Page 21 of I Replaced His Husband
Yeah, it had only been a day. Fucking one day! And sure, Kay was still a stranger. A closed-off, widowed omega with way too much baggage.
But even so, I knew it.
I’d set my eyes on him.
???
After taking a shower, I headed back to the spacious terrace that wrapped around the side and back of Adam’s house.
There was a nice set of rattan furniture out there, and I settled into it to finish up the task Nathaniel had assigned me. We exchanged a few messages as he stressed over deadlines. I promised him, solemnly, that I’d hand over the completed code today.
My cousin tried to sneak in a casual question about what I was up to and where I was, since he’d heard from my brother Skye, who also worked for him, that I’d been away from home for a while. I gave him a vague, dismissive reply.
About an hour later, just as I was going over the last lines of code, my phone rang. I glanced at the screen. It was my dad. That caught me a little off guard, since I’d promised to call him later in the evening.
I sighed and picked up. "Hey, Dad."
"Hey, son. Am I interrupting anything?"
"Not really, just finishing up a few tweaks before I send the code to Nate."
Dad let out a thoughtful hum. "How’s it working out with Nathaniel?"
"Now that I’m doing it full-time, it’s way easier. I can just focus on the stuff he gives me. I finally don’t have to fix Skye’s code anymore. I got so tired of constantly cleaning up his messes."
Dad didn’t say anything to that.
Skye, my younger brother, was still in college, studying programming, the same major I had. It was good of Nathaniel to give him internship opportunities, but honestly, it often left me irritated, fixing all his mistakes. Now that a new semester had started, Skye was only handling smaller tasks, so I wasn’t stuck constantly correcting his code anymore.
Before I took the job from my cousin, I’d been corpo-ratting as a programmer, stuck desk-to-desk with Brian, only doing small tasks for Nate after hours. After the divorce, though, I started working for him full-time, and frankly, I was just glad I didn’t apply to go back into corpo life in some other big tech company, only to get canned all over again.
"Yeah, speaking of Skye… I’ve got two pieces of bad news. One of them’s about him," Dad said, his voice turning a bit grim.
I blinked. "Wait, two? What happened?"
He took a breath. "Let’s start with the lighter one. Skye and Martin broke up. Or rather, Martin left him. He found his High Mate."
A moment of awkward silence hung in the air. I suddenly felt silly and… exposed. My ex-husband had left me for his High Mate, too. What a cruel little coincidence. Just hearing it threatened to bring back memories I’d worked so hard to bury. I could guess Dad was trying to give me a heads-up, maybe hoping I’d hear it from him first before it came up at some family gathering and smacked me in the face.
"Shit. I know what he’s going through," I mumbled.
A bitter lump rose in my throat, and Brian’s pretty face came rushing back, sharp and vivid. My head started to ache. We’d really been a good match, even if we were only Half Mates, and it had taken me a long time to accept that he’d simply left for a better mate. I didn’t want to think about him. It had taken me a full year to get him out of my system. I was done with that.
"Yeah… that’s just how it goes until you find your True Mate. Every other relationship is basicallytemporary," I added, my voice turning sour.
Out of all the topics in the world, this was the one I hated most. It hung over everyone in ABO society like a dark, imminent cloud. You never knew when it might all fall apart, when your partner might leave because he’d found someone with a higher mateship level. More genetically compatible. More psychologically matched. It meant that most of us, at least those not on suppressants, lived with a constant, low-grade anxiety, never knowing if tomorrow we’d lose everything.
Dad was quiet for a few seconds, then said softly, "I still hold on to the statistics. Kids of True Mates are nearly four times more likely to find their own."
"Dad… that’s still just a twenty percent chance. Better than five, sure, but it’s not exactly reassuring," I muttered, my voice a little bitter.
None of my brothers, and there were seven of them, had found their True Mate yet. Five of them weren’t even in serious relationships. I’d joined that group the second I divorced Brian. Now Skye was single again, too. Not great.
Our parents' relationship had always been thegoldstandard. Perfect. Fated. We grew up breathing that connection: they were the thing everyone dreamed about, True Mates, and we could feel it in the air around them. It was part of us. And maybe because of that, we’d all internalized this ridiculously high standard.
Except for Storm and my estranged brother River, who had cut himself off from the rest of the family, the rest of us weren’t married and didn’t have any serious prospects. For most of my brothers, it seemed like no partner ever felt good enough.
"Maybe Fate has something planned for us. A surprise? But it’s hard to stay hopeful when the second piece of news is even worse," Dad whispered.
