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“You been to see Mom?” I ask at last.
“Yeah,” he admits, looking up. “We went with Dad on Christmas Eve. Crystal and the kids and me. He said he invited you.”
“How is she?”
“Not too well,” he says, grimacing. “I didn’t know it was this bad. I’m sorry you had to go through all that shit alone.”
“I wasn’t alone,” I say. “I had Preston.”
I catch the flash of regret in his eyes before he looks down at the baby, switching it from one arm to the other. I sink onto the new leather couch in the house where I grew up. I never thought I’d set foot in here again, now that it’s the Dolce lair. It’s hard to believe that it’s over, that they’ll finally stop trying to annihilate my family. But everything’s different now, and I have the babies to thank for that too, I suppose. Still, I keep a line of sight straight to the front door, and I’m on alert for the first Dolce sighting since I arrived.
Devlin stares glumly at the little dough ball, and the tide of my anger subsides for the moment. Even if he wouldn’t change it, that doesn’t mean he’s not sorry.
“You used to come to our house for Christmas Eve every year,” I say, nodding out the window to the wreckage of Devlin’s old house. “And Mabel would come here to be with her mom.”
“Yeah,” he says. “We took her to church this year, just like we used to.”
“It was before church we always drove her crazy,” I say, smiling. “She wanted to do something traditional, like bake cookies for Santa and listen to Christmas music.”
“But Dad would always get pizza, and we’d watchDie HardorThe Terminator,” he says.
“It was always some lame action movie from when he was growing up.”
“Lame?” he asks. “I think you mean awesome.”
We both chuckle, and I figure even if things aren’t the way they used to be, eventually we’ll find our way back to something we can live with. Maybe that makes us the lucky ones, that we get that luxury.
“So,” he says after a minute. “You and Dixie, huh? Never would have guessed that. You really let the Darling Dog make an honest man out of you?”
My jaw clenches as a dozen ugly thoughts swirl through my fucked up brain. I bristle at the implication that I’m tied down like him, that I’m not still free, that I don’t have options. But I’m the only dumbass who’s thought otherwise for a long time. I never had a choice, at least not the option of dating someone like Crystal Dolce, since the day Devlin disappeared.
At the same time, guilt sits heavy in my gut at the defensive instinct that rises in me, an urge to justify my girlfriend. I know it shouldn’t matter what he thinks. If I loved her the way she loves me, I wouldn’t care. She never cared when I was scum to everyone else. But I do care. Devlin bringing it up so directly makes me confront the ugly truth I try to hide, the one I tell myself will change. I tell myselfIcan change, that I can be worthy of the love she’s given me all this time. But his words just rub the truth in my face—I’m not what she deserves, and I never will be.
“She retired that title before you left,” I say after a minute. “If I recall correctly, we made Crystal the dog.”
“We tried,” Devlin says with a grin.
“So technically, you’d be the one who ended up with the Darling Dog, since no one ever replaced her.”
“Crystal was never a dog,” he says, not sounding at all bothered by my attempt to give him back the shit he’s giving me.
“Yeah,” I admit. “She’s too hot. Which is why I was supposed to fuck her that Homecoming night, and you weresupposed to get Dixie. If you hadn’t stolen Crystal, maybe we’d have traded places. You’d be with Dixie, and I’d be a dad.”
“Nah,” he says, tucking the blanket under the baby’s chin. “You weren’t ready for this. You wouldn’t have made it last.”
“Guess we’ll never know.”
“I didn’t steal her,” he says, looking up at me from the couch. “You know that, right? I didn’t take her away from you. She chose me that night. She knew what she wanted. That’s how we ended up in that bedroom together. Not because I wanted her. Because she wanted me.”
“I know.”
He’s trying to make it better, but it’s not. I already know she didn’t choose me. I already know everything would be different if she had.
But he’s probably right about one thing—I would have fucked it up. A girl like Crystal, she wouldn’t have put up with half the shit Dixie has. It’s hard not to think about it, though, not to dwell on the past and all the what-ifs, now that I know it could have been different. Now that I know they’re alive, and trading places with Devlin wouldn’t have meant trading my life.
It probably doesn’t mean trading the life I have now for the one he has, though.
Maybe I would have given up Crystal to save my family, and the Dolces would never have destroyed us the way they did. They would have been happy to give us a beatdown and move on, having won. After they took Preston’s eye, it would have been over. That’s when we knew we were beaten. We would have waved the white flag and walked away from the throne, defeated but still alive.
