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“Did youtalkto Darlene? Did she call you when you had my phone?” My confusion quickly turned into anger, and again, it felt like I was being backed into a corner with only one way out.
“I didn’t call her.” She wouldn’t meet my gaze. “I didn’t—it was that night when I left you at the bar. You’d invited me to your place.”
“I waskidding. I left your phone at my place in the garage. Did you go to my house?”
Fear paled her face, and without a word, I knew she had. She had, and she’d met Darlene, and now she and Darlene were buddies plotting against me to take away my son.
“Ryan, I need you to listen. Please, I can see everything you probably want to believe right now but let me finish before you get angrier than you need to be.”
“You’re one to talk.”
She closed her eyes and took a visible breath slowly until her chest expanded, then deflated. I tried that myself, but my mind kept swimming with fire and the betrayal she was going to try to justify.
“Yes. I went to your house. The address was on your phone. I was angry and insulted, and I went there to demand my phone back from you. But you weren’t there. She was. I’m sorry.”
“She knows we’ve had sex, doesn’t she?”
Christie nodded. “I didn’t want to tell her. I didn’t want to get between you two. But I didn’t have a good reason for being there other than the truth. I wanted my phone and thought that was your address.”
“What the hell made you look for myaddress?”
“It was programmed as home.Youinvited me over. Ididn’t know anything about your situation, so I made an assumption.”
“And now she thinks I’m fucking other women like some hog running the free world, and you’re just the first slut to tell her.” I swallowed the breath that those words came with, reining my emotions in and wishing I could take that last part back. That was how I used to talk to Darlene. The hurt draining the fight from Christie’s eyes not only told me that she’d seen a side she didn’t like, but it told me we were done before we started.
“Youaresleeping around, Ryan,” she said calmly, her face relaxing as she pushed her plate aside. “You want to sue James’s mother and take her son away from her, and you want to ruin her life by, what, proving she’s cheating? Even if that worked, which it won’t, you want to do the exact same thing youthinkshe’s doing to you. Why? To prove a point?”
“Christie ...”
“Oh, no. You aren’t going to play the victim with me when you’re going to rage like that. A slut? You really have the audacity to call me aslut?”
“I’m sorry.” I fumbled for my voice, but my hope was quickly draining, and though she stood slowly, I felt like she was running fast.
“You’re just angry because you can’t take responsibility for the fact that you found success and left your wife and son behind.” She jutted a finger at me. “You are just an angry man who wants to ruin someone’s life because you’re too much of a coward to admit that your actions caused damage, and instead of cleaning up your mess and accepting that you can’t just slap a bandage over it, you want to mess with your ex’s wife life—and my life, apparently—just to get your way.”
She had walked until she stood in front of me and made a move for her water. I held up my hand to speak. “You’re right,” I said, believing the words as they left my mouth.
She set the glass down, but it missed the corner of the table and fell over into my lap. I stared at the large wet stain, its icy chill taking with it the fire of my earlier anger. I looked up in time to see Christie scoff, a ghost of a smile playing at her lips, and she walked out without another word.
Chapter 21
Christie
Ryan had called, but I hadn’t answered and still didn’t before shutting off my phone. The plane was off the ground when it hit me that I wasn’t returning to Dallas and that soon this place, and Ryan, would just be another bad memory added to the books.
I’d thought we had a good connection worth taking somewhere. It had started out so hard, but when the smoke cleared, it seemed pretty good. I hadn’t thought about what that would mean or how Darlene and James would fit in the picture, but I was open to finding out. Eager to discover it. If only he was open to it, too.
But court? For full custody? Because he was scaredof what shemightdo. He hadn’t even asked her about her plans. I just couldn’t imagine a world where that was okay.
I didn’t know Darlene well, but I’d talked to her enough to know that she had suffered a lot for their family, and Ryan had, too. But Darlene didn’t want her son to be a victim of Ryan’s rage. She didn’t want James to remember that side of him. Wasn’t that enough reason to respect the distance she wanted between James and his father until he proved that he was in a better place?
I wasn’t familiar with what good co-parenting looked like, but it wasn’t that. It wasn’t anger and lies and constant victimization with no room for accepting blame.
Darlene had work to do in accepting blame herself, but just seeing how quickly Ryan unfolded like that made me feel sorry for her, for James. Even without fists, anger like that could only end in tears.
I’d admired him. He loved his son so much. Just watching him talk about him showed me how much he wanted to be part of his son’s life. Then again, was his love really all that pure? If he intended to ruin Darlene’s life, that just made him a manipulative, arrogant pig. A part of me didn’t believe that, even though it had to be true. But he definitely needed to work on himself first, in more ways than one, and until he did that, I wasn’t sure he was ready to be a dad.
I thought so hard about it all that I didn’t even realize we had landed. I shrugged it off and waited until it was finally my turn to follow the trail of passengers off the plane.
