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“You hid all of that from me.”
“Not all.” I did hide a lot of it, hoping it would work itself out. Even though I tried to be as open with him as I could, it hadn’t been enough.
Again, my fault, not his.
“Most of it,” he corrected. “But despite all that, what you did…” He shook his head. “What you did in the end was unforgivable.”
“I know. I made it worse by telling myself it was only sex between us. Exploration. Two boys figuring things out in a safe place.”
“Boys? Hardly. Only sex?” He shook his head again. “No, it wasn’t. You can try to convince yourself of that now to help make swallowing the guilt a little easier, but that’s a lie that you don’t even believe, Tate. You know it and I know it. We were together two fucking years. Or I thought we were. Now that I look back, I question that.”
“We were.”
“Then, tell me… How did Dahlia get pregnant, Tate?”
“I explained what happened.”
“Yeah,” he huffed. “You explained all right. Explaining doesn’t change the fact of what you did. You fucked us both, Tate. Both me and Dahlia. And I’m not talking about sex.”
I opened my mouth to apologize for the hundredth time, but I stopped myself. I’ve told both Roe and Dahlia how sorry I was more times than I could count. Sorry didn’t cut it. Action would.
That was why I was sitting across from Ronan and facing my past. Facing our past.
If nothing more, I hoped to at least cleanse away the bitterness he held for me. The bitterness I held for myself. And help us both heal.
“At the time, I tried to convince myself I was doing the right thing. Even though deep down, I knew,” I blew out a breath, trying to relieve the massive knot in my chest, “I knew it wasn’t. But I felt like I was on a path I had no control over, a path I didn’t know how to step off. My mistake was taking the path of least resistance.”
“You could’ve been there for Dahlia without leaving me.”
“I could’ve but I already had been selfish enough. I was trying to fix that.”
“And here you are, trying to fix things now.”
“Yes. I don’t want you to hate me.”
He scraped his fingers over his short, dark hair. “Too late for that, Tate. That ship sailed a long fucking time ago.”
“I also want to stop hating myself. It’s not good for my children.”
He stared at me. “Speaking of children. Where’s your other kid?”
Shit. I couldn’t avoid this, either. As much as I wanted to.
“The older one,” he continued as I scrambled to compose my answer so I wouldn’t completely shut down. “Wouldn’t he or she be about twelve now?”
“Eleven.”
“Was it a boy or girl?”
“A boy.”
A heaviness suddenly filled the air between us enough to compress my chest, making it feel as if I was being held underwater before getting a chance to take a big breath of air first.
Maybe this had been a bad idea. I should’ve just let this be. We could’ve simply ignored each other and gone on about our lives.
I was beginning to worry that I’d messed up again.
But then, that was nothing new.
CHAPTER 11
Tate (Now)
“So, what happened to that kid? The excuse you used for marrying Dahlia because she got pregnant after you broke up with her? Neither of those kids I saw you with were close to being eleven, Tate. Was the reason you used to leave me a lie, too?”
This was the last place I thought tonight’s conversation would go. I figured in the future what happened would need to be discussed but not tonight. I expected anything but this. “It wasn’t a lie.”
“Then?”
I struggled to take my next breath. “The baby was still-born.”
He drilled his elbows into his thighs and leaned forward, closing the gap between us slightly. “What?”
Of course he hadn’t heard me. The words I spoke were both silent and deafening at the same time.
I cleared the rough from my throat and tried again. “He was still-born.”
I rarely talked about it because it still tore me apart like it happened yesterday. It was a day I’d never forget.
I pressed my thumbs into my eye sockets to ease the sting.
“Tate…”
I shook my head and lifted a hand so he could give me the moment I needed. To gather myself. Because if I didn’t, I’d shatter and I wouldn’t be able to continue.
While it was an important discussion, I didn’t want to derail the whole reason I wanted to meet Ronan on the roof.
Surprisingly, he remained quiet and waited, but I was afraid to look at him. I didn’t want to see any pity in his eyes.
Or maybe I was afraid I wouldn’t see any empathy at all. I feared I would discover that Ronan Pak was heartless and cold and I never really knew him.
