Page 49 of All Our Secrets

Cradling my knees to my chest, I buried my face there. I thought if I distanced myself it would stop.Thisdirty want.It’d been weeks without Silas in sight, and I still saw his face when I closed my eyes.

I’d been feeling more like myself lately. Until those pills. Guilt manifested, burying me in its black hole. The first tear came, then another, until my face was wet and covered with snot. I wasn’t crying for my husband. I cried because I hadn’t thought of him at all when my doctor mentioned birth control.

∞∞∞

Silas called me the next morning. I ignored him the first three times, but that man was persistent. If I continued to hit ignore, he’d show up at my house. I didn’t need to see him. At all.

I accepted his fourth call. “What?”

“Answer when I call.” His deep voice was like maple syrup. Thick and familiar, like I’d heard the gruff sound a hundred times in my ear.

I rubbed the hairs down on my arm. No matter how hard I tried to exorcise him from my life, he showed me how impossible that was.

“It’s too early to put up with you,” I grumbled.

“You never replied yesterday.”

Silas King asked the same thing daily:

DO YOU NEED ME?

“You ask the same thing every day, and the answer is always no.”

“Even if it’s the same one word every time, I still need a response.”

There was a long silence after that. The warm, icky sensation I tried so hard to ignore spread through me. I hated it because it wasn’t supposed to be there. If it were any other man, it would be okay. But this was Theodore’s best friend. Maybe it would be okay if that desire hadn’t lived there, revealing itself occasionally before my husband had even died. But like Silas himself, those feelings were unrelenting and too big to keep under lock and key.

“Why are you doing this?” I implored, ignoring the guilty pang in my chest.

“There’s nothing else I’m supposed to be doing.”

There were a hundred things he should be doing. One of them being starting his own family instead of looking after his best friend’s. For some reason, I absolutely could not voice that into existence, though.

“I don’t need you,” I bit out.

“Everything good around the house?”

“Everything’s fine.”

“You’d be a good girl and tell me if something was wrong, wouldn’t you?”

My body flushed from head to toe as he spoke.

“Don’t keep this ‘I don’t need you’ attitude because we both know it isn’t true.” Before I could rebuke that statement, he added, “I’ve got to go, but you better be eating and sleeping in that damned bed.”

“Silas—”

But I was met with a beep from the other end of the line. He’d disconnected. I stared at the phone and huffed.

Chapter Twenty-One:

exes

Silas

Itook a swig of beer as Steven nagged at me like a wife. We were at the FCR clubhouse, which was a small, one-room cabin. A man’s domain. But it was loaded with all the necessities. Beer in the fridge, guns inside the safe, and a gaming setup I used to play on the nights I was here. But those sweet, blissful moments with Peyton in my ear seemed so long ago.

School would start back soon, so it was time for the back-to-school fundraiser the FCR families put together every year. The wives hosted bake sales on the day we had our big event at the club, and we held a variety of competitions ranging from horseshoe, best pie, and cornhole. Whatever money was made was spent on buying supplies for the children in the community who needed it.

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