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He’d called.
Her phone vibrated in her hand and played a series of musical notes.
Correction. He was calling. Trace was calling.
With shaky fingers, she slid her fingertip across the phone screen to answer the call. “Hello.”
“Chrissie.”
“Trace.” Their one word responses couldn’t go on, so she added, “Good to hear from you.”
“Is it?”
She winced. Not quite sure how to take his comment, she opted to ignore it. It was good to hear from him compared to not hearing from him, but she didn’t really know what to say.
“Why are you calling, Trace?”
“You thought I wouldn’t after the bombshell you dropped?”
Heat crawled up Chrissie’s neck.
“You got off the phone with me rather abruptly. I wasn’t sure what to expect.” Ha. He’d essentially hung up on her, leaving her a bumbling mess that Savannah had found crying in the empty patient room she’d called him from.
Ugh. How she hated the tangled mess she found herself in. Stupid conscience. Stupid her for going to Atlanta. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Everything had been just fine until she’d seen Trace again. She’d been happy, content with her life with Joss. Then she’d had to go and mess everything up by going back to the place where it all started.
The moment she’d seen Trace she should have left.
Only part of her acknowledged she’d gone to Atlanta with the hopes of possibly seeing him again.
Which meant what exactly?
She’d brought this mess tumbling down upon herself for sure.
“I needed to process what you said.”
That she could understand. She hadn’t meant to tell him over the phone. She’d meant to set up a time they could meet, talk, that she could tell him about Joss, show him a picture, let him decide how he wanted to proceed with becoming a part of Joss’s life.
If he wanted to be a part of Joss’s life.
“Have you?” she whispered, her voice twisting up in
her throat.
His sigh was palpable across the phone. “As much as I can.”
Chrissie shifted the phone to her opposite hand and pulled a baggy T-shirt over her wet head, thinking that might help her feel less uncomfortable talking to him. Getting dressed sure couldn’t hurt, because standing wrapped only in a towel was doing nothing for her nerves.
His silence wasn’t, either.
“And?” she finally asked, pulling on a pair of panties, and carrying her towel back to the bathroom and hanging it over the side of the tub.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what Trace had concluded, but was ready to prepare for whatever the near future was about to bring, because obviously she’d reached a point where she was no longer able to deal with her guilty conscience.
“I want to meet him.”
She wasn’t sure if the noise that escaped her was a sigh in relief or a whimper of despair. Maybe a deformed bit of both.
