Page 46 of The Single Dad Project

Finally, she shuddered out a shaky breath and, after turning her face into his palm for a brief moment, she stepped back, and he dropped his arm to his side.

Setting the water bottle down on the coffee table with more care than it warranted, she paced away from him, arms crossed tightly over her chest. To warn off others—others being him—or to keep the pieces of herself together? Something whispered that it was more the latter. Because she seemed...on edge. Restless.

“I am a liar,” she softly admitted, though there was nothing “soft” about the confession. “Omission. Smoke and screens. Evasion. When it all comes down to it, they’re still lies. And that’s what I’ve been doing with my family for a long time.” She walked back toward him, sinking to the middle of her couch. Staring down at her flattened hands on top of her thighs, she murmured, “Those fucking letters. Every one of them have been tearing out a strip of my soul, but I say nothing. Just accept them and say nothing. Saying you’re fine when you’re not. Pretending you’re complete when you’re not. But to admit it would be worse. It would be ungrateful, mean. No, it would be damaging. Not just to me, but to my family who have done nothing but love me, and I would never want them to feel as if they weren’t enough.”

Adam followed very little of what Flo said. Letters? Damaging? He understood none of that, but he did get hurt and guilt when he heard it. And in her jumbled words existed a wealth of both.

Crossing the short distance to her, he lowered himself to the heavy wood coffee table in front of the sofa. His spread legs bracketed hers, and he propped his elbows just above his knees.

“Start from the beginning, queen,” he gently urged, using the moniker he hadn’t used since their night together. He hadn’t meant to use it now, except it slipped from his lips without his permission. Flo jerked the faintest bit, her lips parting. But no sound emerged. “Go on. Let it go,” he encouraged again.

Her eyes closed, and she dipped her head, and the need to stroke his palm over those thick, beautiful locs, to rub her scalp, screamed through him so loud, so fierce, he clutched his fingers tighter together.

Touching her wasn’t why he’d come here this evening. Touching was so far off the table, it hadn’t been invited to the fucking party.

“My father’s back.”

Well...damn.

Whatever he’d been expecting her to say, that—the arrival of a parent—hadn’t been it.

Adam stiffened, confusion rolling through his head as he flipped back through all their conversations. All the information about her family that she’d sparingly doled out.

Hadn’t she said Ian Dennison was her father? That she’d been adopted by him and Moe Dennison as a baby? And as far as Adam knew—thanks in part to Flo and the other part to helpful, chatty gossips in town—Ian had been in Rose Bend all along, running Kinsale Inn.

So what did Flo mean by her father was back?

“Flo,” he said, reaching behind him, nabbing her water bottle and pressing it into her hand, “start at the beginning.”

“Right. Sometimes I forget you’re not from here so wouldn’t know the story like everyone else.” Her fingers curled around the bottle, but she didn’t drink from it. A sad smile ghosted across her lips. His chest constricted, and this time he did grant himself permission to rub the taut spot in the middle of his breastbone. “Originally, I’m not from Rose Bend, either. My biological parents met after my father returned home on leave from Iraq. He was in the army, and it was his first night back in New York. He went out to a bar, saw my mom and fell. Apparently, it was a whirlwind romance. They married, she became pregnant, but he had to return overseas. And that was the last time she saw him. And I never knew him.”

Sympathy for the young military wife swept through him. Left alone and pregnant, their life together over before it even really began had to be devastating. But...

Then how did he return here to Rose Bend if he died?

The question ping-ponged against his skull, but he let her continue.

“A year after my biological father died, my mother worked as a receptionist in a legal office, and Noah Dennison walked in for an appointment. I wasn’t even a year old when they started dating, and eventually my mom fell hard for him, and he fell in return. For both her and me. They eventually married. He was an attorney as well, and when a career opportunity opened up for him to move to Rose Bend where his brother and his family lived, he took it. And my mother and I went with him. I was about eighteen months old then, and the Dennison family accepted us like we were their own. Noah opened his law offices, and they were happy. We were happy. It was a good time.”

“How do you know all of this?” Adam asked, swept up in her tale.

Fascinated by the glimpse she afforded him into her past, into the events that shaped her into the woman who’d been bold enough to ask for and claim her own sexuality but feared and avoided intimacy.

She didn’t immediately reply; instead, she lifted the bottle to her lips for a deep sip then set the plastic container on the floor. The sadness in her voice shadowed her eyes, and he wanted to brush the tender skin under them as if that caress could so easily sweep away her pain.

“She left a diary.” Flo loosed a breathy, heavy chuckle. “Isn’t that crazy? I mean, how many adopted children would give anything for that window into their biological mother? To know her thoughts and discover who she was instead of just a name on a birth certificate? I had that. Aisha Lock Dennison gifted me with that by maintaining diaries she started just after my biological father deployed, after they married.”

“That’s a gift,” Adam murmured, stunned.

And God, it disgusted him, but he was envious.

Flo was right; he would’ve sacrificed anything for so much as a letter or text from his mother, much less a diary packed with her thoughts, impressions, feelings... Insight into how she felt about him.

Why she’d left him and never returned.

Did she ever think about him...?

“It was...is,” she amended. “I still read them. They’re my most prized possessions. Especially since they’re all I have of her. Because not long after I turned two, she died. Undiagnosed heart condition. One morning she just didn’t wake up. And though I was very young, I still have faint memories, or more like impressions, of feeling lost. Of a terrible grief that wasn’t just mine but Noah’s. At that time Noah was the only father I’d known. He’d tucked me in at night, read bedtime stories to me, made me laugh. And from what Moe and Dad tell me, I clung to him after my mother’s death. Literally, clung. As if I was afraid he would disappear like my mother.”

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