Page 72 of The Kiss | AllFreeNovel

She scraped the peppers into a bowl and reached for an onion.

"Erin?"

"Hmm?"

"Why does Alex never talk about his ex-wife?"

The knife stopped. Erin looked at me across the counter.

"Is everything... okay?"

"Yeah, it's just... I need to understand."

She set the knife down and wiped her hands on the dish towel.

"When our father died, he left us with a lot of debt. The mortgage hadn't been paid in months. I'd just finished high school, I was about to start college, so there were all these financial things that needed to be handled all at once. Mom couldn't do it on her own. Alex took it upon himself to make sure all those debts were paid and I was going to college."

A small smile crossed her face.

"He's a good brother. I didn't even know what the debts were about. He just told me to focus on school. So I did."

She picked up the onion and started cutting.

"He went to the fire academy. Earned a stable paycheck, helped with my tuition, the mortgage, the bills. All of it. Mom and I think that really affected his relationship with money. He wanted to be financially stable fast, so he worked himself into the ground. Extra shifts whenever he could get them. He always said the higher the rank, the better the pay, and that's what he worked toward. For years."

"He met Cheryl when he was still a firefighter aiming for Lieutenant. They were good together. She seemed happy. Or at least, we thought she was. I couldn't blame Cheryl for the divorce, though. Alex, for everything that's good in him, wanted to give her the best life. And he worked like it. The problem was they had different ideas of what 'the best life' meant."

"To Alex, the best life is being financially stable. Not having to worry about money. So he worked the same way he did when we were still paying off Dad's debts. Maybe he thought making Captain was the answer to that. But Cheryl had her own job. Her own money. What she wanted was just Alex. And he was rarely home. So they never had problems with money. But they didn't quite have the marriage they wanted either."

"She had an affair with a coworker. Divorced Alex right when he made Captain. Last I heard, she married him and moved to Connecticut."

The story made sense. All of it tracked with the man I knew. But it didn't answer the question Declan had put in my head.

I wanted to ask. The question was right there: Was your father involved in something? But Erin was my best friend. And if Declan had made it up, if I was sitting in her kitchen accusing her dead father of being a criminal, there was no coming back from that.

"Why did Alex quit hockey?"

Erin's hand stilled on the knife.