An hour after I left the launch event I find myself at The Art Of Java. I don’t know why I didn’t stay at home. When I couldn’t get ahold of Brantley again after I walked away from Flash, I used a car service app and had the driver drop me off at home. Instead of going inside, I hopped in my car and drove straight to The Art of Java.

The image of Poppy, the woman who had introduced herself to me as Flash’s fiancée, kept flitting through my mind’s eye. And that word.

Fiancée.

Fiancée.

Fiancée.

Stopping just outside the door to the studio, the sidewalk around me still bustling on a typical Friday night in downtown Savannah, I lean my head against the cool frosted glass and try to calm my breathing. Attempt to slow my frenzied, shallow breaths. Even after separating myself from the situation, the bruising pressure on my chest persists.

Why couldn’t he have just told me?

For this man, because of this man, I’ve flayed my heart wide open, mangled as it was. I allowed him to see all the workings of my ugly insides, the parts of me that were most battered and bruised. I let him in.

I bared my soul.

And he was keeping something to himself. Something as huge as having a woman in his not-so-distant past that he loved enough to propose to.

I unlock the studio door and turn the knob, stepping inside what feels like my sanctuary. Months ago, I wasn’t even sure I ever wanted to set foot in here again. Now, it feels like the only place I can catch my breath again, after having the wind knocked out of me.

I turn to close the door behind me, absently bypassing the coffee shop for the art studio on the back of the quaint building. I drop my purse on a cluttered, long wooden table before sinking onto the stool directly in front of the pottery wheel.

Staring at the wheel in an absent daze, my thoughts continue to whir.

If Flash kept something as important as an ex-fiancée from me, what else could he have hidden? I thought, in the months we’ve known each other, that I had uncovered every vital piece of him. I believe that two people getting to know each other should take time and be organic, but I thought we were doing that. I thought that we’d reached the place where he trusted me with the depths of him, just the way I trusted him.

Now I’m full of questions I’m not sure I’ll ever get the answers to. All I want to do is retreat, put my head down and sink back into the place where I keep what’s left of my heart locked away somewhere deep and dark. The place where Brantley is the only one I trust. Where I keep the true emotions I hide from everyone a secret, even from her.

But there’s a teeny, tiny voice tugging somewhere deep in my soul.

When you first met Flash, he was just as messy as you were. His mind and his heart were in no shape for love, and yet…give him a chance to explain. Trust him.

I shut that voice down as I slip off my heels and set the pottery wheel spinning with my foot. Reaching down into the plastic, sealed container on a bench beside me, I pull out a large, gray hunk of clay. I move on autopilot as I plunk it down on the flat, circular surface of the wheel and allow my hands to pound it into submission.

The chimes signaling the front door of the studio opening causes my head to jerk upward..

My foot pauses its continuous urging of the wheel. Damn. I forgot to lock the door behind me when I came in.

Something I’ve never done before. God, I’m such a mess. With a sigh, I stand and walk barefoot toward the doorway that leads to the coffee shop.

“We’re closed,” I call out, hoping that whoever it is will just turn around and walk back out again so I don’t have to interact.

I’m about to step through the doorway when a figure moves in front of me, blocking my path.

Startled, I stumble back as my heart bottoms out. The stranger shifts into the darkness of the studio, where I haven’t even had a chance to turn on the lights.

My first instinct is to open my mouth and scream, but I’m barely able to suck in a breath before the stranger’s voice echoes, low and eerily calm, throughout the back of the shop.

“You make a sound, and whoever comes to help you will be cleaning up your blood.”

The blood he just threatened to spill goes icy cold in my veins. I lick my lips, my eyes shifting around the small space. Trying to solve something that’s suddenly so complex. Trying to find a way out.

“I don’t…I don’t have…” My voice trails away as he steps into the small circle of light given off by the recessed fixtures overhead.

“What…what the hell are you doing here?”