Page 22 of The Heart Remembers

I look over at my mother, who still looks so young at fifty-four with her blond hair and blue eyes. You’d think I was biologically her child, and many people do. We let it slide and chuckle like we have a secret.

“If Derek isn’t the one, you can’t force it. You know I believe in fairy tales, so someday your prince will come,” she teases.

“What if he came, saw me with Derek, and kept going?” I’m joking, but I’m also a bit serious, too. What if I’ve missed my Prince Charming?

“Then either he’ll be back knowing you needed to learn Derek wasn’t your man, or he wasn’t your Prince Charming. The right one is still out there, waiting on you.”

“I’m getting old.”

“Hardly.” She laughs. “You’re only twenty-seven. You have a long time to go.”

“I don’t want to be alone,” I admit.

“No one ever does, baby. And you aren’t really alone, but maybe lonely. It will take time to let Derek go, if that’s what you really want to happen, but you’ll bounce back. Remember, you’re stronger than you know.” She winks at me, reminding me so much of how she changed the course of life for my dad and me, and I love her with everything in me.

“I love you,” she tells me.

“I know. I love you, too, Mom.”

“I’m going to check on your father. At the rate these men are celebrating Tom turning sixty, your dad isn’t going to make it to his sixtieth.” She’s teasing, but they have been acting like twenty-one-year-olds. I’ve never seen someone so happy to be sixty, and it feels like a lifetime away for me.

Mom stands, brushes back my hair, and bends to kiss my temple.

“Night, Katie bug.”

“Night.”

Only a few minutes pass before I hear the click of crutches and spin to find Levi helping himself to Mom’s vacated seat.

“Hey,” I whisper, not sure what to say to him.

“You ran off earlier.”

Yes, I did.

“What you saw wasn’t what you think,” he begins, and I fight the urge to roll my eyes. We aren’t teens. Lys and Levi can conduct their lives however they wish, I guess. “It’s not really my place to explain things, but Lys and her husband are having issues. He’s a douche, if you ask me, and Lys deserves better.”

“You’re right. It’s not my business.” However, my heart hurts for Lys. She really is sweet and deserves every bit of happiness. I just don’t want it to be Levi, which sounds petty and mean and adolescent.

“Nothing’s happening between us.”

“You don’t have to explain it to me.” I stare out at the dark water, flat and still with that beam of moonlight stretching toward me.

“But I feel like I do,” he says. “Because of last night.”

“We can pretend last night didn’t happen,” I say, still not looking at him. I can’t believe how easily I spread my legs and let him do what he did to me. I don’t even fault him as much as I do the book, my libido, and my still-present crush on this man as a grown adult.

“Is that what you want? You want to pretend it didn’t happen?”

“Don’t you? You kissed Lys.” It’s so childish I want to strangle myself for speaking like this.

“It was an accident.”

Looking over at him, I glare as I recall those exact words when it came to him kissing me at seventeen.

Fuck. It was an accident, he’d said to the person who interrupted us. After he’d been sweet and encouraging, telling me I was looking at him like I wanted to kiss him and then asking me that question. Did I want to kiss him? I wanted to send him off with a hero’s kiss and my own romantic dreams.

Ha. Kissing me had been an accident.