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“Who are you?” I demanded.
His forehead furrowed. “Oh, sorry. I’m Ryan. Grace’s ex-husband.”
I laughed. There was no other suitable response.
Ryan’s frown deepened. “Why is that funny?”
He glanced at Grace as if asking for an explanation, and so did I. Her complexion was waxy, her eyes wide. One look at her shocked face and I realized Ryan wasn’t kidding. She couldn’t seem more horrified if she tried. My chest tightened.
Grace had beenmarriedand I hadn’t known?
She’d had a wedding and shared her life with a man and I’d had no idea? How was that possible? I knew everything about Grace, didn’t I? She was my reliable best friend. We didn’t have secrets from each other, and there was no way I could have overlooked something as massive as that.
“But Grace has never been married,” I protested, my voice too loud in the quiet room. The puppy barked, then glared at me.
“Nate…” she trailed off, looking lost.
“You can’t have been,” I said to her, placing the bottle of wine on the counter with more force than necessary. “We know everything about each other.” Or at least, I’d thought we had. Her expression was beginning to make me wonder. Was there something I’d missed?
Ryan looked between us and cringed. “I’m sorry, man. I didn’t know….”
My stomach heated with frustration at his interruption. At his presence, here in her home. Herex-husband.I shook my head, refusing to believe it. Grace didn’t keep things from me. She was steady and dependable. Always.
“Gracie, tell me what I’m missing.” She’d clear this up. She was the clever one. Sometimes I needed things spelled out for me.
She touched my arm. The brush of her fingers singed me like an open flame. “It was years ago.”
“What?” I stared at her. For the first time in my life, she looked like a stranger. I catalogued her features, each of them as familiar as my own, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I didn’t really know her at all. Somehow, at some point, Grace had become a person who hid things—parts of herself—from me, and that wasn’t okay. “So it’s true? You married this guy?”
She sighed and visibly pulled herself together. “Yes. But we divorced five years ago.”
“Five years ago.” I spoke to myself as much as her. Back then, she’d just returned to Destiny Falls. How could I possibly not have noticed that she was in the midst of divorcing her husband? It should have been the talk of the town. Although, come to think of it, I’d been going through my own separation about that same time and juggling work with raising my tiny daughter. Still, I didn’t understand how on earth the subject hadn’t come up. Had I been so engrossed in my own problems that I’d been blind to hers?
“Why is he here?” I asked, focusing on the present. If Ryan had come in some kind of attempt at reconciliation, he could back the hell off. I didn’t know what had caused their separation, but Grace was the kindest person I knew, so if she’d left him, there must have been a damn good reason for it.
“He brought Duke down for me. His sister, Felicia, breeds Rottweilers.”
I glanced at the puppy, taken aback. Now that she mentioned it, I recognized the trademark characteristics of the breed. I’d been too distracted to pay attention to them earlier. The small creature stared back at me, less hostile than it had been, but it didn’t move from its position near Grace.
“I didn’t know you wanted a dog.” That felt like another betrayal. I never held anything back when we spent time together. I told her all of my thoughts, and I’d believed she did the same with me, but it would seem I was wrong. Either that, or I’d simply not paid attention, and if I hadn’t paid attention to this, what else might I have overlooked when it came to her?
Ryan grabbed a glass from one of the cabinets and held it out to me. “Sorry for dropping a bombshell on you.” He shot Grace a look I probably wasn’t supposed to see. “Why don’t you pour yourself a drink, and we can sit down and talk this through?”
I backed toward the door, instinctively retreating. I couldn’t sit down with this man and chat like we were buddies. My mind was rioting.
“Nah, I’m going to go. You two look like you’ve got a cozy evening planned.” I turned toward Grace but didn’t meet her eyes. “I’ll catch you later.”
“Stay,” she whispered. “Please.”
I left.
It was only as I pulled up my own drive that I realized I’d left my damn beer behind.
3
GRACE
I returned to the kitchen,having followed Nate out to his car in the hopes he’d at least pause and hear me out—although what I’d say given the chance, I didn’t know. It didn’t matter anyway because he’d driven off in a rush. I sighed, and Ryan handed me a glass of wine he must have poured while I’d been gone.
