Page 37 of Mistaken Identity
He turned to me just before turning back and getting up to the window.
He gave Lottie’s name.
Lottie Henson.
Not Lottie Ingram.
“Saw what?” he grumbled.
“The way that you acted toward her after she told you she was pregnant with another man’s baby. You had no desire to stay with her anymore after that,” I pointed out. “And she knew that. She would’ve left you.”
He nodded. “She’d drawn up the divorce paperwork already.”
“I helped her,” I said. “I told her that she’d gotten what she wanted. She got her money. You got your medical bills paid. She was prolonging something that was never supposed to be going that long trying to…”
I abruptly cut off my words.
I winced, realizing that I’d fucked up.
“I knew that she wanted me in a way I didn’t want her,” he said softly. “That’s the one and only thing we ever fought about in our entire lives. She wanted to try, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t see her that way. I loved her like a sister, but I didn’t love her like a man should love his wife.”
I sighed. “She was head over heels for you.”
“She was, but I wasn’t,” he agreed. “I made sure she knew that it would never be more than what she said it would be in the very beginning. I didn’t want her to think that we would be having that fake marriage of convenience that turns into love thing that she read in her books.”
“Have a good afternoon, sir!”
He smiled at the lady who sent out Lottie’s medication, and I turned around to see Lottie now sound asleep.
“Maybe she’ll sleep long enough. Let y’all talk about what you need to talk about,” I mused. “Where are we going to talk to Cakes?”
He put the truck into drive and started pulling out of the lot, his eyes on the road.
He was a hypervigilant driver, and had been his whole life, but it definitely looked like he’d gotten more hypervigilant now that he had a young life in the car with him.
“One Love, Dallas,” he murmured as he got into the lane that would take him onto 635. “The veteran’s place downtown. Cakes runs it.”
“I thought I saw him there a few weeks ago,” I mused.
I donated a lot of my dad’s clothes when I’d gone there last week, and I’d seen a flash of familiarity that’d gotten lost in the crowd of men helping me empty the back of my truck.
I had only really noticed that familiarity after the fact, though.
The men that’d been crowding me to get everything out of my car had backed off minutely to allow me away from their group.
I’d gotten inside the car and had locked the door while silently telling myself not to be such a loser and freak out over nothing.
When they’d gotten everything, they’d given me a thumbs up instead of coming up to the window.
I’d been grateful.
And now I knew why they’d backed off the way they had.
“Does everyone know about…” I hesitated to say the words that always seemed to stick in my throat. “Me?”
Audric looked over at me, and his face softened. “Some.”
Nine
