Page 10 of This Is Love (The Light to My Darkness 3)

She winced at my words. Or maybe it was just at my tone. I wasn’t trying to direct my wrath at her, but she was standing in the way of what I wanted.

“Tyler isn’t here. He's on a run,” she said. “And I think you should go home, James. Whatever this is can wait until the morning. Don’t you think?” That moment of weakness where she had winced was gone. She even seemed to be standing a little taller.

Couldn’t she tell I was here to help her? “I’m not leaving until I speak to him.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “I’m not going to ask you again. You need to go.” Her bottom lip trembled slightly. I would have missed it if I hadn’t been staring right at her.

She was scared of me. What the fuck was I doing? I swallowed down the lump in my throat. She needed to know the truth. She was tough, she could handle it. Probably better than I could. “He’s cheating on you. He’s with Penny.”

“What?” She immediately unfolded her arms. “Why on earth would you think that?” She didn’t believe me.

“Penny disappeared about an hour ago. She said she was going for a walk.”

“So…”

“Right before that, she was reading the book she wrote. All the pages about Tyler were on top of the coffee table when I got home. She remembers him. She remembers him and she doesn’t remember me.” My voice broke. “She doesn’t remember me, Hailey. She doesn’t want to remember me. But Tyler? Apparently she wants to remember him.”

Hailey’s face softened. “She can’t help how she remembers. Getting amnesia wasn’t something she asked for.”

“I’ve tried everything to jog her memory. Everything I could think of. And she reads a few pages about Tyler and runs to him?”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“When did he leave to go on a run?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “About an hour ago.”

See. Wasn’t that proof enough? “Does he usually go on runs this late?”

She didn’t look convinced of my theory at all. “No. He usually goes before work. But we were running late this morning. It’s just a coincidence.”

Was she blind? “They’re together right now. We need to go find them. We need to stop them before Penny breaks your family apart too.”

She drew her eyebrows together. “Tyler loved Penny in that way once. But he doesn’t now. He’s not stuck in the past like Penny is right now. Even if she makes a pass at him, he’ll shut her down. He’ll remind her that she loves you and only you. You’re worrying about nothing.”

“How are you so sure?”

“Because I know Tyler. I know him better than anyone in the world and he’s not the kind of guy that cheats on his wife. Or steals someone else’s wife, for that matter.”

“He asked Penny to run away with him the day before our wedding.”

“Oh, you mean the wedding that you called off? If you ask me, that was kind of on you. And he was in a bad place. He’s been through so much. He was in pain and he was just trying to find comfort in the wrong place. Because he hadn’t met me yet.” She gave me a small, sad smile.

It was right after our wedding that Tyler and Hailey fell in love. Right after Penny rejected him. Couldn’t she see that there was a hole in her logic? The only reason Tyler was with Hailey was because Penny had turned him down. She was his second choice. And right now, I wasn?

??t Penny’s any choice. She didn’t even like me, let alone love me.

“Then call him,” I said. “Prove me wrong.”

“I will.” She walked into the living room and picked her cell phone up off the coffee table. She pressed a few buttons and put her phone up to her ear. After several seconds ticked by, she pressed her lips together and looked down at the ground. Maybe a tiny bit of doubt was getting into her head. “He didn’t pick up. But he listens to music when he runs. He probably just has the call function turned off or whatever.”

“That’s not a thing.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I’m a tech guy. I do know that. A cell phone’s primary function is to you know…be a phone.”

“God, you’re such an old man. If anything, a cell phone’s primary function is for texting. Well, that and watching cat videos on YouTube.”

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