Page 65 of Unofficial

Running a hand over his face, he finally turns to look at her. "I'll tell you, and you can ask whatever questions you want as long as you promise me one thing."

"What's that?"

"After tonight, we never talk about Sam again. This is a one-time conversation."

Her body leans back against the couch, and she nods her head slowly. "Okay."

Kade moves to sit back down in the recliner, and his eyes can't meet hers. "Before I jump into that, I think it's probably necessary to remind you about the deep-rooted abandonment issues I have that likely could use some therapy because of what happened with my parents."

Jess is one of the few people in his life who knows everything about his parents. How his father got drunk and flew into a jealous rage before killing his mother and fleeing the county before running his beat-up jeep into a ravine. How he wishes his father would have killed himself, too, instead of having everything dragged through the courts before he finally took a plea and was sentenced to twenty years to life.

The truth is, without Jess, he probably wouldn't have survived his father being released from prison. He told her everything, and she only asked questions when he became disoriented and fell off the linear path of the story. But more than that, she's never brought it up again. Not even when she had every right to call him out for his abandonment issues.

"I know," Jess says, her voice barely above a whisper.

Kade looks at her, and he can't help but laugh at how she looks as nervous as he feels. "Okay, well, we both know that I have a difficult time trusting people and letting them in. All the way in, anyway. I pass it off and blame my father, but there's more than that. I met a girl in high school, and I fell head over heels for her. We started dating junior year, and I was convinced I'd spend the rest of my life with her."

"And her name was Sam?"

"How'd you know?"

"Uh… you said that after tonight, we can never talk about Sam again. I assumed."

Chuckling, he sniffles. "Yeah, that's her name."

"It's a pretty name."

"She fit in with my life and my family. She got along with my best friend back then, Zach. The three of us did everything together, and sometimes, when he had a girlfriend, we'd add a fourth. We planned our entire future, and we all went to the same college."

"You stayed together through college?" Jess asks. "That's really impressive."

He laughs. "It wasn't always easy, but I was so in love with her. She knew everything about my past, and she was there on every anniversary of Mom's death. We lost our virginity to each other at senior prom, and I held her hand through two pregnancy scares. She came with me to my dad's parole hearings when I spoke up to keep his ass in prison, and I supported her when she defied her parents' wishes. They wanted her to be a doctor like everyone else in her family, but she wanted to go into finance."

"You sound like a perfect match."

"You'd think so," he says and looks at the ground. "When we graduated college, she needed to find a job. She wasn't getting any hits, so I talked to Zach to have him see if his dad could pull strings to hire Sam. His dad runs one of the largest investment firms in the state."

Moving to the end of the couch, she sits closer to him and takes his hand. "Were you engaged at the time?"

"No," he says, gripping her hand and shaking his head. His eyes lock on their hands, and he feels a little stronger than he did a moment before. "She got the job, and we all went out to celebrate. I told Zach he was a lifesaver because the only other option she had was to start looking out of state, and I just started at my job. Drew had just found out Sarah was pregnant, and I couldn't leave. It would've had to be a long-distance relationship."

"You make it sound like he came in clutch, but I have a feeling he wasn't as good of a friend to you as you were to him."

He laughs, still staring at their hands. Her attempt to comfort him and give him strength means more than he could ever find the words to express to her. "Two years after we graduated, I proposed. We'd been together for almost eight years, and I wanted to start a life together. Get married, have kids, buy a house, and be happy. Have the family I felt I was always robbed of. When she said yes, I don't remember ever being happier than I was in that moment."

Her hand squeezes his, but Jess doesn't say a word. He stops and swallows, and he knows she's letting him share at his own pace. He's thankful for her patience.

"We had a long engagement. Her parents didn't support her decision to go into finance instead of medicine, and they refused to pay for the wedding. They didn't like how I stood behind her when she defied them, and I had next to nothing to fall back on. She just started in her career, and she wasn't making much. We decided to postpone the wedding and save up."

"Smart."

"I thought everything was good. We moved into an apartment together in a not-so-great part of town because we wanted to save as much money as we could as quickly as we could. She didn't know it, but I squirreled away extra money with overtime to pay for the down payment on the condo I live in now. It was going to be my wedding present to her. She loved it when we were looking at places, and she said she wanted to live in a place just like that."

Jess shifts their hands and interlocks her fingers with his. "And she seemed fine at home?"

"Yeah, it felt like we were happy. We never really fought or even argued, and we had sex three or four times a week. Even to this day, I can't look back and find a single moment where I think I should have known she wasn't happy. That one moment in time when I could say I knew we weren't solid."

"Nothing you're describing screams problematic."

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