Page 82 of One Foggy Christmas
“Nash, you don't have any other choice. You either win Sadie back, or you come home without her.”
A sobering thought.
So I better win her back.
SADIE
Nash sitsat the bottom of the stairs when I get home. His elbows rest on his knees, hands clasped together. He looks up the second I walk through the front door. My heart pounds. It’s hard to answer to a man you feel has no say in your life.
This is a pit-in-my-stomach, heat-crawling-up-the-side-of-my-neck situation. I feel like a teenager who got caught staying out too late, or in this case, a wife who got caught spending time with her ex-boyfriend.
“Hi.” It comes out more like a whisper. I don’t know if that’s because the house is dark and everyone has gone to bed or because of the guilt rising in my chest.
“Hi.”
I walk to Nash, sitting down beside him. “I was with Stetson.”
“I know.”
“We were just catching up.”
He nods several times and then looks at me. “Did you get all the answers you were looking for?”
My gaze meets his. The dim lighting makes it almost impossible to see what’s behind his stare. “Not all of them.” I shrug. “But enough for now.”
The silence between us thickens, constricting my breath.
“It was Tate's death, wasn't it? The reason I stayed away from my family for so long.”
“That was part of it.”
“Last night, I opened up the text messages between me and my mom—at least what was still saved on my phone.”
“And?”
“There were only four or five in the last seven months, and one was on Mother's Day, and one was on her birthday.” A sneer puffs out. “I mean, how did I get so callous that I barely texted my own mother?”
“You weren’t callous. You were just trying to deal with your own emotions.”
“Stetson said I started to change when I got the internship and moved to Chicago.”
“Is that his excuse for breaking up with you?”
“He knows that was a mistake.” Regret and longing are behind my words. “A lot of things might’ve been different if he’d been more supportive of the internship.”
I probably wouldn’t have married the wrong man.
“He said after moving to Chicago, Tate happened, and the friction between me and my parents just got bigger and bigger, and then—” I stop myself, but it’s too late.
Nash finishes what I didn’t say. “And then me.”
“I’m not blaming you. I know I’m the one who made these decisions, but it doesn’t seem like me. And then talking to Stetson and hearing how I just dropped him out of the blue. I don’t know. It just doesn’t make sense. Nothing went how I thought it would go.” I shake my head, pushing my hair back from my face out of frustration.
“It's all so confusing, and I don't expect you to understand, but the last thing I remember is planning a future with Stetson, and then I wake up, and everything is completely different, and I don't know how I got here, and I'm just…” Emotion swells in my eyes. “I'm mourning the life I thought I would have.”
The life I wanted.
“It’s just so depressing looking at how everything turned out so wrong.”
