Page 4 of Play Pretend

And completely out of my league. He drives me nuts with his power tools at all hours of the night. Oh, and this entire story is a freaking lie.

I should’ve kept quiet. I should’ve let him drone on about Vanessa. Because at least then the focus wouldn’t be on me. Instead, I stupidly invited him into a life I’d spent years cultivating to get away from him and the life I left behind.

Here, no one knew who I was before. I was just Willow, the girl who worked at the bakery and had a weird obsession with the lighthouse. They didn’t know me as Vanessa’s stepsister—they didn’t even know who she was, and there was freedom in that.

I waited for him to say something else, but silence stretched on. The distant chirping of evening birds filled my ears as I watched Ronan stack the last of the wood, his strong, deliberate movements almost hypnotic.

The longer I watched, the more I felt like a voyeur in my own life, caught between past and present, between the life I was running from and the life I was aching to build.

“I need to go,” I finally said, my voice soft yet surprisingly firm. “I need to get ready for the week.”

There was a long sigh before he said, “I’ll let you get back to it, then. I’d love to hear more about Roman?—”

“Ronan,” I corrected, and he let out a low chuckle that grated down my nerves.

“Right. Of course.”

I bit my lip, fighting all the words clawing to be set free. “I’ll talk to you later.”

“Take care of yourself.”

I waited for more, for anything that would remotely sound like a father signing off a phone call with his daughter, but he said nothing else. He left it at that—at the words of a near stranger.

If it weren’t for the shared blood coursing through our veins, that was all we would ever be:strangers.

I sat there long after he’d hung up, the phone still pressed to my ear. The silence of my apartment settled around me, and the tension I’d been holding in my shoulders since the second I answered slowly melted away.

Ronan leaned against the wall by his door, his back to me. The last light of the day cast a hazy golden halo around him. He pushed off the house and stooped to grab the chopped wood before disappearing into his side of the duplex. The full weight of my lie settled on my chest like an elephant.

Why had I said that? It was such a stupid lie. Maybe Dad will forget about it by the next time we spoke. If not, I could always lie again and say things didn’t work out.

No one ever needed to know about this—it started and died tonight. It was nothing but a passing comment, something to appease my father for a short time. He never remembered anything I told him, anyway.

He likely wouldn’t remember this.

willow

Present

Igrabbed my metal to-go mug from the counter, my mom’s voice rattling through the phone speaker, filling the tiny living room. Sweat beaded along my back as I spun in a circle to make sure I had everything I needed. It was my usual whirlwind morning, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I was forgetting something.

“I know. But there’s nothing I can do. It’s not like I can tell him I don’t want to hear about his family,” I said absentmindedly, still searching the apartment for whatever I was missing, as if it would jump out and bite me.

What even was it?

“That’s exactly what you can do,” she shot back. “Tell him you’re tired of hearing about how great his life is—” I let out a long sigh, cutting her off.

“That’s not fair.”

“No, what’s not fair is that he’s living the life you deserve to have,” she murmured. “It’s not fair he’s the father you need for someone else’s child.” Emotion burned my throat as I stopped by the front door and turned back to my apartment, my hand wrapped around the worn golden doorknob. It was too early to have this conversation.

Yesterday, my father called to tell me he was taking Vanessa, her husband, and my stepmother to Greece for afamily vacation to celebrate Vanessa’s promotion.I’d braced myself as I waited for him to include me, but the invitation never came.

I couldn’t say anything without letting all my emotions out. I couldn’t do anything but listen as he excitedly told me how proud of her he was, how excited he was to go to fuckingGreece—one of my bucket list destinations he definitely knew about.

A part of me wondered if I would’ve stayed in Ohio, if I would’ve eventually found a place in his family. Maybe I would’ve been happy. Maybe he would be proud of me, and I wouldn’t have been an afterthought.

But I knew the truth: this was how it would always be, because this was how it had always been.

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