It was so strange for Danielle to imagine what he was telling her. This whole other life he’d had. In a city where he had lived with a woman and loved her. Where he had dreamed of having a family. Of having a child. Where he had buried himself in work to avoid dealing with the pain of loss, while the woman he loved lost herself in a different way.
The tale seemed so far removed from the man he was now. From this place, from that hard set to his jaw, that sharp glitter in his eye, the way he held his shoulders straight. She couldn’t imagine this man feeling at a loss. Feeling helpless.
“She got involved with another man, someone I worked with. Maybe it started before she left me, but I’m not entirely sure. All I know is she wasn’t sleeping with me at the time, so even if she was with him before she moved out, it hardly felt like cheating. And anyway, the affair wasn’t really the important part. That guy was into recreational drug use. It’s how he functioned. And he made it all available to her.”
“That’s...that’s awful, Joshua. I know how bad that stuff can be. I’ve seen it.”
He shook his head. “Do you have any idea what it’s like? To have somebody come into your life who’s beautiful, happy, and to watch her leave your life as something else entirely. Broken, an addict. I ruined her.”
Danielle took a step back, feeling as though she had been struck by the impact of his words. “No, you didn’t. It was drugs. It was...”
“I wasn’t there for her. I didn’t know how to be. I didn’t like hard things, Danielle. I never did. I didn’t want to stay in Copper Ridge and work the land—I didn’t want to deal with a lifetime of scraping by, because it was too hard.”
“Right. You’re so lazy that you moved to Seattle and started from scratch and worked your way to the highest ranks of the company? I don’t buy that.”
“There’s reward in that kind of work, though. And you don’t have to deal with your life when it gets bad. You just go work more. And you can tell yourself it’s fine because you’re making more money. Because you’re making your life easier, life for the other person easier, even while you let them sit on the couch slowly dying, waiting for you to help them. I convinced myself that what I was doing was important. It was the worst kind of narcissism, Danielle, and I’m not going to excuse it.”
“But that was... It was a unique circumstance. And you’re different. And...it’s not like every future relationship...”
“And here’s the problem. You don’t know me. You don’t even like me and yet you’re trying to fix this. You’re trying to convince me I should give relationships another try. It’s your first instinct, and you don’t even actually care. My father can’t stop any more than you could stop yourself just now. So I did this.” He gestured between the two of them. “I did this because he escalated it all the way to putting an ad in the paper. Because he won’t listen to me. Because he knows my ex is a junkie somewhere living on the damned street, and that I feel responsible for that, and still he wants me to live his life. This life here, where he’s never made a single mistake or let anyone down.”
Danielle had no idea what to say to that. She imagined that his dad had made mistakes. But what did she know? She only knew about absentee fathers and mothers who treated their children like afterthoughts.
Her arms were starting to ache. Her chest ached too. All of her ached.
“I’m going to take Riley up to bed,” she said, turning and heading up the stairs.
She didn’t look back, but she could hear the heavy footfalls behind her, and she knew he was following her. Even if she didn’t quite understand why.
She walked into her bedroom, and she left the door open. She crossed the space and set Riley down in the crib. He shifted for a moment, stretching his arms up above his head and kicking his feet out. But he didn’t wake up. She was sweaty from having his warm little body pressed against her chest, but she was grateful for that feeling now. Thinking about Joshua and his loss made her feel especially grateful.
Joshua was standing in the doorway, looking at her. “Did you still want to argue with me?”
She shook her head. “I never wanted to argue with you.”
She went to walk past him, but his big body blocked her path. She took a step toward him, and he refused to move, his blue eyes looking straight into hers.
“You seemed like you wanted to argue,” he responded.
“No,” she said, reaching up to press her hand against him, to push him out of the way. “I just wanted an explanation.”
The moment her hand made contact with his shoulder, something raced through her. Something electric. Thrilling. Something that reached back to that feeling, that tightening low in her stomach when he’d first mentioned Shannon.
The two feelings were connected.
Jealousy. That was what she felt. Attraction. That was what this was.
She looked up, his chin in her
