“I wondered what you looked like pregnant.” His throat worked. “This is better than I imagined.”
Butterflies stirred. His words had always been a spell.
“Well, that’s the only one,” she warned when he flipped the page and found no more belly shots.
“Why?”
“It was a hard time. I thought I’d never want to remember it.” She swallowed. “I regret that now.”
They paged through Amelia’s life, stopping so Daisy could narrate small stories: the first smile, the time she face-planted into a cake, the preschool recital meltdown. At the end, he asked, “Could I… make copies?”
Sorrow rose, thick and familiar. “You can have this.”
“Daisy, no—”
“It’s the least I can do, but guard it with your life.”
He held the album like a relic. “Thank you.”
The moment stretched, quiet and raw and more intimate than anything they’d done in years.
Finding a pocket of courage, Daisy asked, “Tell me about you. About the years I missed?”
“You want to know if the rumors are true?”
“I want to know what happened. After.”
He breathed out. “After that tour, everything changed. We were on every cover, recognized everywhere. It shoved our career into overdrive.”
“I didn’t think it could get crazier.”
“It did. Tenfold. We recorded another album a few months later. It went platinum in a week.”
Her teeth caught her lip. “The ‘love letter’ album?”
He nodded. “I had a lot to say. I had hoped you’d hear it. Forgive me.”
She winced. “I didn’t listen. I couldn’t. I really tried to purge my life of all things TKC. Which,”—she huffed a laugh—“was not easy.”
“I always thought you’d turn up at one of our shows,” he admitted. “I don’t know why, but I had this dream, over and over, that you would. Is that crazy?”
“No,” she said softly. “I almost did. Once.”
He leaned in, intent. “When?”
“My senior year. Some friends had tickets to Madison Square Garden. They begged me to go. They even had backstage passes.” She shook her head faintly. “I almost said yes, but Amelia got sick that night. I took it as… a sign I wasn’t meant to.”
His jaw tightened, a flicker of pain crossing his face. “We were so close.”
“Yeah,” she whispered. “We were.”
Silence fell, heavy with all the words they didn’t say.What if.What if she had gone. What if she’d walked backstage and found him there. What if their lives had shifted on that one night.
But what-ifs were dangerous. They hadn’t happened, and they never would. Daisy drew in a breath, steadying herself. “Anyway,” she said gently, “this is your story. Please… go on.”
“Right. After that album, we went on tour again, won our first Grammy, traveled the world, and got really messed up along theway. It was wild. The music was real, but nothing good came out of that time.”
Daisy stilled, her heart thudding in her ears. She told herself to leave it alone, but the words slipped out before she could stop them.
