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“One of us is. She’s done with me.”
“Did you do something wrong?”
Now, why did she think he was the one at fault? He started to ask her, then thought better of it. After all, according to Damaris at least, he was the one at fault. “I screwed up. She’s convinced I lied to her and now she says she can’t trust me.”
“Did you lie to her?”
He shrugged. “Sort of.”
“Either you did or you didn’t. Which one is it?”
“Technically I guess you can say I lied. But it was a lie of omission.”
Grandma looked at him for a long moment then drank some tea. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” she said, setting down her glass. “We’re going to eat our lunch and you’ll clean up and then we’ll go in the living room and you can tell me what the heck is going on.”
They basically ate in silence until they finished. After he’d cleaned up, he went to the den where Grandma sat with a crossword puzzle. She did one every day, saying they kept her mind working and at her age anything that helped your mind was a good thing. Setting it aside, she demanded, “What in the heck did you do? If Damaris says you lied, I’ll wager she knows what she’s talking about.”
“I screwed up. Royally.” He told her the whole story. How it started when she’d said she wanted to see him dating someone or have a more serious girlfriend. And given that Damaris was the only woman he wanted, he’d decided that asking her to be his fake girlfriend was the perfect way to convince her that the two of them should be together.
“Judging from seeing the two of you together, I gather it worked.”
“Yeah. Kinda. But Damaris never admitted how she really felt about me. She kept saying we were just temporary. I finally got sick of it and asked her to marry me for real.”
“What happened then?”
“Exactly what I’d figured. She flipped out. Especially when I told her I’d been in love with her basically since we met.”
“Is that true? You’ve been in love with her all this time? And she didn’t know?”
“Yes, it’s true. And no, she didn’t know. She wanted to be friends so that’s what we’ve been. I’ve been waiting, trying to figure out how to convince her she wanted more. So when you told me you wanted to see me settled, I thought why not try? Nothing else I’ve done has worked, so maybe this will. She’s the only woman I’ve ever been in love with. I’ve thought I was in love before but those were nothing compared to how I feel about Damaris.
“And now she’s pissed because I ‘lied’ to her when I didn’t tell her I loved her to begin with. But if I had, she’d have run so fast all I could’ve seen was her dust. Which I told her.”
“Lying’s not good. And a lie of omission is still a lie.”
“That’s what she says,” he replied grimly. “If I could have seen another way, I wouldn’t have done it. But she was always so adamant that we just be friends. So, yeah, I lied by omission.”
“Well, Nate, that’s a fine pickle you’re in. What are you going to do about it?”
“What can I do? She knows I love her. She knows I’m—” Sorry, he started to say. But he hadn’t told her he was sorry. Because to him it hadn’t been a lie. But to Damaris it had. And she was the one who mattered. She was the one who felt betrayed. By him. The man who supposedly loved her.
He had to do something. But he had no freaking idea what.
*
Damaris was in the barn saddling Cinnamon to go for a ride. What she always did when she was upset and didn’t know what to do. She knew she should talk to someone. Not her brothers. They didn’t need to know any more than she and Nate had broken up. Jaclyn, who knew her best, knew that whatever was going on, it wasn’t a simple breakup. But Damaris hadn’t had the courage to talk about it. As if ignoring what had happened would make it go away.
“Damaris, I need to talk to you.”
Oh, God. Nate. Just the sound of his voice brought on so many conflicting emotions. Love, despair, betrayal. “I asked you not to come here,” she said with her back still to him. She was afraid to look at him. If she did she might throw herself into his arms and tell him nothing mattered but the two of them. But that would be a lie.
“I know. But you wouldn’t answer your phone and I needed to tell you something.”
She drew in a breath and turned around. Damn, he looked as bad as she felt. Like he hadn’t slept in days, maybe hadn’t eaten either. “What?”
“I told Grandma the truth.”
“Why?”
