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She knew so little about any of this. It was all just local gossip. But she’d passed a few of them in their beaten-up pickup trucks in flannel shirts coming up and down the road that led to the tip-top of the mountain. They were mountain men with money in the bank.
The whole thing seemed fascinating to her. But she wasn’t fascinated enough to try to get to know anyone.
Sitting back and looking around, she continued. “Anyway, I almost got married a couple of years ago. Well, we were talking about getting married. We never really made it to the point where he popped the question.”
How much of this did she want to explain to her ex-boyfriend? If they’d never dated, Charity would be more than excited to spill all. This was Nic Winters, her high school boyfriend and prom date, not Nic Winters, her childhood best friend and confidante.
“What happened?” he asked.
She stared at the teenagers having a blast in the center of the restaurant. Life seemed so much simpler when they were hanging out here. Couldn’t they go back to the days when the only worry they had was whether or not they got a good grade on Friday’s math test?
“We were already like an old married couple,” she said. “I don’t know what it was. Everything on the surface seemed perfect. He wanted to move to this town and even looked into opening a real estate office here. But he was dead set on routines. Even when he wasn’t visiting, we’d get on the phone at the same time every night. He’d come in on Friday nights and take me to dinner at the same place—the Mexican restaurant off the strip. I started to realize we’d become more like friends than two people in love, and I didn’t want to marry someone who was just a friend.”
“Absolutely.” He nodded. “Although there are benefits to getting comfortable in your couple routines.”
A bolt of jealousy swept through her. He said that as though he knew from experience.
“What about you?” she asked. “I don’t see a wedding ring.”
“I took it off when the divorce was final.”
Whoa. He’d been married? If jealousy had surged earlier, it threatened to boil over now. All this time, it’d been easy to just assume he was living a single life, doing nothing but working. But of course his life had gone on. It just hurt more than she could have imagined to know he’d said “I do” to someone else. Someone who wasn’t her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.”
Nic looked at his left ring finger. “It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do. We both knew it was for the best, but that didn’t make it hurt any less. It felt like a failure, you know? I don’t really believe in divorce, but it takes two people working together to make it last.”
“How long were you married?” she asked.
“Just a year and a half. We worked together on a farm in Indiana.”
So he’d lived somewhere else before he settled in Lexington. Interesting.
“It seemed like we had a lot in common, but she didn’t want kids.” He looked down at his hands, and she wondered if he was thinking about the wedding ring that used to be there. “That was a huge surprise. She didn’t mention it. We’d been married a few months, then she dropped that bomb on me. I just couldn’t imagine going the rest of my life not being a father. It’s important to me, you know?”
She nodded. “Me, too.”
“You’d make a great mom.”
Those words went straight to her heart. Nobody had ever told her that. It was strange—such a simple thing. But she’d begun to worry in the past year or so that motherhood might not be in the cards for her. Maybe she was destined to only have her career, her friends, and her family.
It wouldn’t be so bad. If her sisters ever got around to having children, she’d be a good aunt. And her friends would have kids.
“I wish you were still around,” she said, feeling a rush of emotions all of a sudden. “I miss our talks.”
She meant every word of that. He might be her ex, but he’d once been one of her closest friends. That had made their breakup doubly painful.
But she didn’t want to think about that right now. She just wanted to enjoy the last hours they’d spend together before he left town for good.
8
“Iwas a jerk.”
Nic uttered those words somewhere between his third and fourth slice of pizza. He’d been watching her talk about the various friends they’d had that left town and never came back. She seemed to know who had what job, who was married, and who had kids. It made him wonder if she tried to keep up with him. But he deliberately left his name and face off the internet, so she wouldn’t have even found his city or his job in a web search.
“You were a jerk?” She set her half-eaten pizza slice down and lifted her napkin to pat the perfectly clean area around her mouth. “What do you mean?”
He waited as she lowered the napkin back to her lap. No reason to wait. He was just trying to gather his thoughts. What exactly was he planning to say here?
