.

And it hurt.

They hadn’t just burned each other. They had skinned each other alive.

There was first love, and then there was Landry King and Fia Sullivan.

He had been her escape. He had been her everything. And she had been his. They had fought. They had wounded each other. They found solace in each other’s arms, and ultimately, they had devastated each other.

Then they had built this scaffolding around themselves. A fake life. A way that they interacted with one another that made it look like they hadn’t been each other’s deep wound.

Even she came close to believing it sometimes.

But this was it. The wound. They were ripping off the bandages. Exposing it.

It was exhilarating and terrifying, but their secret was here, in the middle of them. This bomb waiting to go off. Everyone would know.Everyone would know.They would look at that little girl, who favored Fia so much, and who had Landry’s demeanor, and they would know. He had brought this secret that she had kept at great cost to herself right back into the middle of them.

She wanted this child.

At the same time, she was so wildly resentful that he’d done this to them.

It was really like being sixteen all over again.

“Is this a game to you?” she asked. “A chance to get back at me?”

“No,”he said, the denial vehement. “This isn’t a game. I am not playing with Lila’s life. I want to be a father. I always have. You took that from me. I wanted it then, and I want it now. I never stopped wanting it.”

She felt her lip curl. “That’s what you see me as. This person who stole fatherhood from you.” She shook her head. “You should thank me, do you know that? You would’ve been a terrible father. A terrible husband. And I wouldn’t have been any better. Think about it, Landry. What would we have done? You would’ve been a ranch hand somewhere else? Or maybe we would’ve ended up stayinghere. Teenage parents with families that were coming apart at the seams. You would have gone out drinking and other women would have flirted with you, I would have come down to the bar and screamed at you, and where would Lila have been? What kind of life would she have had? Look at what Four Corners is now. It wasn’t that then. Don’t forget that. Don’t forget that this place we’ve made now is so far removed from everything we had back then. We were...nothing but broken.”

“When you told me you were pregnant I was happy, Fia.” That hurt. It still hurt so badly. “I wanted to make a life with you, a family. Something better than what we were. I thought you saw things in me, better things than anyone else. I thought you saw more of me than just being my father’s son. When I found out you had no faith in me, no faith in us, it was like a death,” he said. “You have no idea. You have no idea what it’s like to feel like something that precious was taken away from you.”

His pain was real. But he’d never tried to understand hers. So why should she try and understand his?

“How dare you?Don’t tell me what I don’t understand. You got me pregnant. I watched those lines change. Those two pink lines. I felt the infinite torture of hope and possibility, and the crushing despair of realizing that there was no way. And youtormentedme. With this idea that maybe we could run off together. That maybe this dysfunctional version of love we had would be enough. And all the while I knew that I needed to make a choice. A different choice. The possibility of being a mother was growing inside of me every day. And I had dreams. Visions of what it would be like to hold that baby. To love her. But in the end it was because I did love her that I made that decision. And you wouldn’t let me do it. You wouldn’tlet me. So yes. I went behind your back. I went to the adoption agency, and I chose the family myself out of a book.”

“How civilized,” he said, his expression something like disgust. “To find them in a catalog.”

“It was the only thing about it that was civilized. I think you forget how young we were. Lila’s thirteen. I wasfifteenwhen you first got me pregnant. You were sixteen. And then I was sixteen when the baby was born. It’s outrageous. You thought two children could take care of a child... We didn’t even know how to be together. We broke up every week.”

Agony and ecstasy, that was them. Sometimes the very best and then the very worst.

“We would’ve gotten it together,” he said.

“We wouldn’t have. What makes you believe that, Landry? Because my parents had it so together? My family was falling apart, unraveling, while I was facing the reality of this pregnancy. And I looked at my father and I just knew that... It was going to be us. Eventually, it was going to be us. Us getting married young, being each other’s only lovers, you getting bored and finding someone else. Sleeping with some other woman behind my back. Deciding to run away and move to California.”

“I would never move to California. That’s about as likely as me becoming a vegan.”

“Fine. Maybe you just would’ve moved in next door with her. How about that? I couldn’t find a way to have any faith in us when I had to try and think about what we would look like twenty years down the road. Because no one around me ever gave me a reason to hope. Not in us or in anything else. So yes, I chose her parents. And then I ran away. I stayed with them. Because I knew... I knew you weren’t going to support me. You wouldn’t be there for me in the way that I needed you to be.”

“I wanted something different,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “And I couldn’t give it to you.”

“Well, look where it landed her. She’s back here anyway. And now she’s got dead parents on top of it.”

“Well, if only I’d had a crystal ball so I would have known I was choosing pain for her,” said Fia, her throat getting tight. “Obviously, that isn’t what I intended to have happen. Obviously, that wasn’t the life I wanted her to have. I couldn’t have anticipated that. But you know what, I’m glad that she had them. Because they gave her something. A foundation that we couldn’t have given her.”

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