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So we live indoors and I pretend I don’t mind, even though my patience is wearing thin.

The second thing wrong is Europe.

He leaves in three days for Limelight’s summer festival run overseas. He knows, because I’ve told him more than once, I’m dying to see France. Italy. Spain. Paris, Rome, and Madrid are on his itinerary and he hasn’t once asked if I’d like to come with him.

He talks about the eight-week trip like it’s weather. Like it’s happening to him and not to us. Every time he breezily chatters about tour-this or tour-that, something cold turns over low in my stomach, and I bite my tongue.

I promised him time. Regardless of my own insecurities, I’m determined to be a woman who keeps her word.

Besides, I don’t want to lose the good things we have.

As usual, this morning started with him fucking me until I forgot what year it was. We showered and got dressed for our big outing. The plan was to take a long drive and disappear somewhere remote for the day.

Not twenty minutes ago, Beau was at the counter making our smoothies when I couldn’t help myself. I dropped to my knees, pulled his joggers down, and took his cock in my mouth, slow and obscene. His fingers wound through my hair while he watched me work.

He came so much, I couldn’t swallow it all and he splooged all over his pants. He’s back upstairs rinsing off and changing as I wait at the kitchen counter drinking my smoothie with swollen lips.

I’m spooked when I hear the front door open.

Followed by confident, at-home footsteps, and a voice calling out, “Dad? Are you okay? Since when do you not return my texts and phone calls?”

A younger version of Yolanda saunters into the kitchen and stops dead when she sees me.

Of course, I know her before she says a word. She’s on the walls of this house in a zillion different frames. Angelic baby. Gap-toothed at six. Awkward with braces. Stunning in a graduation gown. Family pictures galore.

In person, Billie is stunning. Tall and fit like her parents, wearing gym clothes and holding a green juice. She stares at me as if I’m a raccoon loose in the kitchen. Rapidly calculating and recalculating what the hell she’s come across.

Thank God I’m dressed in a t-shirt and capris. Despite the fact my hair is a crime scene from when Beau gripped me earlier, it’s plausible I’m here for a reason other than fucking Billie’s father.

I hear Beau bound down the stairs loose and easy. A man who has no idea we’re not alone in the house.

“Elodie, I wanna show you this place—” He rounds the corner in fresh clothes and wet hair to the sight of his daughter standing in his kitchen with me.

It kills the sentence in his throat and his expression turns to panic. His eyes flick from Billie to me, then back to her. For a split second, his whole face falls. Actually, it drops clean off its hinges before he catches it and hauls it back into something resembling normal.

“Billie. Hey.” He crosses the kitchen and kisses the top of her head. “I didn’t expect you today.”

“Clearly.” She glares at me unabashedly.

“You haven’t met Elodie, have you?” Beau waves a hand toward me. “She was my partner in the writing class you signed me up for, remember? The one at the university. We got paired up for the term project and we hit it off, because, it turns out, we’ve both lost someone important to cancer. I lost your mom, she lost her mother about a year ago. So we got to talking. Her sister travels for work, she’s a flight attendant, gone half the month, so Elodie’s on her own a lot, and we’ve become friends. Good friends. I told her she could use the quiet out here to write. So. Yeah.”

He’s rambling and this man doesn’t ramble. Tripping over his own sentences, piling one true fact on another, trying to hide who we are to each other from his daughter. Making a clumsy job of it.

I understand why. We agreed on this. Private, not secret. Figure it out before we tell anyone, and I suppose his children would be at the front of the line.

I know all of it. Knowing does nothing for how shitty it feels to listen to the man I’m in love with turn me into a writing partner he took pity on. The woman I thought I am to Beau is being erased right before my eyes.

Nevertheless, I’m not going to rat him out. I keep my face pleasant because I’ve got years of practice. “Nice to meet you.”

Billie is deceptively polite when she returns my greeting, but she’s not buying what either of us are selling. She’s sharp. Observed the way he came down the stairs calling my name, the smoothie sweating on the counter in front of me and how at home I am on his barstool midmorning.

Mostly it’s Beau’s embarrassment of having been caught. Her father—my lover—is a man who’s never explained himself to anyone and he babbled for thirty seconds like a kid who was caught stealing. She’s known him her whole life. She doesn’t need proof he’s fucking me.

She can feel it in the room.

“For the record, I called and texted. I came by because I haven’t seen you in a month.” Billie turns to Beau, an edge in her voice now. “Like, at all. You’ve been a ghost for weeks. You answer half my texts if I’m lucky.” Her eyes cut to me and back and the math is all over her face. “I was worried. Well, I was, anyway. Until I—”

“Billie…” he starts to answer.