Page 77 of The Damaged Hearts Bargain

She handed over her credit card and Rosalee took it.

Cal didn’t see how anything could change. And it broke her heart even more than it was already broken.

“Maybe,” Rosalee said as she handed back the card. “Maybe you should think a little bit about what you deserve.”

Which could go either way. Maybe Rosalee was telling her she deserved all this for being a lying thief. Or maybe she was telling her to believe that she deserved better. Either way, Cal knew itwas too late now. It always seemed to be too late.

???

“Do you want me to take you to a gay bar?” George asked, putting a cup of hot chocolate in front of Lucy.

“It’s thirty degrees out, George, why are you giving me hot chocolate?”

“Because chocolate is good for a broken heart,” said George, sitting down at the kitchen table opposite her. “And also because Billy is in bed and I don’t want to wake him up with the coffee machine.”

“Is there a gay bar in town?” Lucy asked, wondering just how she’d missed it.

“No,” said George. “But I’d take you out of town to one.”

“With your bus pass, considering that you can’t drive,” said Lucy, laughing.

George squinted at her. “You’re looking oddly cheerful. I thought I’d find you here crying your eyes out. Or at least looking faintly sad.”

“I am sad,” Lucy said. “But… I don’t know. Something Pen said on the phone has stuck with me. Well done getting the gossip all the way across the Atlantic, by the way.”

“I do my best,” said George. “Anyway, Pen made me promise that I’d tell her anything important that happened while she was away.”

“She’s busy choosing a child, she doesn’t need to know my relationship worries.”

“It’s not like a department store. You don’t just choose the one you want,” George said. Then he looked doubtful. “I think.”

Lucy sighed. “Pen told me that we all get to write our own endings.”

“True enough,” said George, eyeing her. “And from that I’m taking it that you’re starting to think that you and Cal don’t have an ending yet.”

“No, not exactly that.” Lucy wrapped her hands around her mug. “It’s all wrong. It’s unfair. I think Cal doesn’t have her ending and that’s what’s bothering me.”

“Wait, what?”

Lucy shrugged. “I know that you all think that I’m just looking for a relationship, someone to settle down with, and that I don’t know what I’m doing. And maybe you’re all right. But I think I’ve realized that this is about more than all of that. I’m not going to lie, being broken up with hurts. It hurts a lot. But I’m not a child, I know that life is hard, I know how much being rejected hurts and that life isn’t always fair.”

George reached out and patted her hand. “Life can be pretty unfair.”

“I don’t want this relationship to end. But more than that, I look at Cal and I can see why she’s doing what she’s doing and it all seems so… wrong.”

“So what do you want to do?” George asked.

“I want Cal to be happy. I think that all break ups hurt, but if you know it’s happening for the right reason, if you know that you or the other person will eventually be happier this way, then maybe that helps a little. This one hurts more because I don’t see Cal improving.”

George blew out a breath. “So you want to respond to a break up by… making Cal’s life better?”

“I want her to leave me in a better state than when she found me, if that makes sense,” Lucy said. “Even if we’re not together, I want her to be able to go on to be happy. And that can’t happen with all of this theft nonsense hanging over her head.”

“I don’t get it,” said George, frowning at her.

“I’m not exactly sure I do either,” Lucy confessed. “I just know that I can sit around being miserable that I’m not with Cal, or I can do something so that at least Cal will be happy. And maybe if she is, she might choose me again.”

“And if she doesn’t?” asked George quietly.

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