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He snorts and thrusts his hands into his pant pockets.
“How long you going to blame yourself?”
“Until I’m dead ought to do it.”
He sighs and pulls the chair opposite my desk out and drops into it. “At this rate, that won’t be long.”
“Scatter me in that lake at Dax’s estate. The one with the lilies. The fish can chew on my dust.”
“You’re a real depressing, self-absorbed fucker, you know that?” Tanner leans back in the chair, placing his hands on the back of his head and stretching his elbows out.
“So?” I shrug. “My father might have doused the house in petrol, Tan. But I struck the fucking match that made it burn.” I grit my teeth together, rolling my neck side to side in a piss-poor attempt at dislodging any of the permanent tightness there.
“She’ll come back.”
What if she doesn’t?
“All I ever wanted was to be the best father I could be.” I press my thumb and finger into my eye sockets, ignoring the dry burn from eight days’ worth of lack of food and sleep.
Lack of Sophie.
“I thought that meant being there for every morning, every bedtime story. Every cuddle, every smile, every cry. Every fucking thing.” I drag my hand down my face and tip my head back to stare at the ceiling. “I thought letting her go was the right thing to do. I thought… Fuck. I don’t know what the hell I thought.”
“I do,” Tanner says. “You were thinking like a Dad who loves his kids. Thinking of them before all else.”
“She deserves better than me.” I squint as I meet his eyes.
“Nah. She deservesyou, idiot. After everything you’ve done, there’s no way she can’t see that.”
“What if it’s not enough?” Desperation seeps into my tone. “What if she doesn’t come back? And she decides we can’t leave the past behind us?”
Tanner shakes his head. “You can’t think like that.”
“It’s all I can think like.”
“You waited four years for her. You can survive until she’s ready to come back.”
I grunt and cast my eyes back to the window and roof of the hotel in the distance. Tanner’s right. I did wait four years. But this is different. So fucking different. I know what she smells like… tastes like. I know what it feels like against my hand when our babies move inside her. I know the overwhelming sense I had that first night that she was always meant to be with me. That night, I pushed inside her and life began to grow.
Our life.
One that should be spent together. Not an ocean apart.
She’s my everything. They all are.
Those first four years feel like a skip through the park in comparison to the grueling marathon I’m dragging myself around now. Alone.
“You can survive,” Tanner repeats, fixing me with a look that’s as much as a challenge to argue with him as it is a reassuring show of support.
“Yeah,” I mutter.
His eyes drop to my phone on the desk as a text from Maddy pings on the screen.
“She coming here to give you a two-course lunch of grief again?”
“Probably.” My face crumples. “I don’t blame her. She saw Sophie when my father told her about Alicia. She watched her leave, just like I did.”
“She doesn’t understand, though. Why haven’t you told her?”
