“Son…” his father said with a strained voice.
“I’m sorry, Dad, Mom.” He looked at Harper and said, “Harper, I’m so sorry.”
Tears ran like rivers down her cheeks. She didn’t even try to wipe them away. She crossed her arms over her stomach, but she didn’t look away this time. He had no idea what that meant.
“It makes me sick to think of you going through that alone,” his mother said through her tears. “We’re your parents, honey. We love you, regardless of what choices you make. How could you not know that?”
“I wasn’t thinking straight, Mom. I was embarrassed and hurt. I’d been played in the worst way. What kind of a man gets played? Dad would never let that happen to him. I was a mess. I was angry and sad and flat-out mortified. I wasn’t going to come back home with my tail between my legs. I started the annulment process, and then I drank like a fish.” He told them what he’d already explained to Harper about how he fell into the bottle and then climbed back out, only to throw himself into his schoolwork and, eventually, his jobs.
“By the time I came out the other side of it, I was working at KHB and on the fast track to moving up the corporate ladder. I thought if I could make a name for myself, something to make you proud, it would compensate for all the lost time and the pain I’d caused. But I got so lost trying to bury those mistakes, I forgot who I was. I forgot how families worked, how to have meaningful friendships. At that point, my past was buried so deep, I never thought about it.” He looked at Harper and said, “Maybe it was self-protection, a way to put my grief and shame under lock and key. I don’t know. What I do know is that when I met Serena, I remembered what it was like to have friends, to care about people. That was last summer when I called you, Dad. When I came to town and Beckett dragged me to the music festival.” He met Harper’s gaze and said, “That’s when I met Harper.”
Harper cleared her throat. “Excuse me.” She pushed to her feet, and Gavin stood up. “I’m sorry. I just need some space to think.”
He followed her into the house, and when she grabbed her keys and phone, he touched her hand, drawing her sad eyes to his, driving the knife in his heart deeper. “Harper, please don’t leave.”
“I have to, Gavin. I need time to think.”
He curled his hand around hers and she didn’t pull away. Thank fucking God.
“I screwed up, Harper, but I didn’t mean to. I didn’t hide the baby from you, and I know I sound like a liar, saying I haven’t thought about that day at the courthouse in the last decade, but it’s true. I swear it on the lives of everyone I love.”
“Gavin, don’t,” she said wistfully. “I can’t do this now.”
“Please, just hear me out. I was in survival mode. I don’t know if I blocked it out, chose not to think about it, or what I did, but it wasn’t anywhere on my radar. The pain of what she did was there. That was real to me, but marrying her? It’s like it never happened. I don’t know how else to explain it. When I think of that time in my life, the courthouse was a blip. It’s not like I was in love and my marriage of twenty years broke up. We were two kids in a courthouse making things legal so I could raise a child I had no idea wasn’t mine. We didn’t even go back to the same dorm room afterward, Harper. Please, try to understand what it was like.”
“I trusted you,” she said just above a whisper. “I’m so hurt…”
“I know, sweetheart, and I’m sorry. I can’t change how I handled it, and I’ll regret it for the rest of my life. Do you think I wanted to hurt you? To hurt my parents? I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone or anything. If I could go back to the day I told you about that time of my life and the shit show that I became afterward and find that awful memory so I could tell you about it, I would. God, I’d do it in a heartbeat, because while I survived losing a baby I thought was mine, I’m not sure I could ever come back from losing you.”
“I have to go.” Fresh tears spilled from her eyes.
He followed her outside, wanting to grab her by the shoulders and beg her to stay, but he was the hurricane and she was the sea. The harder he pushed, the farther she’d run. Watching her climb into her car nearly brought him to his knees.
“Harper!”
She stilled at his desperate plea.
“Are you coming back?”
She looked directly into his eyes, tears sliding down her cheeks, and said, “I hope so.”
AS HARPER DROVE away, sobs burst from her lungs. She didn’t know where to go or who to talk to. She’d just driven away from the only person she wanted to talk to. But with Gavin’s mother in tears, his father looking like he’d aged ten years in the space of an hour, and Gavin…
Her strong, sensible boyfriend, the man who had helped her find her way to honesty from day one, had looked guilt-stricken and sick, like it had taken all of his strength to push words from his lungs.
How was she supposed to process her own feelings when the man she loved looked just as devastated as she was?
She thought about calling Jana. But she was the one who had convinced Harper to stop waiting for the other shoe to drop. The frigging shoe not only dropped, it landed on my flipping head. She wiped her eyes, driving aimlessly as she debated what to do and where to go. The thought of telling anyone what was going on was too much to bear. She drove to her cottage, but as she stepped onto the porch, she remembered Gavin’s note, the lollipops he’d left, and how he’d helped her unpack her life and put it back together.
She inhaled a ragged breath and pushed the door open. As she stepped inside and looked at the stark little cottage, the place she’d once called home, it felt stifling and cold at once. She closed the door and paced, but her legs were weak. She collapsed on the sofa and cried into her hands. Thoughts whirled in her head, snippets of the things Gavin had said, images of the hurt in his eyes, and sounds. God, the sounds. His mother’s soft sobs, his father’s strained voice, Beckett’s apologies, and Gavin’s voice turning thin as a frayed thread as he told the story of his suffering.
Her head fell back against the cushion and she stared up at the ceiling, remembering how she’d faked being sick to get out of her blind date. She laughed softly, thinking of how persistent, yet careful, Gavin had been with her. He always knew just what she needed.
But he’d kept his marriage from her.
Maybe that was what he needed.
She pushed to her feet again, feeling like a stranger in her own house. She wasn’t the same person she’d been when she got home from LA. She was better, stronger, more confident in what she wanted.
I want Gavin.
Heartache pressed in on her.
She walked to the bedroom. Even though they’d replaced the furniture so they could rent it fully furnished, images of them making love slammed into her. She turned on her heel and walked out the door.
Through the blur of tears, she climbed back into her car and drove away.
Her go-to thinking spot had become Gavin’s dock. Our dock. More sobs bubbled out. Pull yourself together and think. Her mind was too cluttered with pain and love and so much confusion she was lucky she didn’t drive off the road. She drove as if on autopilot, weaving through the dark streets of Wellfleet, passing galleries and restaurants, heading toward the pier, her old thinking spot. Maybe the sea air would help her make sense of her careening emotions.