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Setting the food out on the table, I went to the door and let Bryn in. I tried to decipher the look on her face to determine how the meeting might have gone, but she was hard to read. There were no tears on her face, and her eyes didn’t look bloodshot, so I was going to take that as a good thing. We went inside, and she sat down at the table while I poured her a glass of water.
“Go ahead and eat,” I said. “If you’re not in the mood for salad, I can make you something else.”
She shook her head. “This looks good. Thank you.”
She picked up her spoon and took a small sip of the soup. I wanted to ask her how the meeting went and why she came over rather than just telling me about it over the phone, but I didn’t. She needed some time to unwind and decompress. And I wanted her to eat. The conversation would happen when she was ready.35BrynBy the time I got to Nick’s house, I was so angry, I was shaking. I knew the meeting with Justin was going to be hard.
But I wasn’t expecting it to affect me as much as it did. Possibly because I wasn’t expecting that he was actually going to get worse. There was some hope that he might have come to the realization of what he did and want to apologize.
That was before I found out he’d gone to Nick’s office. As soon as I heard that, I knew Justin had reached a new level. The time we spent apart helped me see how much he tried to control and influence my life and reassure me us breaking up was the best thing that could have happened to me.
The goal of going to meet with him was to make sure he understood everything was final between us. I wasn’t going to go back with him, and he wasn’t going to manipulate me into it. He also wasn’t going to bully or intimidate me into it by trying to go through Nick. With any luck, it was going to be a smooth, fast meeting, then I would be able to go see Nick and everything would be fine.
Turned out, that luck wasn’t coming to me.
The whole event went in a direction I wasn’t anticipating and left me furious and not knowing what I was supposed to do next. When I finally got away from Justin, I did the only thing I knew to do, and the only thing I wanted to do. I went to Nick.
The lunch he had waiting for me was perfect. Not just because it smelled delicious and was somehow the exact thing I wanted even if would never have thought of it myself. Even more than that, it was just amazing because he had thought of me. It also made my heart warm knowing he was doing something to take care of the baby. He wanted both of us to be healthy, and that meant the world to me.
He didn’t ask me how the meeting with Justin went immediately when I got to the house. I could tell he was bursting to find out what happened, but he cared more about getting me to the table and making sure I ate. He sat with me quietly while I worked on the soup, then ate a few bites of the salad. My appetite hadn’t been great but having something that was delicious and fresh made it easier to eat what I knew I needed to.
Even though being there with Nick helped to bring down my anger and pent-up energy, I could tell he was angry as well. I wondered how much of that was my fault. He had specifically asked me not to go see Justin by myself. In fact, he had all but demanded I wait until he was able to go with me. I refused him. I told him this was something I needed to do myself, which I still believed. But that didn’t stop him from being upset.
By the time I ate about half of what he put in front of me, I felt calm enough to talk about what happened. Nick seemed to recognize that I had settled down and moved a little closer to me.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I took the officer’s advice and met up with Justin at the park,” I said. “I wanted to make sure we were in a very public place so even if he got upset, there wasn’t anything he could do. I have to admit, it made me feel a lot better once I was there with him and knew there were other people around. I’ve never been afraid of Justin, exactly, but there was something unnerving about the conversation from the very beginning.”
