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“What changed your mind?”
“I got to know you and found out you weren’t the monster I’d always pictured in my mind.”
“Thanks, I think.”
“And any guy who’d propose marriage as a solution, well, it’s hard to stay worried about his motives.”
“Yeah, about that, I’m sorry for asking.”
“Forget about it.” Even if she couldn’t. Even if it still stung every time that she thought about it.
“It’s just that the thought of not being with Harper every day... Well, you get it.”
“I do.”
“But it’s more than that. While I was sitting with Dad last night, all I could think about was when we found out that Ace wasn’t his child. My siblings and I were focused on the scandal and the chaos, but Dad lost his son that day. After he’d already lost the child’s mother.”
“That must have hit so close to home for you. First Nora—”
He shook his head before she could get the rest out.
“It’s not like that. Yes, my ex will always be important to me. She was the mother of my child, after all, but we were never—” He stopped himself that time and shrugged.
“Yeah, I get it.”
From the beginning, their situations had been alike but different, their wounds from betrayal like a T in the road, two points meeting through the turn and continuing on their own rocky paths.
He was quiet then, sipping coffee that must have grown cold and staring at a place where only he could see.
“You know, I wasn’t happy when I got Nora pregnant. I wasn’t ready to be a parent.”
“Then you stepped up and became a great dad.”
Asher shook his head as if he couldn’t allow her to smooth out the jagged edges of his pain.
“I just keep thinking that my sweet Harper, the child I love more than I thought I was capable of caring about anyone or anything, might not even be...mine.”
As his voice broke, his misery clear in his damp eyes, Willow couldn’t stop herself from reaching out to him this time. She placed both of her hands around the tangle his fists had formed together. For several seconds, he stared at that connection before looking up again.
“You’ll still be a father to Harper,” she blurted before she could stop herself.
“Just like I’ll always be a mother to...Luna.” Her voice cracked as she spoke her child’s name, perhaps for the last time while still believing they were biologically linked. Her chest squeezed so tightly she was convinced that the pain would crush it. “We will. Somehow. No matter what.”
He stared back at her, searching for a guarantee, the thing she had no ability to give.
“I want to believe that.”
His raw whisper touched her in the deepest part of her soul.
“Then believe it,” she said.
For several seconds or minutes, Willow stared into his eyes, a guarded man’s wounds openly displayed for her, with hope lingering just out of reach. Then she did the only thing she could think of to soothe his pain.
Leaning in close, she touched her lips to his. Only when she tasted salt did she realize that she was crying. Or, maybe, they both were.
He didn’t pull away, but he didn’t commit, either, only staring back at her with shock and something she couldn’t define. She kissed him again, her mouth slightly open and connecting with the dampness just inside his parted lips.
When Asher slid his hands out f
