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“How old do you think this oak is?” Darlene had asked me once. We’d walked this trail many times before, usually to escape the terrors of her final exams and find some quiet in the chaos that stole her normal brightness.
“I’m not sure,” I droned, glancing back at the tree and measuring it with a quick scan. “A hundred, maybe.”
She guffawed. “A hundred? It’s not that big, is it?”
“Sure it is!”
Darlene’s eyebrow lifted in a challenge, so I laughed. “What, you don’t think this tree is big enough to be a hundred?”
“No, I don’t.”
“And why are you so sure?”
Her cheeks reddened, and I followed her gaze to a small plaque on a stand shorter than the actual bench. It wasn’t too far from the tree, but it was at least close enough to me that I could see the engraving of an oak tree and the year that, I assumed, it was planted.
“1925. That’s not as off as you acted like it was.”
Darlene scooted closer. “Well, it wasn’t a hundred.”
I wasn’t sure why that memory was the one I remembered, but I’d decided that day that I loved her. I didn’t tell her later when I proposed right here, on this bench, under the not-one-hundred-year-old oak tree.
Had I been distant even then? Had she wondered in the beginning whether she’d have to deal with me working so much? It almost made it worse that I realized it now, after all the time and effort we’d put into a relationship only for it to fail.
Was it worth it to try again with someone else? And was Christie really someone I wanted to try with? She’d been the first woman I enjoyed spending time with in a long while, and it wasn’t until she dumped her drink on me that I knew I had real feelings for her. She didn’t sugarcoat things.
I wished I’d let myself appreciate that quality in Darlene, but I still could, I supposed. As James’s mother.
“Ryan.”
My head shot up and landed on the thick, muscular frame of Duke the Fluke. I ground my teeth as I remembered the pressure he’d put on Darlene to cancel her bank account—to move north with his family.
“Duke,” I managed, fighting the building pressure in my chest when he sat beside me.
Stained.
My memory of this place was officially stained.
Chapter 27
“How are you? I didn’t know you were still in town.”
I didn’t meet Duke’s gaze or shake his hand when he’d offered it, but now that his ass was where Darlene’s used to be in every good memory I had of us, I wanted to shove his face into the cement and walk away.
“You doing okay?”
I swallowed a couple of dozen sarcastic remarks before I settled on something a little less than friendly. “No better than you, I’m sure.”
Duke was taken aback. His body recoiled in a way that made the big guy seem a hell of a lot smaller. “Did you talk to Darlene?”
I sighed. I’d just started a conversation I didn’t want to be part of. “I...” I what? I saw her with the man she cheated on you with. “Yes. The other day.”
Duke’s body slumped, and the tall, frustratingly friendly asshole suddenly seemed like a shell of himself. Not that I knew him well enough to know, but he’d never been shy about his size before. “I don’t know what to do, man.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.”
He smacked his legs, which I realized were incredibly white up to his thighs. I fought the urge to move away from him.
“She told me it had only happened once,” he said, shaking his head. “I can’t tell whether she’s lying.”
