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So what if he didn’t know the names of every single member of One Direction? Or any of them? Or even if that was a band (he was pretty sure it was a band), or some kind of dance troupe, or some other sort of creative thing that he wasn’t aware of. The important thing was that he knew Mila had been devastated when they broke up.
It was her emotions that he cared about. What she loved, what she hated, what brought her joy, and what hurt her.
“I can’t believe you’re actually dating Alison Bartholomew. She’s my favorite Broadway star,” she said dramatically.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ve been on one date.” He wanted to keep her expectations reasonable. He knew he should be giving the same advice to his own heart, because the minute that he’d heard the phrase “dating Alison” it had started beating a million miles a minute.
“So,” Mila continued conspiratorially, completely ignoring the word of caution he’d just given her, “when are you two seeing each other again?”
He looked down at her young, eager face. He saw the excitement and hope and vulnerability shining just behind her eyes. Just behind that thin veneer of cool that she was trying so hard to cultivate.
It was the first inkling he had that this whole thing could potentially go seriously wrong. That wasn’t what he wanted, of course, but a phone call in the middle of the night five years ago, one that changed his life and Mila’s forever, had taught him that life had very little regard for the way individual people wanted it to go.
There was every possibility that things would deteriorate horribly between him and Alison somehow. That she’d just disappear one day. That he’d get his heart broken. If he was going to be realistic, and when you have a child in your life who depended on you that was really the only way to be, he had to admit that based on statistics alone the relationship would probably flame out spectacularly one day. That could be tomorrow or it could be months or years down the road, but chances are it would happen.
Fuck.
He didn’t mind getting his own heart broken. Hell, it wasn’t ideal, but he was a grown man and he could take it. He’d survived worse than a broken heart.
But Mila? She was just a kid. He hadn’t thought about the fact that this whole thing would affect her, as well. If Alison waltzed out of their lives one day as abruptly and spectacularly as she’d waltzed in, his heart wouldn’t be the only one shattered into a million pieces. There was a fun and sassy thirteen-year-old that he was putting at a huge risk of getting her heart broken, as well. And as expert as he was at refurbishing things, hearts weren’t something you could fix with a hammer and wood glue.
