Page 206 of Reverse

“Not necessarily. The traffic has cleared out for the most part. It thinned out a lot when I hired security.”

“Jesus,” I palm my forehead. “I’m sorry you had to do that.”

He waves his hand in dismissal.

“You know as well as I do, Dad, they’ll just come running back to the doors if and when our divorce is final.” I see no satisfaction in his eyes with that admission.

“I don’t give a damn about that . . . the media part,” he clarifies, knowing the hard line still exists where I refuse to discuss my relationship status with Easton. I’m still protective of my husband, even if I’m shifting from one emotion to another regarding him on the daily.

“You have employees that will care. It’s not fair to them.”

“Already thinking like a chief,” he says with immense pride, “but tough shit if they can’t handle it. It’s our chosen arena, so they can deal with it or find the door.” He pauses, his beer halfway to his mouth, “but that’s not why you won’t come home.”

Pushing up the sleeves of my thick sweater, I turn and face him fully. “I’m still in Chicago because I’ve realized I’ve let the people in my life—especially the men I trusted—have too much sway over me and say in my decisions. A flaw I didn’t realize I desperately needed to correct—if only for my sanity’s sake. I’ve set new boundaries because of it, and I refuse to go back to that.”

“I’m proud of you, and I’m not trying to lure you back with the promise of inheriting a position you’ve already earned. It’s your decision, okay?”

Dipping my chin, I take another long sip of beer. Unable to help myself, I finally speak up.

“How in the hell did you endure it?”

Fiddling with the cocktail napkin, he returns my gaze point-blank. “Sometimes, love, no matter how real it feels and is, isn’t always the right love, and you don’t figure that part out until you’ve lost it and put some time between your feelings and reality. I got that perspective after my split with Stella. In my case, time helped, Natalie, and it’s been a very, very long time.”

I shake my head. “But you still had so much animosity.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not proud of myself,” he says, looking down at the napkin he’s shredding. “But that had far more to do with you. Between finding out the way I did and being in the same room with Reid and his son—knowing your last name was theirs—it was too much at once. Though I’ll forever be sorry for how I behaved that day and the ones after.” His next admission is full of remorse. “I had Brad draw up those papers in my worst hour.”

“I’ll always be sorry, too, especially for the way you found out. I never thought it would go as far as it has.”

Silence lingers until he tilts his head back up to me. “Do you still want to know?”

I dip my chin.

“Okay . . . the honest to God truth about my relationship with Stella is that I realized in retrospect that I held her back with my own aspirations for the paper and expectations for my own future.” He shifts back on his stool, his eyes glazing over with thoughts of the past. “She tried to talk to me about it more than once, but I was selfish because I was perfectly content with the way things were. At times it felt as if she was waiting for something to happen, for her life to begin, and I couldn’t figure out why. As much as I wanted to be the man for her, I wasn’t right for the future she envisioned for herself and was working so tirelessly for. When I saw how much she wanted her idea of her future and with whom, I broke off our engagement immediately.”

“So, you broke up with her?”

“Yeah, I did,” he sighs. “But she loved me, Natalie, truly. I still believe she loved me enough to go through with marrying me. If I hadn’t broken it off so abruptly, I think she might have because we were good together. But some of that choice would have been made from loyalty, and I fucking hated that. I hated it so much that I kept my distance from her for months after we broke up. That was after being together for almost four years, living together for half of that time. Talk about hell on earth. It was hard.” He sips his beer.

“So, you didn’t know about Reid?”

“She told me she got hurt before we got together but hid the depth of her relationship and feelings for Reid from me. The night I found out was one of the most painful nights of my life. Seeing how much she loved him and how drawn she was to him fucking gutted me. I broke it off right then.”

“Is that when she quit the paper?”

“Yes, and it was brutal,” he confesses. “Despite making her aware he wanted her back, Reid kept his distance. He respected her choice to stay with me if that’s what she wanted—and I did the same. Selfishly, I entertained getting back with her when she didn’t go running to him, but it would never have been right. Because though we were very much in love, we never fit the way we needed to in order to last. So, I let her go, and she set out on her own and started a future without either of us. You read the emails.”

I nod.

“They found each other again by crazy coincidence, and the rest is their history, Natalie—not mine.”

“The headlines, though,” I whisper. “How did you handle it?”

“It stung pretty badly,” he says honestly. “But it wasn’t news to me. We’d been apart so long I made peace with it. The truth for me is, if I had stayed with Stella, married Stella knowing what I did, I would have been the one settling.”

I mull over his revelation, his truth flipping so many of my theories on their head. “So, after . . . when you met Mom—”

“I love your mother,” he cuts in sharply, “On an unparalleled level. No other love I have ever had compares to what I feel for her. I fell for her because she is beautiful, strong, independent, brave, ridiculously intelligent, loved football, and did not put up with my shit for one second. If you want the truth, she terrorized me from day one, swear to God.” He grins down at the foam on his beer. “I married Addie because we fit together in a way we would work long term, because I learned how vitally important that was. The rest of that love stems from the history we made spending so much of our lives together.” He turns to me. “So, I didn’t tell you about my history with Stella, because frankly, it was a history I’d outgrown, living out my future with the woman I was meant to marry—and it was none of your damned business.”

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