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“I got that, too,” I told him.

“Kat,” he said and I looked up. “I didn’t invite her over here.”

“Yes, I understood everything.”

“No.” He shook his head. “You did not. You couldn’t have because I don’t really know what’s going on, either.”

“You’re getting back together with your ex-wife,” I stated. “I’ve seen it before with my mom and Daisuke and I have to tell you, it’s a hard road. I always reminded her that there was a reason that they broke up in the first place. Even if the physical parts were as amazing as she liked to say, it didn’t make up for all the other problems.”

“You were giving your mom advice about her sex life?” Now he winced, too. “Holy Moses. But no, I’m not getting back together with Lexi, not after everything that happened between us.”

“Which was…what?” I asked. I threw up my hands in a way that was reminiscent of my mom, so I put them back down. “You left her, running out of the state. I guess that it must have been something bad if you reacted that way.”

“It was.”

“She cheated?” I guessed. That was what usually happened among my mom’s groups of friends, and then the people had to decide if they were willing to forgive and move on. As far as I’d been able to tell, they’d never forgotten, though.

“She did.” He sat down in his desk chair, a plain, black one, and sighed. “It was my fault.”

“I don’t know how that would be true.”

“I was not the person she thought I was,” Oliver answered. “She imagined that I would grow into being like the guys she worked with, the tech bros who were out to make millions upon millions. I stumbled into some money—”

“Not exactly,” I interrupted. “You worked hard and invented something great. It wasn’t like you bought a lottery ticket or inherited a big trust. You deserved it.”

“Maybe. But I’m not the hard-driver that Lexi wanted. At heart, I’m a band kid and she was always disappointed. The piano became a huge point of contention, because it took up too much room in the apartment and she was tired of hearing me play. I was doing it all the time because that made me feel better about the mess I had created with her.”

“It doesn’t sound like it was entirely your mess,” I pointed out.

“Whosever fault it was, Lexi felt let down. She cheated and I found out, and I was devastated. She thought it was par for the course. That was what her friends did,” he said. “It was what everyone did. She couldn’t understand why I was so upset.”

“And now she’s thinking that you guys can rekindle the romance.”

“Maybe.” He sighed again. “Honestly, I never knew what she saw in me.”

I stared at him, gaping, because didn’t he have a mirror? He could have looked at his reflection in the glass door to clear up any confusion, and those were just his features. Once you got to know him as a person, how could you have helped yourself from falling for him?

“She wasn’t interested in any of the things I liked. She said that I was silly when I didn’t want to get a bigger apartment so we could invite more people over and show it off. My car was boring. She didn’t think that our patent was exciting enough. I can understand all of that,” he told me. “I was happy to live in the place we had rented because we could afford it, instead of buying some mansion and tying ourselves to a giant mortgage. I like my car because it gets good gas mileage and it has high safety ratings. I do understand how all of that is dull for someone like Lexi, especially the improved water pump mechanism. It’s not something you can talk about in a bar and leave other people impressed.”

“How many people in a bar have a patent?” I asked. “Probably none and I bet she doesn’t, either!”

“When I first met her, I was…I don’t know what you’d call it. Entranced?” he suggested. “I was bowled over. I’d never had a serious relationship before but she knew exactly what to do. It was easy for me to go along with what she wanted, like when she said that we should get married. I said, ‘Ok. Let’s do that.’”

“That was the proposal?”

“It was more like a statement. We went to the courthouse on her lunch break and then I went back to the lab. Her best friend was planning a huge wedding in Italy,” he said. “I think Lexi was trying to take some of the wind out of her sails.” He looked down at his hands, which were in fists, and stretched out his fingers. “I’ve never told anyone about any of this crap. I’m aware that it makes me sound like a stupid kid, which I was. Except I’m too old to be a stupid kid anymore, and I’m not getting back together with Lexi.”

“Even if she wants to. Why does she want to?” I asked.

“I wondered that, too.”

“She might have realized what she had done when she left, that she’d been heartless and cruel. It could be that she’s missing the dual income. Or she could love you,” I suggested. That wouldn’t have been very hard to do.

“I don’t think that she ever loved me.” But he had loved her, clearly he had.

That was when my phone rang, though, which ended our conversation. That call was the beginning of a lot of other problems but I didn’t know it at the time.

So I picked it up.