“I mean, part of me wants to guess you and Lara finally hooked up, but I don’t know why you’d be here then.”
It wasn’t a surprise Keane might…see through this whole thing. He knew both of them too well, had been around for too much of who he and Lara were. Just like Mary Lou, except…
As much as Mary Lou loved him like a grandson, Larawashers. Keane might have a decent kind of friendship with Lara, but he was definitely closer to Ty.
Keane was the only person he had as a sounding board that was…not on his side, exactly, but more inclined to understand wherehewas coming from overher.
So, he laid it out. He left some of the details out, even if Keane had already deduced thehooking uppart. He didn’t need to get into the nitty gritty. Just the part where he’d said something as stupid asI love you, and she had insisted they were friends.
Nothing more thanfriends.
“So what are you going to do? Just avoid her?”
Ty sighed. In the end, a sounding board didn’t give him any answers, but he supposed it gave him a clear head to start finding some. “For a start.”
“Then what?”
Ty didn’t know. He couldn’t imagine spending the rest of his life avoiding her. Hell, he wasn’t sure he’d last a week. She was too important to him, even with all this hurt roiling around in his gut.
But was it possible to just go back to the way things were, like she so clearly wanted? He wasn’t sure he had that in him. He understood failure. He’d lived so intimately acquainted with it all his life.
But this wasn’t failure. It was her refusal. It was…pretending something wasn’t there thatwas. How could he do it?
“You think she’ll come crawling back if you wait?” Keane asked.
He let out a long sigh. Crawling back? No, he really couldn’t picture Lara making that kind of change. And as angry as he was, as hurt as he was, he didn’t want that for her. “She’s been through a lot. Maybe I’m asking for too much.”
“Look, I don’t know shit about…” he waved a hand up and down Ty. “…whatever this is. Love or whatever. But you’ve been through a lot too, Ty. She doesn’t have a monopoly on a crappy childhood. A crappy anything, really.”
Ty couldn’t argue with that, but it was more complicated than that. She had some stuff to work through, and if what had happened tonight made her turn away instead of reach out for him… He didn’t think there was anythinghecould do to fix this.
No, whatever happened next… It had to come from Lara. Which terrified him. He wanted to march down to that cabin and tell her all the ways she was wrong. But she’d only dig in, build that brick wall thicker.
At the end of the day, she wasn’t rejectinghim. She was rejecting…change. Growth. He couldn’t force her to accept those things. So he had to wait or move on.
“I really don’t know. I just know whatever happens next, she’s got to choose it.”
But in that realization, he came to one of his own. He had some choices to make too. Sure, he had chosen her, and she wasn’t ready to hear it. But there were more things to a life than finding someone you wanted to spend it with.
So, he’d choose other things. A job at the school. The coaching position. Wild Rose Point and a future that didn’t involve trying to prove something to a man who was never going to see him as a success.
Damn it, hewasa success. If he built a life for himself. Here and how he wanted.
“Do you know any houses for sale?” Ty demanded of Keane.
Keane’s eyebrows winged up. “You’re going to buy a house?”
“Yeah. Because no matter what happens, I’m planting some damn roots here.” For himself.
For the first time in his life, everything he was doing was for himself.
And if Lara came around, if he found a way to get her to come around, that’d be quite the homerun.
But he was stepping up to the plate and swinging, no matter the outcome.
Chapter Ten
It had been three days and Lara hadn’t even caught a glimpse of Ty. He hadn’t been at the cottage—at least when she was there. She’d come home from the museum that first day to find the couch back to a couch and all his things gone.
