Page 129 of The Truth About Love

Everything about him is different than it was when I saw him several months ago.

Lighter. Sunnier. Like a fog has lifted around him.

“I got divorced,” he says, eating up the distance between us.

I blink at him.

“It was finalised today.”

He reaches out to tuck my hair behind my ear, a peaceful smile on his face. And though the gesture makes my heart beat double-time, I flinch at the touch.

Auden’s fingers instantly fall away.

In all the times I’ve allowed myself to fantasise about a moment like this, I always imagined that I’d leap into his arms, wrap my legs around his waist and cling to him so tightly that he’d never be able to leave me again.

But all I feel right now is anger.

“And what? You thought that you could just show up and I’d take you back like that?” I snap my fingers. “As if you haven’t picked another woman over me, not once, buttwice?”

Auden stares at me in confusion. I guess he was expecting a different reaction from me too.

“You thought that I’d just welcome you with open arms and no questions asked?” I carry on. “As if you aren’t the reason for my broken, unmendable heart? Did you even stop to consider that I might have moved on? That I mightfinallybe happy? That maybe I’d even met someone else?”

He rears back like I’ve shot him. “Have you?”

I let the question hang in the air between us. Maybe it’s cruel, but I want him to hurt a little. I want him to think that maybe there really is another man warming my bed at night. That I’m not pathetic enough to have spent all this time crying over him in the dark.

“No,” I say finally. “But the point is I could have done.”

His shoulders relax.

“You can’t keep picking me up and letting me down, Auden. It isn’t fair. You can’t play with my heart again, I won’t let you.”

He hangs his head, regret swimming in those gorgeous depths of turquoise. “Pretty girl, I’m so sorry. Please believe that the last thing I ever wanted was to cause you pain.”

“But you did.” I sigh. “You hurt me so bad I didn’t think that I’d survive it.”

“I was trying to do the right thing, baby. That’s all I’ve ever tried to do.”

“I know, but?”

“Please,” he pleads, silencing me. “Let me say what I came to say. Just hear me out. And if, by the end, you want me to leave and never come back, then I will.”

I purse my lips in thought, then nod.

I head to the couch, flopping down onto it with my arms spread either side of me. I stare him down with steely eyes and a blank face. It’s taking a hell of a lot of control to keep my facial features so rigid, since it really is adorable when he’s looking all bashful with an anxious smile and rosy cheeks.

“My dad ran out on Mama when I was five,” he starts, breathing heavily, his hands rubbing together nervously in front of him. “I was too young to really understand what was happening, but one day he was there and the next, he was gone. Afterwards, Mama crumbled. She’d always struggled mentally, but it was like a damn broke when Dad left. She was imploding and I was just this little five-year-old boy watching his Mama get sicker and sicker, desperate to help but not knowing how.”

Tears fill my eyes and they fall silently as he talks.

“I was seven the first time she attacked me, eight when she made the first attempt on her life. She became so sick that for a long time, I’d have to make all her meals, bathe her, even help her when she needed the bathroom. I was just a kid. And I blamed my dad for everything. What kind of man abandons his sick wife and leaves his young son to pick up the pieces?”

He sucks in a deep breath and pauses, the weight of the conversation hanging heavy in the air.

“I’ve spent my whole life doing everything I can to make sure I never become my father. Repelling anything that could even suggest I’m following in his footsteps is what I’ve been doing since the very day he left us.”

He looks at me, the warm artificial light reflecting off his pupils. He shoves his hands into his pockets and shuffles from foot to foot, all the while staring straight into my soul.

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