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“And the others? Carl?”
“Carl wanted to tell you,” she said. “But I made him promise he wouldn’t.”
That explained a lot about what was going on. If Carl gave his word that he’d follow someone into hell, he’d do it even if the Devil himself showed up at the gates with a nuke.
I blew out a breath, stood, and started pacing. “This is a lot.”
“Yeah, I know,” Aspyn said. “I guess I wanted to say we both screwed up. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. At the time, I thought it was the right thing to do, but now I realize it wasn’t. All I can say is that I’m sorry.”
I paced in silence before stopping and dropping back into my chair. “I’m not mad.”
Aspyn tilted her head. The look on her face suggested she thought I was nuts.
“You’re not mad?” she said.
I shook my head. “I’m not mad. Like you said, we both screwed up. I can say all I want about the accident, but I had plenty of time after that to call. You didn’t try to keep the secret from me at first. You tried to call me, and you just never got ahold of me.”
She nodded slowly.
“The past isn’t important,” I said. “The future is. And now we have to figure out what happens next. Where do we go from here?”
Aspyn shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not like I’ve been in this position before.”
I chuckled. “I guess that’s something else we have in common.”
She smiled, and we both shared a cleansing laugh. So many years of pain and secrets from both of us. Maybe we couldn’t let them go with one quick meeting in a conference room, but it was a start. Now we were both being honest with each other, and we could move toward something better.
Maybe something more than friendship.
Chapter 15
Aspyn
Alex sat in front me, staring past me, lost in his own world. I’m pretty sure that’s what was going on, at least. I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised. He’d just learned something major, or at least had it confirmed.
I still wasn’t convinced Carl hadn’t told Alex. He hadn’t acted as surprised as I’d expected. But it was hard to know. He might have worked it out for himself. It’s not that he needed to be a genius to count backward.
At least my stomach had unknotted itself now that I’d told him the truth, and he’d not reacted by pitching a fit.
I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, whether he knew before or not. Maybe more anger, but I was glad he’d been pretty calm about the whole thing. No chair throwing, yelling, or angry accusations about how I’d lied to him.
Alex was right, though. We’d both made our own mistakes. We both did what we thought was right. They say two wrongs don’t make a right, but sometimes it seemed like two rights didn’t make a right, either.
I let out a long sigh as his earlier question bounced around in my head. Where do we go from here?
I didn’t know. I’d never expected this day to come, so it wasn’t even like I’d thought about what to do after it. As far as I’d known, Alex would never come back to Livingston.
Okay, we both needed to move on, and I knew just the thing.
Fumbling, I searched my purse for my little present. I didn’t know what we would do after this conversation, but I had put some thought into what I’d do that day at least.
Alex looked over at me, and I handed him a stack of photos of Kadie. I could have shown him on my phone, but there was something about actual pictures you could hold that made the memory seem so much more real. At least it did to me, and I hoped he felt the same way.
He looked down at the pictures, his face blank.
“The top one is Kadie at the hospital,” I said quietly. “It was an easy birth. We were in the hospital a couple days.”
Alex stared at the picture, a smile forming. “She’s so beautiful.” He put it on the bottom of the stack.
