Page 127 of Choosing Forever
I grin, resting my chin on her head. “That sounds like her. Blackjack?”
“With nothing to bet besides a few sour green grapes and a tub of cottage cheese.”
“Shit.”
Delaney takes another swig of her wine, the light in her eyes staying bright. “I miss those moments the most. The thoughtless fun she could always create.”
“I remember the time she brought a crib board to one of my games and had a crowd of high school students around her begging to join by the time the third quarter started.”
“Oh, she had a big head about that for weeks.”
“It was deserved. Everyone loved her and misses her. You’re not alone,” I say softly.
“I wish I’d have felt like that.”
“The entire town let you down.”
She shrugs before setting her glass down on the coffee tableand tucking her legs beneath her. Leaning into me again, she sighs, cheek rubbing against my shoulder.
“I don’t hold it against them. When I left for school, I think there were more than a few people who felt betrayed.”
“It wasn’t fair. Still isn’t. You didn’t owe anyone here anything. Vancouver is a part of who you are now, and that isn’t going to change.”
“Everything is mostly back to how it was before I left. I think I’ve been almost completely forgiven,” she notes.
“I love this town, but the loyalty that’s expected from you when you grow up here can be suffocating. It’s not fair.”
Her head turns as she stares up at me, an expectant expression on her face. “Yet you wouldn’t live anywhere else, would you?”
“Not unless you wanted to.”
“Oh, don’t start. You would not move away from Cherry Peak for anyone.”
I pull back and pull all of my focus onto her. “You’re wrong. I’d move anywhere for you.”
“It will never be that simple. Abbie needs to stay here.”
“Not forever.”
Her smile is gentle and so beautiful it makes my chest throb. “Where is she tonight?”
“With my parents. They jumped at the chance to watch her when I brought up needing a babysitter.”
“I always wondered what their reaction was to you telling them you were having a baby. I’m assuming your mom was a blubbering mess?”
I swallow as those memories try rising to the surface. “She was, but they weren’t entirely happy tears.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I was fresh out of college with a degree in my hand that I didn’t know how to use yet and no money to my name. My parents were always going to let me move back in with them until I found a job and saved enough to get my own place, butthey weren’t expecting me to be bringing anyone with me. Let alone a woman they didn’t know who was pregnant with their granddaughter.”
I clear my throat, but it doesn’t help stop the words from flying out of my mouth. Not now that I’ve finally let myself talk about this.
“They hid it well, but I know they were disappointed in me, and they had every right to be. I was raised better than the way I acted before and after I found out about the pregnancy, and they didn’t know what to do with me or that or anything. Everything just . . . fell apart around me. I was a terrible fucking father for months after Abbie was born. Sasha dealt with more than she deserved from me, but we were married, and I told myself that meant we were together for life, whether we were miserable or not, which we were. Constantly.” My laugh is venomous and angry. The years of self-hatred I’ve worked through left a lingering sting that I’ll never be able to get rid of. “Everyone thinks it was me who issued the divorce, but it was her. She had read the interview I gave in the article you saw earlier and slammed it down in front of me one night with the divorce papers already drawn up. After three years of a loveless marriage, she was hoping that I’d have ‘built a bridge and gotten over her’ by now.”
“Her, meaning me,” Delaney says simply.
“You’ve always been the ‘her’ when it came to me and Sasha. I’ve made too many mistakes, Elle. I did so many things wrong. Too many people were brought into my shit. You, Sasha, Bryce, Poppy, my parents. Everyone who cared about me, I hurt because I was too mad at myself to see a way out of the funk I’d fallen into.”
