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“I figured the best thing for Bree would be to have both parents in her life. I’m not saying that she wouldn’t have been fine with just me, but if there was a shot that she could have her mom and her dad, I had to take it. I just didn’t want her to grow up with questions I couldn’t answer or wondering why her mom wasn’t around. I thought the healthiest thing would be that she was in her life, even if she hadn’t been for the first couple of years.”
“Well, as someone who grew up with one parent, I can tell you from firsthand experience, you did the right thing.”
Shit.He hadn’t even thought about the fact that they were literally driving to go find her dad. How had that not dawned on him. “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking abou—”
“No, it’s fine. I’m a walking testament that you made the right call. I mean look at me, I’m a grown woman who spent the past two years trying to track down my father for exactly the reasons you were concerned about. I have questions. I want answers. Not to mention how much it has fucked up my relationships with men. And my sisters, they might all be in healthy relationships now, but that wasn’t always the case.”
“How so?” Glenn usually wasn’t someone who asked prying or personal questions, but he was invested in Vivien. He wanted to know what made her tick. He wanted to know about her relationships. Not just with men but with her sisters, friends, and extended family.
Not that she’d mentioned any extended family other than Nonna. But that was the point, he didn’t even know if she had any.
Viv rolled up the empty bag of M&M’s and put it in the bag she’d designated as the trash bag. She took a drink of water, and then sighed. He glanced over to her and saw that she was looking straight ahead but appeared to be miles away and he figured she had ignored the question. He didn’t blame her. He understood being private.
She tucked her feet up on the seat and he did his best not to drool over her long-toned legs. The woman tempted him on every level. She was sexy to the point of distraction. She was wearing cut off jean shorts, sandals and a white V-neck T-shirt and she’d never looked hotter.
“Before Easton, Grace never let any man get close to her. She kept things on a surface level. None of the men she dated really knew her. Audrey said that a guy Grace had been dating for months showed up to pick her up and had asked for her by the wrong name. There was nothing real, nothing personal about any of her relationships.
“Then there’s Ava. Ava was engaged to Ian who she’d been with since they were in middle school. He was all wrong for her, but she stayed with him for nearly twenty years and would have walked down the aisle with him if Ian hadn’t slipped her a Dear Jane letter under the hotel door on their wedding day.”
“On their wedding day?” Glenn had a friend whose fiancée left him the week before the wedding, but he’d never actually heard of someone basically being stood up at the altar—or the hotel—day of.
“Yep. But thank God he did! Now she’s happily married to the person she was always supposed to be with and even got a kickass bonus stepdaughter out of the deal.
“And then there’s Audrey, sweet, sweet Audrey. Our mom used to take us to Hope Falls every summer for vacation and she met Josh down by the river on the Fourth of July when she was four years old. She’s been in love with him ever since. After Mom got sick, we stopped going on summer vacations so she hadn’t seen him since she was probably ten. Fast forward fifteen years, she graduated college and asked me to move to Hope Falls to open the coffee shop. I agreed, we got here, and she ran into him. They were friends, just friends for eight fucking years. Both of them had feelings for each other. Neither of them would admit it. It took mine and Nonna’s brilliant matchmaking skills before they finally got together.”
“And what about you?”
“What about me?”
“You said that not having your dad in your life fucked up your relationships with men.”
“Where do I start?” She let out a forced laugh. “I have trust issues and abandonment issues. The longest relationship I’ve ever had is six months. And, like yourself, I’ve never been in love. So yeah, my relationships with men are pretty fucked up.”
“But you still believe in the Hope Falls Effect?”
“Of course, I do. I might only have three hundred dollars in my bank account, but I still believe in millionaires.” She sighed. “Plus, I’m my mother’s daughter. I think believing in true love and happily ever after is built into my DNA.”
Glenn sat thinking about everything Vivien had just told him. About all the different ways her sisters were affected by their father being absent. His aunt kept telling him he didn’t need to be a monk just because he was a father, but hearing Vivien explain the lasting effects that her father had on her and her sisters only served to reinforce the reasons he’d taken the vow of celibacy in the first place.
“Oh and, for the record, I have more than three hundred dollars in my bank account. It was just an analogy.”
“Duly noted.” He nodded.
He loved that out of everything she’d just said to him, that was the point she wanted to clarify. He never knew what she was going to say next, but he was really enjoying spending time with her and finding out.
