Page 92 of Just Like Home

“Can you turn that off?” Cole heard himself say.

The blonde’s eyes widened. Charlotte’s frown deepened. Steve and Hildy straightened.

“Turn it off,” Cole said, this time more loudly.

“Dude, relax,” Max said stupidly.

Cole stood, putting it all together. A year later, and he was still discovering new ways that Gemma had betrayed him.

The music came to an abrupt stop.

“Cole, calm down.” Gemma moved between him and Max, holding a hand out as if she could protect her beloved from the man whose life she’d ruined.

“I can’t believe you,” he muttered under his breath. More to the point, he couldn’t believe he ever thought he loved her.

“I told you, Cole.” Her eyes turned innocent. “It’s time to let me go.”

He squeezed a fist, eyeing the two of them, replaying his public humiliation and realizing just how deep it went. There seemed to be no end to her betrayal.

“Is it time for Max to let his wife go?” Cole said.

A gasp raced around the circle, and Cole struggled to keep his mouth shut. He could air it all right there for everyone to hear. He could tell them all the truth about the woman he thought he loved.

How she’d started an affair with a married man months before she met Cole, that she dated Cole only to make that married man jealous, that she trapped him into marrying him by telling him she was pregnant with his baby, and that she invited her lover to their wedding and played “their song” as her first dance with her new husband—a man so smitten, so baffled how he got so lucky he would’ve hung the moon for her.

If he could go back, he’d tell that man what a fool he was to fall for someone so brazenly selfish and wicked.

It wasn’t until they’d been married for two years that he learned the truth—that baby was never his. Gemma had a miscarriage, but if she hadn’t, Cole would’ve loved that child until the day he died.

And finding out it wasn’t his would’ve killed him.

He could spill all of that right here in front of all these people—make sure Max and Gemma shared in his humiliation.

But what was the point?

A hand on his arm startled him back to reality. He glanced down and found Charlotte’s wide eyes trained on him. “Can I talk to you in the hallway?”

He felt his jaw twitch as his eyes circled the room, a mix of pity and concern on the faces of everyone there. He followed Charlotte into the hallway and then into another studio at the back of the building.

“Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “This was a mistake.”

“What was? Trusting you not to start a fight in my rehearsal?” She crossed her arms and glared up at him.

“Agreeing to do this in the first place.”

“If I remember right, you have a good reason to do this,” she said.

He sighed. “I didn’t know she was going to be here.”

Charlotte frowned. “Cole, what is going on? Who is she?”

He didn’t want Charlotte to know this story. It was humiliating enough that everyone in town had been audience to his personal pain, and he liked that she didn’t know any of it. But she was going to find out—there was no sense pretending otherwise.

“That’s Gemma,” he finally said. “My ex-wife.”

“Oh.” Charlotte angled her gaze up toward him, and set something inside him off-kilter. She’d carried her confidence from the other studio into this one, and he couldn’t help but be drawn in by it.

It was a different version of her, one he hadn’t seen before. It was as if she’d taken a little time to find her footing here in Harbor Pointe, but now that she had, she was sure of herself. He envied her that.

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