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“Yes, I know.”
“About that case—your client fucked you over and he did it last minute.”
“He did. I really thought he’d gotten his life back on track but I was wrong. I dropped him as a client that day.”
“As you should have. He’s a piece of shit. He not only has a major drug problem but a violence problem too. It was clear to me that he would’ve gotten ahold of you, Stevie, if he could have,” Brooke said, looking over at me. “Thank God Zac was right there to keep him away from you.”
“I know. No doubt, Mr. Ferguson could’ve hurt me had Zac not gotten to him in time, but I was never scared of him. If he had been able to reach me, I would’ve gone down fighting.”
Brooke nodded. “We all know that. I spoke with Judge Smith later that day and he told me that he was impressed by your ‘in-your-face assertiveness,’ as he put it, and also how prepared you were with the case. He also said he was glad that you’re part of my team now.”
“I’m glad to be part of it too.”
“Next week, you’ll get to assert yourself again when Mrs. Ferguson has her day in court.”
“If she doesn’t mess up before then.”
“There’s no telling with people like her and her husband. Anyway… Enough of that. Now that we’re done eating, I’m gonna shift gears on both of you by going back to talking about your relationship.”
“Okay,” Zac and I said in unison but this time, we didn’t look over at each other and laugh. We kept our eyes on Brooke.
“When I told you that I understood your relationship, I meant it in a very personal way. I’m about to share something that neither of you know about but I think you’ll appreciate hearing it. I was in your exact position at one time. I had an affair. My marriage to my kids’ father was a miserable joke just like yours is to Avery, Zac. My ex-husband and I were living separate lives even though we lived under the same roof. We slept in separate bedrooms, we didn’t eat meals together—nothing. He was a drunk jerk who barely worked because he was employed by his mommy and daddy. I worked all the time and also took care of the kids. I shut down emotionally and went through my days and nights like a robot…until I met ‘the exception’, as I will always call him. He was the only man that I ever broke all the rules for and I’m telling you—I broke them, willfully and unapologetically. He and I both did.”
Brooke stopped talking long enough to take a big gulp of her mimosa, then continued telling Zac and me this all-too-familiar story.
“Like you, Stevie, he was divorced with no kids. And I was like you, Zac—unhappily married with… Well, more than one kid. Our affair began two weeks after we met, but our falling in love with each other began happening on the day we met. Our affair was so passionate. It was on fire and it consumed both of us.”
Brooke stopped talking again and took a deep breath. There were tears in her eyes now and Zac reached out to hold her hand. It was trembling as she reached for his.
“We can take a break,” Zac said.
Brooke shook her head no and smiled through her tears. “I need to finish telling you everything. I’ll be all right.”
“Okay.”
“The exception and I wanted to build a life together. We talked about it so much but when it came down to making thatleap, I pulled back. I couldn’t do it. As pathetic as my ex-husband was, I didn’t wanna split up my family by divorcing him. I didn’t want my kids to have to uproot from the only home that they’d ever known. They were happy there, even with their father being who and how he was.”
“They were happy withyoubeing there, Brooke,” Zac told her. “And they would’ve been happy living anywhere as long as you were there.”
“I realized that too late.” She pulled her hand away from Zac’s to wipe her eyes and nose with her napkin, then took another drink of her mimosa. “One year to the day of when my affair with the exception began, it ended. It ended after I told him that I wouldn’t get a divorce even as much as I wanted to. When we told each other goodbye, I felt my soul rip apart. I watched the one man who I loved with every ounce of my being walk away from me, crying just as hard as I was. He was my soul mate and I was his. We both knew it, too.”
Zac looked at me and then wrapped his arm around my shoulders, pulling me closer to him. Then he hugged me with both his arms while resting his head on top of mine. All three of us sitting here at this table had tears flowing from our eyes now. We took a moment to collect ourselves and then Brooke started talking again. Going by what she’d last said, I’d thought her story ended there, but I was wrong.
“The exception and I never spoke to or saw each other again—not until I received a phone call from him three years later to tell me that he was dying of prostate cancer. He’d had it for several months and it was in its last stage. He asked me to come to see him because he didn’t wanna leave this earth without seeing or touching me one last time, so I went to him. I went to the hospice that he was at and as soon as I walked into his room, I went straight to him in his bed. We hugged, we kissed each other and we cried. I stayed with him until he took his last breathfour days later. I was holding him in my arms when he died. Zac Buchanan and Stevie Sinclair…”
“Yes?” we both choked out.
“I wanted to share all of this with you to teach you a lesson that I wish I’d learned a long time ago, and that’s to be true to yourself. Listen to what your heart and soul are telling you and don’t waste precious time hanging on to anything that keeps you from truly livingandloving. If I could go back in time, I would’ve gotten divorced and made a life with my one and only exception.”
I buried my face in the crook of Zac’s neck, closed my eyes and continued to quietly cry. He was my one and only exception and I knew that I was his too. I also knew that I was never letting go of him, no matter how difficult things got.
“Brooke, I-I…” Zac stammered, then took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry that you went through all of that—that you lost him. And I am so sorry that he lost you. I’ve heard every single word that you’ve said and lesson already learned.”
I raised up my head and looked at Brooke. “Same here.”
“Stevie and I have already talked about building a life together,” Zac went on to say. “We have no idea when we’re gonna get that chance, but she and I have agreed to ride out this thing until a door opens for us to have our forever. She believes it won’t happen until Malcolm is grown—when I’ll no longer be concerned about being a part-time father to him. For some reason though, I sense a door opening so much sooner than that. It’s anybody’s guess as to what the circumstances that allow us to move forward into building a life together are gonna be, but they’re gonna appear. That door is gonna open and when it does, I’m marrying this woman right here,” Zac said, looking back at me. “She is my soul mate and I am hers. We both know it too.”
Zac leaned his head down and kissed me. When we looked back at Brooke, she was smiling at us.
