Page 86 of Careless Whisper

“I’d take it back if I could.”

“No takebacks!” There was no malice in his words. Just simple, brutal honesty.

There were crickets somewhere in the bushes, and those sounds mingled with Anna and Reggie’s laughter floated from the kitchen window.

“I spent most of my life in diplomacy,” he drawled after a moment. “Talking around pain. Delaying hard truths. But my daughter—she’s not built like that. She doesn’t need a man who’ll protect her from discomfort.She needs someone who can stand in it with her.”

“I know, and I want to be that man.”

He looked at me—not sizing me up, not judging—but assessing the space between what I was saying and what I’d done.

“You can’t fix this by waiting for her,” he stated coolly. “You’ll have to walk through her pain with her. Let it blister you. That’s the only way she’ll believe you’re not going anywhere.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Don’t kid a diplomat,señor.” Ignacio chuckled. “You bare your heart to my girl. You tell her what’s in yours. Not the pretty I love you…no, the hard stuff, the fact that you didn’t believe in love because you didn’t see it when you grew up.”

My heart began to beat fast.

He was right. I hadn’t told her my story—mostly because I didn’t know how to. Hell, I hadn’t even realized I had one. Not really. Not until Reggie.

Love had always been a foreign language to me. I could recognize it in theory, maybe even pronounce the words if I tried hard enough—but I’d never spoken it fluently. Not the way she did.

For her, love was native. It was instinct. Everything she did—how she showed up, how she forgave, how she cared—was written in it.

And, I’d spent a lifetime pretending it didn’tmatter, because it was easier than admitting I didn’t know what it looked like.

“Once, Anna and I had a fight. Abigone. She packed up the kids and went to New York. I was in Mexico City then. Reggie was seven, and Carlos was eleven. It was summer, so they thought it was vacation time with G’Mum. I knew better.”

“What did you fight about?”

Ignacio shrugged. “I hurt her.”

It seemed like he still carried guilt and pain for putting his wife through that—but then I would as well for what I did to Reggie, until the end of my days.

“I…tried everything, the talking, the calling, the showing up…finally, I wrote her a letter.”

“And that did the trick?” I asked hopefully.

He nodded with a smile. “The thing is, words spoken in real-time can get twisted, guarded, or drowned out by fear. But a letter? She can read on her own time, in her own space. A letter can bleed. And she needed to see me bleed.”

I digested what he told me and tipped my glass toward Ignacio. “Gracias,señor.”

He smiled, small and knowing. “Don’t thank me, just make sure my daughter can forgive the man she loves so she can be whole and happy.”

CHAPTER 31

Reggie

Ididn’t open the letter right away.

I kept it in my pocket, the edges softening with the heat from my body, the paper curling slightly at the corners. I didn’t know why I waited. Maybe because once I read it, I couldn’t unknow what was inside. Whatever Elias had poured out in his jagged, surgeon’s-scrawl—it would change things, even if I didn’t want it to.

I opened the letter that night.

The clinic was quiet, and I’d stayed late, saying I needed to sort files in the back room. I sat on the edge of a supply cabinet, fluorescent light buzzing faintly overhead, and slid my finger under the flap.

Reggie,

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