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“I found out I was pregnant a few weeks later, and told Ben before you came home after that semester. I didn’t know what I’d thought would happen . . . he’d leave you to be with me? He’d be happy, scared, or confused again? I didn’t know, but nothing happened. He hung up the phone when I told him, and every day after would send me a text asking how I was feeling, but that was it. He wouldn’t answer my calls, never responded to my texts, nothing. I tried to see him when you came back, but he made sure he was never alone if I was around. Then he died, and I didn’t know how I would ever move on from him. That’s why I was so mad that you were able to, Grey. I’m so sorry for hurting you. You’ll never know how sorry I am.”
Charlie walked away when neither of us said anything, and Jagger came back to sit next to me on the couch and pull me into his arms.
“I had no idea,” he mumbled against my head once I’d stopped crying.
“I know you didn’t,” I whispered back. “Jagger, I’m so sorry that I kept what your mom was—”
“Don’t,” he begged, interrupting me. “I’m sorry I left, and I’m sorry I yelled at you.” He grabbed the ring on my left hand and began twisting it around my finger. “I’m upset that you felt like you couldn’t come to me, but after I calmed down I understood why you felt that way. I should’ve told you about my mom a long time ago. If I had, we could’v
e avoided all of this.”
I didn’t respond because while I agreed with him, I also couldn’t let him take the blame for something that was both our faults, and I knew he would continue to do just that. “What are we gonna do? About your mom, Charlie, and Keith . . . what do we do?”
“I don’t know, Grey. I just don’t know.”
Jagger
December 23, 2014
“I THINK I should go talk to Charlie,” Grey said a couple days later.
I stopped putting the dishes from our breakfast in the dishwasher and turned to look at her. “Are you sure you want to do that?”
“Yeah, I am. There are things I need to tell her, and things I need to make sure she understands.” Grey sat down on one of the bar stools and rested her chin in one of her hands—her eyes unfocused.
We hadn’t talked much about what Charlie had told us. We hadn’t talked much at all. After working a morning shift at The Brew, Grey had come home and pulled me upstairs to our bed. Without a word she shrugged out of her boots and jacket, and curled up on the bed still fully clothed. She’d said all she wanted was to lie down and think, and for me to just hold her.
Hours later and only a few words exchanged between us, I’d gotten dinner and brought it back upstairs to eat with her in bed. She lay between my legs while we ate, and for the rest of the night we only talked about the wedding and another show of my work in Seattle coming up. That is . . . when we talked.
She’d seemed better that morning and had sung to herself while she made breakfast for us, and I’d just been waiting for the moment when she was ready to talk. I hadn’t expected her to want to go straight to Charlie.
“I can call her—” I started to offer, but Grey stopped me.
“No. I want to go to her, not make her come to us.” Grey’s eyes looked off into the distance for a second, then she asked, “You know how you’ve always come to me when I was hurting?” When I nodded, she continued: “Well, right now Charlie is hurting, so I need to be the one to go to her.”
My eyebrows rose as I took in her determined expression. “And you’re not . . . ?” I asked, trailing off.
“Not like I thought I would be. I feel . . . weird. I just feel weird,” she confessed with an unsure smile. “I’m more upset right now for Charlie than for myself. When she told us, it hurt, and I didn’t understand it. I kept thinking that what Ben and I’d had was a lie. But I know it wasn’t. And somehow everything that happened has kind of given me this awkward form of peace.”
“Peace,” I stated dully. “You found out Ben cheated on you and that my sister had his son . . . and you feel peace?”
She sat up straighter and put her hands on the counter, her palms lightly slapping against the granite. “I told you I feel weird! Okay, so Ben knew how you felt about me, and even made sure to not throw our relationship in your face because he loved you. Ben told Charlie he knew I was supposed to be with you. For so long I didn’t know how to keep moving, and I didn’t think I was. But you were always there helping me, taking care of me, making sure that both of us kept moving. Once I knew how you felt, all I could think about was Ben, what we had, and what he would think if he knew how I felt about you. And I know you struggled with your own feelings about it.”
I shook my head when she paused, and stuttered out, “I don’t—where are you—I don’t know how that has made you feel peace.”
“You don’t?” Grey looked directly at me and a beautiful smile crossed her face. “We’ve both wondered what Ben would think. We’ve both struggled with our feelings for each other because of Ben. And now we know. Ben loved me, and I loved him. But he knew I was supposed to be with you, and knowing that, and knowing how he tried to make it easier on you, just tells me that what you and I have together is exactly what Ben would want for both of us. Not just now that he’s gone, but even when he was still here. It is the most calming thing knowing that. Yes, it hurt when Charlie told us. It hurt knowing that he’d cheated on me when I’d been with him for seven years; we’d already talked about getting married so many times, and we came back to Thatch specifically to talk to our parents about moving in together—knowing they would say no, and tell us we needed to be married first. But I have you now, and right now the thing that hurts me the most is what Charlie went through, how he treated her, and how she’s gone through the last two and a half years with this huge secret.”
“So you feel weird,” I finished for her, and her smile widened.
“Yes. I feel weird, and I want to go talk to your sister.”
“All right, then you should. Do you want me to go with you?”
“I do, but I want to go in and talk to her alone. I want you there if she needs you, and I have a feeling I’m going to need you when it’s all over.”
Pushing away from the counter, I walked around the bar and turned Grey so she was facing me and I was standing between her legs. “After everything you’ve gone through, you’re still so strong. With Ben’s death, and then everything that’s happened over the last few months, no one would blame you if you just shut down and wanted to get away from everything. But you’ve stood strong, you’ve faced it, and now your main concern is my sister, when everyone would expect you to hate her.” Cupping her face in my hands, I brought her closer to me and placed two light kisses on her lips. “You’re amazing, and I love you.”
She smiled against our next kiss, and wrapped her arms securely around my waist. “I’m really not. If we had found this out any sooner, I probably wouldn’t be this calm about it. But I feel like all the hard stuff is behind us. Ben’s death. LeAnn trying to keep us apart. Your mom. And the secret that Charlie’s had to keep all these years. Everything’s done now. We’ve already been through hell. There isn’t much more that can happen, Jagger. Knowing that, and having you here, makes all of this a lot easier.”
