Page 37 of What Comes After

Before I knew it, Theo had gently brushed his lips against mine. Soft. Sweet. So very tender.

My knees were immediately weak, and somehow, Theo knew. He slid his hand from my hip to around my waist, holding me upright and close to his body.

Then his hand at the side of my face drifted back into my hair and settled at the base of my skull just as he captured my lips in a kiss.

A kiss.

Theo was kissing me.

The guy I’d fallen in love with was giving me my first kiss just seconds before he was going to walk out of the door to start his new life.

It was wonderful and devastating all at the same time.

His lips were soft, and while I never believed it was possible to feel anything other than the physical touch of a kiss, in that moment, I was proven wrong. There was something so much deeper there.

Did he feel it, too? Or, was it because I loved him?

When he pulled his lips away and rested his forehead against mine, he tightened his hold around my waist and pressed his fingers firmly into the back of my skull.

For several moments, he said nothing.

I was too stunned to speak.

Then he lifted his head from mine, searched my face, and said, “I love you, Devyn, and I’m going to miss you like crazy.”

Before I could even begin to think about processing that, he touched his lips to my forehead, gave me one final squeeze, and turned around to walk out.

I stood there, unmoving, for minutes afterward.

It was days later when I still hadn’t wrapped my head around the kiss he’d given me or the words he’d said, but there was one thing that became abundantly clear to me.

I’d officially lost it all.

My parents months ago.

Theo, that night.

And three weeks later, the house I grew up in, because it sold.

EIGHT

Devyn

Six years later

“I’ll see you next week, Ms. Lopez.”

“Thank you for doing such a wonderful job again, Devyn. Have a nice weekend.”

I walked out of Ms. Lopez’s home, a piece of homemade crumb cake in my hand, and made my way to my car.

Ms. Lopez was one of my nicest clients. While her home was on the smaller side and didn’t require a deep level of cleaning like some of my other clients’ homes did, I loved going to her place every week, because she always had a sweet treat waiting for me when I finished. As tight as things were for me in the financial sense, which meant that I should have been searching for a bigger job to do instead of cleaning Ms. Lopez’s place, having her desserts was one of the simple pleasures in my life.

As someone who knew how important it was to hang on to the few enjoyable things she had left in her life, I refused to give up Ms. Lopez’s desserts.

Plus, at her age, she really needed my help. There were just some things that an eighty-four-year-old woman shouldn’t be doing to maintain her household.

So, I did it for her.

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