Chapter Twenty-Five

The next day starts out badly. I oversleep, have to cut my morning run short by ten minutes, then rush out of Luke’s place without my usual coffee. At least I arrive at work on time. I grab a latte and two bags of sour gummy worms from the break room on the way to my workstation.

I glare at Outlook, which dumps a torrent of emails into my inbox. I’m still tired, and my head is throbbing. I can barely process what’s on my monitor, especially without caffeine, so I don’t delete half the emails unread like usual. Just in case.

Anyway, I must, must get caught up on sleep this weekend. It’s gotta be the lack of sleep that’s getting to me. Okay, so Luke didn’t keep me up last night. He somehow managed to get an amazing chicken noodle soup delivered, and we ate…and then I think I dozed off. That’s all I remember until getting up this morning. And if Luke and I had done anything, I would definitely remember.

Although my a.m. run was sort of…half-assed today, my muscles and joints are slightly achy anyway. Must be all the extracurricular bedroom activity. I make a mental note to drink more water and stretch this evening.

I pull out my phone to sync the day’s agenda. It has a proprietary company app that keeps track of all my meetings, tasks and so on. If anything’s canceled at the last minute, it updates everyone so we don’t waste our time.

I tap on the smooth, cold glass screen without looking at it. I can tell from finger position alone what I’m typing because I’m just that good. The sync program on my computer shows red, which means the phone isn’t available. I try again, then look down with a scowl. Oh wait. Did I grab Luke’s phone?

I see a gorgeous beach wallpaper picture—one he took in Da Nang—and sigh. Damn it.

Since he doesn’t do Facebook, and I don’t know his email address, and his place doesn’t have a landline, I have to call my phone and hope he picks it up. There’s no way I can function the entire day without it, and I can’t go to his house to get it; I have a meeting in less than ten minutes.

I look at the screen and enter my first guess. The phone unlocks. I smirk. Sleep-deprived or not, low on caffeine or not, I’m good. I should remind Luke not to use his birthdate as a passcode. Might as well not secure his phone at all.

A photo of a small boy and Luke fills the screen, and I stop. My thumb swipes across the picture, and another one slides over. This one doesn’t just have the boy and Luke, but a brunette in her mid- to late twenties as well. She’s gazing up at Luke like he’s one of the most adorable human beings she’s ever known. I stare at the image, my mind still sluggish. The caffeine and sugar from the coffee and gummy worms haven’t yet fully hit my system.

Maybe she’s Luke’s cousin and the kid’s mom. She’s definitely the kid’s mom. The boy and she share the same mouth and jawline. But…

I tilt my head. The boy also has Luke’s eyes and nose. And he’s looking at Luke as though he’s Iron Man, Spider-Man and Superman all rolled into one.

I swipe my thumb a few more times, see more photos of Luke, the boy and the brunette looking very much like one extremely happy family. My mind keeps capturing the images, but my brain’s having a hard time processing them, as though it’s a compiler dealing with garbage code.

Not garbage, I correct myself. Just containing one tiny, laughably easy to fix error.

When I was in introductory computer science in college, the compiler barfed on my third assignment. I had no idea what was going on, and the error message referred to some improper floating-point arithmetic in my code, which didn’t make any sense—it was a simple program designed to take two inputs and dump a single line onto the monitor. I tore my hair out for two hours, then finally gave up and went to my TA for help. He took one look at my short code and said, “You put a comma here instead of a semicolon.”

That small correction fixed the whole thing. And I never made that mistake again.

I know the gibberish in my head is exactly the same thing. I’m just not making the simplest and easiest connection, which is why I’m floundering.

But relationships aren’t like programming.

Of course not. Real life is stranger than fiction. Which is why I’m going to ignore the nasty feeling in my gut and paste on a smile. There’s gotta be a good explanation for those photos. Maybe they’re gonna be used for his next book or something. He’s decided to write about wholesome, sweet families, not the usual over-the-top spy thriller. Or maybe his next thriller will be about a little kid and his mom, so Luke was just doing some research and took photos. Or maybe they’re his long-lost sister and her kid. A sister who looks nothing like Luke…and has some really deep incestuous feelings for him…but hey, every family has a black sheep, right? Even my family has a couple—my lawyer brothers, Nathan and Stan.

Forget the damn phone and pictures, I decide. I click the button to kill the screen. There’s no way I can talk to Luke right now. What I want to ask him can’t be answered in the less than three minutes I have left before my meeting. I’m just going to have to come back to my computer periodically to make sure the day’s agenda stays the same. That’s a good way to make up for not running a full sixty minutes.

Of course, that’s easier decided than done.

I can barely pay attention to anything Tim’s saying in the meeting. I tell myself it’s the sleep…but that’s a lie. I already had two coffees, and it’s not even eleven.

“Sammi?”

I blink, then realize Tim’s looking at me expectantly. In fact, everyone’s gaze is on me. I feel my cheeks heat. “Um. Sorry. What?”

“The revised timeline? Any objections?”

“Uh…” Clearing my throat, I glance at the chart on the projector. The timeline is aggressive, but reasonable. “No. No, it looks fine.”

The meeting ends, and I walk out, supremely annoyed. I just don’t blank out in front of people like that. You don’t get to be the best that way.

“You okay?” Manop asks, which makes me feel even worse.

“Yeah.” I give him a wan smile. “Just a little tired.” Just keep thinking about the damn photos and possible explanations that don’t sound ridiculous.

And because I can’t help myself, I return to my desk and unlock Luke’s phone to look at the text messages. Luke doesn’t have a lot of texts. There are a few from his mom, then me and someone named Belinda, who turns out to be the woman in the picture. The boy’s name is Tom, and as I suspected, he’s her son.

As I scroll through, I see more—and none of them good. The reason why Luke left the way he did after our first date was because of a text from Belinda, saying Tom got hurt and he kept crying for Luke and was inconsolable. And when he was out of town for the entire week? He was with her and Tom.

Does Belinda know about me? Or has Luke also have her fooled?

I asked Luke for a full disclosure on our first date. He can’t possibly claim he didn’t realize he was supposed to tell me about Belinda and Tom. As a matter of fact, if they were nothing to him, he should’ve been able to talk about them so that if I ever found out, I wouldn’t jump to the wrong conclusion.

Or maybe he thought I never would find out, because his social media feeds are so bare.

There were plenty of opportunities for Luke to tell me why he had to leave the way he did, but he never explained anything. And because I’m an idiot, I decided to give him the trust he asked for and not press or try to dig around for answers.

The only logical conclusion is that he’s either married or in a serious relationship already—with a child on top of it. He decided not to talk about this. Instead, he asked for trust.

Trust.

My ass.

I can’t believe I bought that bullshit story about why his author bio says he’s married. It says he’s married because he is.

Something hot explodes in my chest. The skin around my eyes heats, and I feel the prickling of incipient tears.

A couple of developers laugh from the other side of the area, then high-five each other. It drags me back to reality. I can’t break down at work. Nothing makes guys more uncomfortable than a woman crying, and I can’t to impose my unhappiness on them.

After throwing the phone into my desk drawer, I rush to the bathroom. I’m alone—the app dev floor has very few female employees.

I grip the edge of the porcelain basin and stare at myself. I look horrible—eyes red and shimmering with unshed tears, dark circles underneath that my hurried morning makeup doesn’t hide, the blotchy red in my cheeks. But I feel much worse. This isn’t the usual mild sense of betrayal I experienced with my exes. Anger courses through my veins, but that’s to be expected. I’ve always felt furious when my exes cheated on me or did something equally stupid. But I’ve never experienced this kind of crushing betrayal and disappointment, maybe because I expected my exes to fail me in some way. The fact that I didn’t with Luke has left me shaking.

Fucking bastard.

Pushing myself from the basin, I start pacing, but it’s not enough to calm down. Tears keep threatening to overflow, and I crane my neck and look up at the ceiling. I will not cry and make an idiot of myself at work. It’s already bad enough that Luke’s made an idiot of me in our relationship.

I don’t have anything scheduled before lunch. Unable to stay inside the building anymore, I take the stairs and walk out, not bothering to stop by my desk. Maybe the frigid morning weather will help numb the pain.