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“Tyler was a nice guy,” I told him. “But then the accident happened. And then we found out about Mira ...” My voice trailed off. “It was a bit too much to put on a new relationship.”
“He bailed?” Liam asked.
It took everything in me not to drop his shocked gaze. Slowly, I nodded. “It was a pretty mutual decision, but yeah. And I can’t blame him.”
“What an absolute git.”
For a moment, I couldn’t do anything but stare.
Then I burst out laughing.
Liam’s face was full of confusion at first.
Then I laughed even harder.
“You’re serious,” I managed through my helpless laughter. Tears sprang to the edges of my eyes, and I wiped them away. “Oh gawd, you are actually serious right now. You giant, raginghypocrite.”
He scoffed, crossing his big arms over his big chest. “It’s not funny. I had perfectly valid reasons for what I did.”
“Liam, you stormed out of the lawyer’s office like a child when you found out,” I said, slowly getting ahold of myself. The laughter had felt good, though. Some of the tension had bled from my frame. “Wow. It’s been a while since I’ve laughed that hard. Thank you for that, truly.”
“Glad to be of service,” he ground out.
“You gonna tell me all those valid reasons?” I asked.
“Maybe another day,” he answered evenly.
I snorted. “That’s what I thought.”
“Back to the subject at hand. You’re leaving for a thing. Drop the kid off here, and we’ll be just fine.”
“I’m not just going to drop her off. You have to see her a couple times before you spend an entire weekend with her.” I pointed to the binders. “You can read through those in the meantime; they’ll help.”
He tugged at one of the binders sitting in the middle of the island, his face going slack with shock when he opened the first one. “Absolutely bloody not.”
“What?”
He gave me an incredulous look. “You’ve got a color-coded schedule in here. I’m surprised you don’t time it out when she takes a piss.”
“It’shelpful. Believe me, I wish I would’ve had one at the beginning.”
“I don’t need one. We’ll crack on just fine.”
“Liam, I don’t think you—”
He held up a hand. “I’ve done a lot of big transitions in my life, Valentine. Never had a pretty rainbow-colored binder for a single fucking one, and it all turned out just fine. Part of life is having to stumble through the shit when you can’t see the outcome. You don’t know how messy it’ll get, and you don’t always have a perfect plan.”
Slowly, he closed the binder and pushed it back in my direction along with the others.
I narrowed my eyes. He narrowed his right back.
“You can take those back with you, thank you very much.”
“No bullshit, right?” I asked.
He sighed.
“You want me to say what I’m thinking at any given time? Just so you can be aware of my emotional state?”
