Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
“Once a womanizer,” Troy says to the headstone, “always a womanizer.”
“It takes one to know one, is that it?”
That earns me a quick flash of the grin that sold all those jerseys, there and then gone. “Naturally. But here’s where he and I part ways, Cam.” The grin fades out entirely. “I’m not married. He is.”
I shake my head at him, because there’s no point and there never is. We’ve had this exact conversation in a dozen different shapes and it always arrives at the same locked door. “Goodbye, Troy. It was good to see you.”
And I mean it, too, which is the thing he will never understand and I have long since stopped trying to explain to him. He is the man every woman in this city has built a fantasy around, and I am the one woman alive who looks at him and sees a brother who never once learned to mind his own business. His suspicion of Trey comes from the very same overprotective place that used to make him glower at any boy who dared walk me home, and I love him for the place it comes from even on the days I’d cheerfully like to shake him for where it leads him.
He goes, his dark coat disappearing down the slope between the stones, and then I’m alone with my father at last, and that’s when the memory comes the way it always comes in this exact spot.
The day of my wedding, which was not so much a wedding as the signing of a stack of contracts in a room that smelled of medicine and antiseptic and the particular cloying sweetness of a sickroom. Afterward Dad had the nurse wheel me into his bedroom, just the two of us, the blinds half drawn and his breath coming slow, and he took my hand in both of his thin papery ones and looked at me with a gravity I’d only ever seen him wear before a trade big enough to make or break a whole season.
“There will come a time you’ll find him particularly hard to understand,” he told me. “Be patient. Pray about it. Remember what your Mama used to teach you.”
Quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.
I’d nodded the way you nod to a dying man, holding his words carefully like something that might break, certain I would carry them gently with me always and just as certain I’d never have any real need of them. And six months on, I still haven’t needed them. That’s the strange part, the part I keep turning over. There’s been nothing to be patient about. No moment I’ve found Trey hard to understand. No anger to be slow toward. He has been, from that very first morning to this one, very nearly perfect.
I tell my father that I love him, and I straighten, and I head back down the slope toward the car with the warmth of the morning still folded up inside me like a secret. But the memory comes down the hill after me, and so does the small cold thought that always trails along behind it, the one I have never once managed to fully talk myself out of.
Because that’s the thing that frightens me, on the days I let myself be honest. A husband with no flaw that needs forgiving. A marriage with no moment hard enough to need my mother’s wisdom for. When a thing seems too good to be true, there is always, always a lie buried somewhere underneath it, just waiting to be turned up, and I have spent six happy months being very careful not to wonder what mine might be.
I even end up falling asleep on the living room sofa that evening, still in my coat, because this has never once happened before and I don’t know what else to do with myself.
Why hasn’t Trey come home?
Chapter Two
The office was Richard’s before it was mine, and I’ve changed almost nothing in it. The same dark shelves, heavy with the bound league records no one has opened in twenty years. The same broad desk, oak the color of strong tea, angled so that whoever sits behind it sees the door a full second before the door sees him. The same two leather chairs on the supplicant’s side of all that wood, lower than mine by an inch and a half, which is not an accident and was never an accident. I kept every bit of it on purpose. A man learns more from the room he inherits than from any room he builds for himself, and Richard built this one to be looked up to across a great deal of polished oak.
Right now the oak is the only thing standing between me and Raymond Glasgow, and Raymond is smiling at me across it the way men smile when they’ve already decided they’ve won.