Page 40 of More Than Words
Maybe I shouldn’t have asked, but I needed to know.“And your husband?”
“Ex,” she said pointedly.“I haven’t spoken to him in years.Last I heard, he was out East still.And if I know Ken at all, he’s still trying to charm his way through life.”
Charm.
All of a sudden, it made sense why, when we’d first met, Delaney continually called me out for being too charming and why she never fell for my smooth moves.I almost laughed, and she must have realized that I’d put two and two together, because before I could ask, she said, “No, I don’t think you’re anything like him.Not now,” she added.
“But at first?”
Delaney shrugged.“Can you blame me?A good-looking, way too smooth, charming man trying to get me to do what he wanted…”
“Good-looking?”
She rolled her eyes, and I grinned.“No,” I said.“I guess I can’t blame you at all.But in my defense, I didn’t know about your ex.”
“Would it have made a difference?”She tilted her head and gave me a wry smile.“Tell me about Quinn’s mom.”
I probably shouldn’t have been surprised by the question.After all, Delaney did spend a lot of time with Quinn, and there was the whole career day letdown.
“Unless you don’t want to talk about it,” she said quickly.“I understand if?—”
“It’s not that.”I stopped her.The last thing I wanted was for Delaney to think there was anything left between Polly and me.There most certainly wasn’t and hadn’t been for longer than I cared to think about.“I was just a little surprised by the question, is all.”
“You were?Really?”A smile teased at her lips.
“Only because…well, I don’t give her much thought, if I’m being honest.Not beyond the fact that she’s Quinn’s mom.”I shrugged.“She’s kind of self-selected her way out of our lives.”
“That’s so sad,” Delaney said.“For Quinn.”
I couldn’t help but grin a little.“For Quinn,” I agreed.“Definitely.But sadly, she’s mostly used to her mother’s absence by now.It’s been this way almost from the beginning.”
“Even when she was a baby?”We’d long since pushed the coffee table out of the way and brought a battery-powered space heater upstairs to keep us warm.Delaney turned so she was facing me, cross-legged.“Surely, when Quinn was…”
She trailed off when I shook my head.
Delaney
My heart ached for a little girl who had an absent mother.And for Ethan, too.It couldn’t have been easy to raise a daughter with a partner who was uninvested.
“It’s okay,” he said with a small smile.“Polly and I should never have been married.We were never right for each other, only by the time we realized it, we’d been married a little over a year, and Polly was pregnant.We tried to make it work.For Quinn’s sake.”He chuckled a little.“We triedwaytoo long, and it was never going to work.Truth be told, we should have called it years earlier than we did, but…”
“But you didn’t want to give up.”I reached for him and took his hand as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
He glanced at our hands and then back at me.“Exactly,” he said after a moment.“You never get married thinking it will end in divorce.Especially when you have a kid to think about.But ultimately, we decided it was probably best to model single parenting instead of…well, whatever it was that we were doing.”He chuckled softly, the sound low and self-deprecating.“It’s funny, because it’s not like things didn’t work out because one of us cheated or anything.In many ways, that might have been easier.It might have made more sense.”
I stayed silent, giving him the space he needed.I got the sense that he didn’t speak about the situation very often.If at all.
“We weren’t angry all the time,” he added after a beat.“We only really fought when she let Quinn down, which she started to do more and more.Her career is the most important thing in Polly’s life.I guess I thought it might change after Quinn was born, but it was almost like it became even more important.I was building a career, too.But when Quinn came along, the world of finance didn’t hold the same appeal, so I opted to stay home with her.
“Polly was just so driven, but in a way that wasn’t healthy.For a while, I wondered whether she’d applied that same drive to our marriage if it might have worked, but I don’t think it would have.We are fundamentally very different people.By the end, there wasn’t any love between us.It was just…cold.”
He drifted off, his gaze moving past me as if he were seeing something that was no longer there.After a moment, he shook his head and looked at me again with a small smile.“And that’s no way for a little girl to grow up, so…” He held up his free hand and dropped it with a shrug.“Here we are.”
“Here you are.”I offered him a smile and added, “She’s lucky to have you.”
“I’m lucky to have her.”
The candlelight flickered between us, and I realized I was holding my breath.
