Page 18 of Came the Closest
“Hey, Graham, can you help me figure out how this label printer—” Ember stops a half step behind her fiancé with a long sheet of blank labels in her hand. “Oh. Hi, Colton.”
“Hey, Em,” Colton says easily, but his gaze never leaves mine. “I’m here because I saw Cheyenne’s car. Cheyenne, can I have a word?”
He wants to talk to me? I fumble for an out, and then I remember the books in my hands. God bless words that speak for themselves. “I still have to pay for these, and—”
“Add them to my tab,” Colton says briskly to Ember. He pivots toward the door without looking at me. “I have donuts in the truck, Cheyenne.”
Frick.
Lips parted, I look from Colton’s retreating back to Ember. I don’t want to be indebted to Colton or any other man, but…he said he has donuts. Presumably from Sunny Glaze. He knows my weakness is a chocolate glazed donut, light frosting, with sprinkles.
It’s just further proof of why we’ll never be those bookstore meet cute strangers.
“Wait.” A foggy breeze presses at my cheeks and my once-white boat shoe Vans dig into the soft sand of the beach. “Let me get this straight: your late, absent mother named you as the guardian for a four-year-old half brother you didn’t know about?”
Colton keeps his gaze focused on the lake, knees bent, and arms folded on top of them. If not for the lines around his eyes and the way he favors his previously injured left hip, he’d look just like the boy I once knew. “If you know the answer, why are you asking the question?”
“Colton.”
“Yes. Sure. Yeah.” He shakes his head, the movement rife with frustration. “I don’t get it, Cheyenne. I haven’t spoken to or seen my mother in almost twenty years, she kept our full sister a secret from us, and now this? I can’t be someone’s guardian, and especially not a child.”
Because I can’t—or won’t—stay in one place for long enough.
He doesn’t say it because he doesn’t have to. We both know it. Everyone who witnessed our breakup on this very beach five years ago, amicable as it was, probably knew it.
“Do you have a choice?” I ask. “I mean, is there someone else stated in the will?”
Discussing Kathleen’s will feels wrong. The woman was out of Colton’s life more than she was in it, but she was still his mother. He’s talking about this—her passing and this guardianship thing—transactionally. Like it isn’t personal.
Like the woman who gave him life is as disposable as the Coke bottle poking out of the overfilled trash can up on the boardwalk.
He laughs mirthlessly. “We always have a choice.”
I had been looking at him, but I glance away. That’s the same thing he told me a week before my wedding, when he tried to tell me not to go through with it and I told him I had no choice. I’d said yes to Stephen’s proposal. I’d made my decision. Stephen was supposed to be it for me.
“No,” I say now, “we don’t.”
“Yes,” he counters, “we do.”
“Colton, do you think I would have chosen for my dad to be in a near fatal accident at fifty-nine? Do you think I’d have chosen to walk away from my career or my marriage?”
Do you think I would have chosen to lose my baby?
The question is there on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t say it. I can’t open that part of myself to Colton when I haven’t told anyone outside of my family.
His attention shifts from the frothy waves tumbling into the sandy shore to me. I feel the weight of his gaze on the side of my face, but I don’t look at him. Partly because I don’t want to, but mostly because I can’t.
Colton doesn’t know the truths behind my divorce. If he did, he’d lose it. I don’t like talking about it with anyone, let alone him. If he knew he was right about Stephen, he’d have leverage. And when I left Stephen, I promised myself I’d never let another man have leverage over me. Not even one who once knew me better than I knew myself.
“Of course, I don’t,” he finally answers. “But…” He pauses and shakes his head. “Never mind.”
“No. Tell me. But what?”
“Cheyenne—”
I look at him now, straightening my spine with all the resolve I can find.
He sighs. “But he had a choice. I don’t know why he did it—why he drove so fast, on Christmas of all nights, but he had a choice. And he chose what he chose. He knows those roads like the back of his hand, Cheyenne. He knows they get slick when it’s icy.”