Mason was always an inclusive kind of boyfriend, the type my friends loved hanging out with and my parents flat out loved. When I’d come home, giddy with excitement over our engagement, my mom had burst into happy tears and my dad had been thrilled to finally, in his words, “have a son.”
Aria deserves someone like that, a man who will make her life fuller and richer, not harder and lonelier. I hope someday I can help her find someone like that. Someone like Mason.
And yes, Mason screwed up, too, but not like Liam. He wasn’t a serial liar or a cheat. He was a damaged soul who was afraid he didn’t have what it took to be a good husband. But instead of letting that fear drag him down, he’d fought back, getting the help he needed to learn to have faith in himself.
And then he’d come home to fight for me. For us.
I’m so proud of him, and so grateful we’re together again, that all the pain from the past feels like it happened in another lifetime.
That’s the thing about being in love: it feels so good, you want everyone to have the same blissful experience, to soar on the wings of happiness and anticipation into the fluffy, pink clouds of happily ever after.
Even after only a few days, you tend to forget the heartbreak, to block out the misery of being left alone and betrayed.
You forget, until something—or someone—forces you to remember.
Chapter 19
Aria
I wake up early.
Very early, considering I stayed up until midnight playing cards with Melody and Lark and got up to feed Felicity at two thirty, and then again at five. But for some reason, my eyes fly open at six fifteen and stay that way, fixed on the ceiling while an unexpected sense of dread—like a raincloud sweeping in to hover over the bed, menacing me with its ominous, black belly—swells inside me.
It’s…strange.
There’s no reason to feel so off-center, not when I went to bed happier than I’ve been in months.
The stubborn, prideful part of me hasn’t wanted to tell anyone what Liam did, not even my sisters. But the lonely, broken, certain-I-am-unlovable part appreciated hearing Lark call Liam a bastard so much it was probably sinful. I needed to hear that I’m too good for the man who broke my heart into a thousand, razor-sharp pieces. I needed Lark’s strong hug and assurance that the best days of my life are still ahead of me. Just a few hours of not being alone with my secret—one of them, anyway— was enough to send me to bed with a smile on my face and a tiny, flickering flame of hope in my heart.
I fell asleep more easily than I have in months and dreamed a scandalous dream starring Nash Geary and his impossibly perfect body. The boy was perfect enough back when we were kids, but the man he is now…
Well, now, Nash is the stuff of fantasies.
And naughty dreams involving me, him, a bucket of ice in a hot tub, and not a stitch of clothing.
No matter how awkward and humiliating eating dinner with him had been, it was almost worth it for a dream like that. I haven’t had a dream that wasn’t a nightmare since I caught Liam cheating the first time.
Between the talk with Lark, the perfect late night with my sisters—eating massive amounts of cheese and snorting wine through my nose over stories from when we were little—and the delicious dream, I should be waking up invigorated and ready for a fresh start.
Instead, I have…dread.
It’s almost as if something inside of me knows.
Knows I’m going to run into Mason’s creepy uncle at the store while picking up the diapers I forgot to grab yesterday. Knows Parker will tell me that he received the message I left the other day asking if he still has any of Mason’s things, and that Parker will give me a box of his nephew’s old papers right there in the parking lot of the A&P.
Knows I will take those papers home and sneak them up to the closet in my room and go through the box during Felicity’s nap, even though a voice in my head screams for me to leave it alone, to let Lark and Mason be happy and quit looking for the fly in the ointment.
Knows I will find something that proves that Mason is a liar—a liar then, and a liar now, and making a fool out of Lark all over again.
And once I know the truth, I can’t un-know it. I can’t turn back time and restore my own innocence, and I can’t sit back and let Lark be tricked by the man who already shattered my too-trusting sister once before.
I don’t want to destroy Lark’s dream, but I don’t want my sister to be destroyed, either. I don’t want Lark to know what it’s like to give everything she has to a man, only to be left alone and devastated when he decides everything isn’t good enough. I don’t want my sister to hurt the way I hurt, the way I’m not sure I will ever completely stop hurting, no matter how much time passes or how many good things come into my life.