Aiden stuck his head in my office a little before six, all smiles.

“Hey, Ami. I heard you needed a ride home.”

I bit back the disappointment that flooded my chest. A part of me had really hoped that Gentry would come back and we could talk things out. But clearly that wasn’t going to happen today. I just hoped it happened before too much time passed.

“I’ll be ready in just a minute.”

“No rush.”

I picked up my bag and slid my laptop into it, searching my desk for the contracts that needed to be signed tonight. Like his brother, Aiden walked around the office, touching the spines of books and straightening paintings on the walls that tended to slip to one side or the other no matter what anyone did. I found myself watching him, thinking how much things had changed, but how much they were still the same.

“Gentry was busy?”

“He’s dealing with a problem on the construction site.” Aiden glanced at me, his dark blue eyes—so much like his brother’s—made darker by the lie.

I just nodded, aware that I’d dropped a bomb on Gentry’s world this afternoon. It would take time for him to come to terms with it all, I supposed.

I stood and tugged the strap of my backpack over my shoulder. Aiden didn’t seem to be in a hurry, though. He wandered to my desk and picked up the only picture frame that sat there. He seemed disappointed to see it was a photograph of me when I was in high school.

“This is still my dad’s office in my mind. I haven’t gotten around to bringing in my own decorations.”

“Do you have a picture of Noah?”

The question caught me by surprise. I don’t know why I shouldn’t have assumed Brent or Gentry would have gone to his brothers and told them the truth. I just…it felt strange knowing that all these people suddenly knew this secret I had held close for so long.

“Brent,” he said softly. “He thought we should know.”

I nodded, fumbling around as I dragged my phone from my pocket. I nearly dropped it as I touched the screen to pull up the gallery app. My phone’s memory was filled with pictures of my son, had been since I bought it. It was a habit I’d begun when he was just an infant, unable to resist documenting every little moment we shared together.

I scrolled through until I found a favorite picture, one I’d taken just a few weeks ago while Noah sat watching television on the couch in my father’s house. I handed the phone to Aiden, watching him suck in a breath as he stared at his nephew for the first time.

“He looks just like Gentry!”

“I always thought so.”

Aiden glanced at me, then back at the phone. “Is it okay if I…”

“Of course.”

I moved to his elbow and watched as he scrolled through the photos, pausing from time to time as he found one that he particularly liked. Most of the photos were recent, within the last six months or so, but some had been transferred from my previous phones, pics that were years old that I kept moving from one phone to the next for the sake of memory. I’d almost forgotten about those when one popped up on the screen.

“Oh, that’s—”

“He was so little!”

I nodded as I studied the picture. Noah was lying in a hospital bed, the small gown they’d given him much too big. It swallowed him whole like the whale that ate Geppetto in Noah’s favorite Disney movie.

“He was eighteen months old.”

“That’s when he was diagnosed?”

I nodded. “He was in the hospital for a week while they stabilized him and gave me a crash course on diabetes.”

“I don’t know how you did it.”

Aiden flipped to the next picture and the next one after that, all of them showing my beautiful baby in the hospital crib, lethargic with these big, dark circles under his eyes. My heart broke just at the memory of those days.

He came to the end of the pictures and handed the phone back to me, his kind eyes searching mine.

“Brent said you didn’t tell us because of Gentry, because you didn’t want to put him in a bad position.”

“I’m sorry. I wish things had been different.”

Aiden rubbed my arm lightly. “I think you’ve paid your dues for whatever you might or might not have done. I can’t imagine going through what you did alone.”

I touched his hand, grateful for the kindness he and Brent had both shown. It was more than I deserved.

*

My alarm woke me at two in the morning as it had done every night for the past seven and a half years. I reached over and turned it off, pulling up the app that showed me a graph of Noah’s blood sugars over the past few hours. It was even, settling just under one hundred. That was good, but I still dragged myself out of bed and wandered down the hall, slipping into his room, the dim illumination of his nightlight guiding me to his bed. He was sleeping on his side, his hand tucked under his pillow, the other resting on his hip.

I often wondered what he was dreaming about and if he was aware of my visits. It used to wake him up, these visits, but they hadn’t in a long time.

I reached into his bedside table and took out the meter kit Chloe and I both used to check his blood sugars manually three times a day and once at night, as well as the few hours when we were waiting for the sensor on his CGM to calibrate. It required a drop of blood, which I obtained from the side of his index finger. He didn’t even flinch.

Ninety-five. Exactly what the CGM was telling me. Perfect.

I put everything away and kissed his temple. He brushed his hand over the side of his head as I straightened. Of course, that he felt! He was so much like his father sometimes.

I paused in the doorway to watch him sleep for a minute, wondering what would happen now that the Stones knew the truth. There was once a time when I worried they’d want to take him from me. The Stones were wealthy people and, even though I grew up in that same world, I was no longer supported by my father’s wealth. I worried they would see the tiny, one bedroom apartment Noah and I shared when he was small and they’d decide they could give him a better life.

My finances had improved—I wasn’t rich, not by a long shot, but I didn’t have to eat ramen and beans to afford Noah’s medical supplies, either—but I no longer worried about that. Now I worried that Gentry would confuse his issues with me with his role as Noah’s father and that would build a wall between them that couldn’t be overcome.

I knew Noah needed a father, especially now that he was in school and excited to join little league and the junior football league. Sports were never really my thing, but Gentry had been quarterback of the football team both in junior high and high school. It was something they could bond over as Noah stormed toward puberty and all the issues that would bring up for him. He needed his father.

I just wondered if Gentry needed him or if Noah would just be a roadblock to the new life he was planning with his fiancée.

I went back to my room, but couldn’t rest. There was too much on my mind. I got up, wondering if I should go down the hall and check in on my dad. The problem was, he didn’t know me anymore. He hadn’t known me since I came home. And when he found me in his house, he’d often become irrational, threatening to call the police. Rebecca was always able to calm him, but it was disturbing just the same.

I hated the way my dad and I had left our relationship. I always assumed there would be plenty of time to reconnect and I was so busy with my job, my life, that I didn’t make the overtures I should have. I excused it by telling myself he could have reached out to me, but he didn’t. By the time I realized how sick he was, it was too late. His mind was already gone. I would never know if he came to an understanding of my choices, if he ever came to accept what I’d done and the reasons behind it. And he never got to know his grandson, which was probably the biggest tragedy of it all.

A light flashed in the kitchen windows as I wandered in there to get myself a cup of hot milk. I looked out toward the streets and smiled, relief a balm on my tortured mind. Instead of hot milk, I made a pot of coffee and poured it into a thermos before finding a bathrobe to cover the t-shirt and boxers I’d worn to bed. I went outside, careful to reset the alarm with the fob on my house keys.

I tapped on the car window and waited until I heard the little click of the door unlocking.

“Imagine my surprise seeing you here.”

Gentry shrugged, refusing to look at me as I settled in the passenger seat of his borrowed Mercedes.

“Why not send one of your guys to sit here? Why not go home and sleep beside your fiancée?”

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“Too much on your mind?”

He glanced at me then, anger sparking in his eyes until he saw the tease in mine. I handed him the thermos and watched his sigh of gratitude as he opened it and sniffed the strong aroma of the coffee blend.

“You still like it black, right?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

I settled back, glancing up at my dad’s house. “I figure if you’re going to sit out here all night watching over my family, a little bit of coffee is the least I could do.”

He sipped at his coffee, sighing after the first taste. “Don’t get this in Germany.”

“I don’t imagine you do.”

We sat there for a while, both of us absorbed in our own thoughts. I held my keys and my cell phone in my lap, my fingers playing over the screen of the phone almost by rote, pulling up the graph Noah’s CGM sent to my phone in a constant feed.

“What is that?”

I glanced at Gentry. “Noah’s blood sugars.”

“It’s flat. Is that good?”

“That’s awesome. It means his blood sugars are steady, which means the settings on his pump for his basal insulin are right on target.”

He looked confused and that amused me a little even though it was completely understandable. I had no idea what diabetes was all about until Noah’s diagnosis. All I knew was that eating too much sugar caused fat people to have diabetes. I had no idea how completely wrong I was.

“It’s complicated, but essentially he has a pump that infuses insulin into his body every few minutes to keep his blood sugars steady.”

“I thought he only had to take it with meals.”

“He takes extra at meals to cover the carbs in his meals. But he also needs a small amount of insulin all the time.”

Gentry shook his head. “It is complicated.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t take long to figure it all out. What’s hard is figuring out why his blood sugars go too high or too low even when you’re doing everything right.”

“And you’ve done this since he was…how old?”

“Eighteen months.”

Gentry grunted. “That’s a long time.”

“Chloe helps. She has a brother who was also a diabetic, so she’s pretty much an expert. You can’t imagine how thrilled I was to find her.”

“She’s his nanny?”

“Yeah. She’s been with us just short of a year.”

“Who took care of him before that?”

‘He was in daycare for a while. Then he went to a private school that had an extended program.”

“Must have been expensive.”

I chewed on my bottom lip. “We managed.”

He gripped the steering wheel, tugging at it a little as he clearly struggled with something. “I was angry when you first told me, when I realized how much time I’ve missed. But I know that it’s mostly my fault. If I hadn’t pushed you away, if I hadn’t done some of the things I’d done, maybe…”

“What’s done is done, Gentry.”

“But I owe you an explanation.”

I started to shake my head, but, in truth, this was what I’d been waiting for all these years. I wanted to know why he did what he’d done. I wanted to know what had gone wrong because I have never been able to figure it out and not knowing made it so hard for me to trust anyone else. Dating was difficult enough with a child—especially a child with a chronic illness—not being able to trust made it that much harder.

I wanted to move on with my life. I wanted to point my finger to a specific reason why my life imploded all those years ago.

We were happy all those years. Through high school and college. We lived together the last two years of college, shared space and talked about the future. When we came home, my father still believed I was virtuous. He never would have accepted Gentry and I living together, so we lived separately. But I spent so much time at his place, we might as well have been living together. I had a key to his place, he had one to mine. And everyone was waiting with baited breath for that engagement ring, including me.

We were happy. What the hell happened?

The memory of that night was so seared on my mind that I couldn’t stop seeing it even when I wanted to.

I knew Gentry would be working late because it was Tuesday and he’d been working late on Tuesdays for nearly six weeks. It seemed like the perfect time to go over and lay out the little infant shirt I’d gotten that read, Daddy’s Little Monster. I could already imagine his face when he saw it. It was early. I hadn’t even been to a doctor yet, but I was so excited I wanted to tell the whole world. At the same time, I was scared to death of the changes this might bring to us, to our relationship. But I had complete faith that we could handle it.

I saw her car, but didn’t think anything of it. Lots of people drive a Lexus, especially in this neighborhood. And black was such a common color, it could have belonged to anyone. But I should have known better.

I parked and grabbed the little bag that held the baby shirt, a little skip in my step as I walked to his condo. When he bought the place, he chose one that fronted a courtyard because he said he didn’t want the noise of people coming and going all the time. Privacy had always been a big deal to Gentry, probably a result of having so many brothers and his one sister. I was okay with it because I liked the courtyard. But when I rounded the corner, my world shattered.

He was standing on the steps, his shirt gone and his feet bare, looking as though he’d just gotten out of bed. She was standing in front of him, fully dressed, but her hair ruffled like she hadn’t bothered to comb it out this morning. He said something to her and she laughed. Then, almost as if it was impulsive, she rushed toward him and kissed him hard on the lips. His hands came around her, tugging her close as their kiss deepened. When she pulled back again, she stared up at him, an expression on her face I would never forget. It was like she’d just realized a truth she’d been searching for her whole life.

Blood rushed in my ears even as my heart seemed to have stopped beating. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from them, couldn’t understand what I was seeing. Before I could get a grip on myself, she was gone, having walked around the far side of the complex, and he was alone on his narrow porch.

“How long has that been going on?”

He turned to me, the color rushing away from his face. “Amelia.”

“How long?”

“That…it wasn’t what it looked like.”

“Wasn’t it? Are you in love with her? Are you in love with your brother’s wife, Gentry?”

He hesitated and that was enough for me. I slapped him as hard as I could and ran away, so heartbroken, I couldn’t function.

“What kind of explanation could there be for that, Gentry?”

I wasn’t angry. It was an honest question. And he seemed to take it that way, his hands moving on the steering wheel as he worked out his next words. He glanced at me, shame burning deep in his eyes.

“I don’t know how it happened,” he said softly. “She came to me because she needed someone to talk to and Brent was…he had just gotten the promotion to sergeant and they were piling all this new stuff on him and he was stressed all the time. She felt like she couldn’t talk to him.”

“Why you? Why not Jack or Aiden or Bo? Why not Remy?”

“Remy was a kid at the time, Amelia. Aiden was already in the Navy and Bo…I don’t know why not Bo or Jack. Maybe she didn’t feel as safe with either of them as she did with me.”

I crossed my arms over my chest, holding down the firestorm that was building there. I could have voiced so many objections to that statement, but I wanted to hear him out. I wanted to see where this was going.

“She trusted you and you had an affair with her. Your own sister-in-law.”

I think that’s what bothered me the most about it all these years. It wasn’t just some woman he was sleeping with. It was Madeline Stone, Brent’s wife. It was beautiful, shy, perfect Madeline, the one Stone I could never feel comfortable around. She and Brent had only been married a short time then, a matter of months, but she already had such power over everyone. It was intimidating. For it to be her…it was like nothing that had happened all the years before that night mattered.

“We didn’t have an affair.”

“Don’t insult me by denying it now!” I looked at him, really twisted my body around so that I could see him. “It’s been ten years. She’s dead now. What’s the point in denying it?”

“Because it’s the truth, Amelia. Don’t you think I would have been more careful if I’d been sleeping with her? I mean, give me some credit! I wouldn’t have had an affair in my own condo when I knew you had a key to the place!”

“Then what did I see? You were standing there, half naked, kissing her. What was that?”

“That was her interrupting me in the middle of preparing for a shower. I had a business dinner that night. I’d come home to change.”

“And the kiss?”

His face brightened with shame. “That was her. It was her sharing her joy with me.”

I shook my head in disgust and reached for the door handle, but he grabbed my wrist and held me inside the car by pressing my hand to his thigh. He turned to me—leaned into me—his lips so close to mine that we could have kissed if he’d wanted that.

“Madeline started coming to me weeks before, talking about this social worker course she’d heard about that she wanted to do. She had a degree in psychology, but she had no clue what she was going to do with it and she was beyond bored sitting around the house day-in and day-out, waiting for Brent to come home from work. She wanted something to fill her days, so we talked it out and she wanted to do this social worker thing.” He pulled back slightly to gauge my reaction to his words. “The day you saw us, she’d just learned she’d been accepted after this rigorous process she’d been going through. She’d just gotten the letter and I was the first person she thought of to tell. She rushed over to my place and just caught me as I was getting into the shower.”

“But the kiss—”

“She was excited.”

I shook my head, unable to wrap my head around what he was saying. It didn’t make sense to me.

“You let me walk away. You didn’t try to tell me the truth.”

“Because you asked if I was in love with her.”

Silence fell like bricks in the car. I yanked away from him and pulled into myself, making myself as small as possible in the passenger seat of his brother’s Mercedes. That searing pain I’d known for so long suddenly jumped up a few degrees, the heat so painful I couldn’t move for a moment. I’d never hurt quite that bad before.

“I wanted to be honest with you, Amelia. But I couldn’t deny it. Everyone was in love with Madeline and when she kissed me like that…”

“Nine years with me didn’t matter, then.”

“It mattered. But I needed to sort my feelings out, needed to be sure of how I felt.”

“So you ran away?”

“You were the only woman I’d ever known! Didn’t you ever wonder what it would have been like if you’d been with someone else?”

I laughed, though it was a sound that lacked all humor. The thing was, I’d never wondered. I knew from the time I was twelve that Gentry was the only man I’d ever want. That hadn’t changed, even though I’d been alone for ten years, even though I’d been telling myself that once my secret was out, once I had all the answers I needed, I would be able to move on with my life. But I never really believed I would have these answers, that I would ever really move on. There was nothing to move on to.

“Did you figure it out? Did you sow those wild oats and figure out what it was you wanted?”

Instead of answering, he grabbed the steering wheel again, pulling on it like he wanted to pull it free of the car. And then he turned to me so quickly that I almost didn’t realize what he was doing until he was yanking me toward him, until his lips were pressed to mine and we were kissing like nothing had changed between us. His touch was a perfect balm to the hurt that was still burning in my chest, the pain that was an open wound in the pit of my stomach.

His hands were under my robe almost instantly, the heat of his palm pressed against the curve of my belly, his fingers inching upward, dancing over my ribs in a calm, gentle movement that belied the heat of his kiss. My chest was heaving, my nerves standing on end, begging for the satisfaction of his caress. I wanted him, but there was this thin barrier between what I wanted and what I knew was right. That barrier was being pushed and beaten, abused so badly that it wasn’t likely to hold up much longer.

I groaned as I pushed him back and crawled into his lap, as lifted my arms and allowed him to push my robe away and lift my t-shirt over my head. He buried his mouth against my throat, nibbling at the tender flesh there, sending shivers up and down the length of my spine. I leaned back, the steering wheel pressing hard into my back. It seemed almost appropriate that we should be in a car. Wasn’t it in a car where we shared our first real kiss? And wasn’t it in the car where we shared a lot of other firsts, going so close to that line that we nearly stepped over it a few times?

I moved my hips against him, wrapping my arms around his head as he moved further down my body, creating a heated trail of kisses down the center of my chest, his teeth doing incredible things to my nipples as they stood on end, begging for him to do just what he was doing.

What was I doing? How could I allow him to touch me this way after everything he’d said, everything he’d done? But how could I not? I’d been longing for this for so long that I forgot what my life was like before this longing was born. He was mine once. Was it so bad for me to want to claim him as mine again?

His mouth worked its way back up, searching for my lips. I kissed him, nibbled on his bottom lip, my body just a bundle of aching nerves. I loved him. I wanted so desperately to hate him, to forget what this was like, to forget what it felt like to be a part of something that was bigger than I was. But I was weak. I couldn’t do it.

It never stopped for me. I never stopped loving him. I never stopped thinking of him as mine. I always assumed he’d come back, he’d come find me and we’d be okay. It never occurred to me he’d come home with a fiancée.

But he had.

I buried my face against his shoulder and, after a moment, his hands stilled on the small of my back.

“I should go inside. Noah will be awake soon and he’ll wonder where I am.”

He pressed his lips to my neck, my shoulder, sliding his lips slowly over my bare skin. “I don’t want you to go. There’s so much more we need to talk about.”

“I think I’m talked out for one night.”

He pushed my head back and looked me in the eye. “But we’ll talk.”

“We’ll talk.”

There was doubt in his eyes, but he nodded, stealing one more kiss. “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.”

I climbed off his lap and tugged my shirt back over my head. I hesitated as I stepped out of the car. “We have breakfast about seven-thirty. You should join us.”

“Are you sure?”

I looked at him, thinking this was my last chance to cut and run. But then I nodded. “He needs to know his dad.”

Gentry nodded, his expression contemplative. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I left it at that.

*

Noah was curled up on my bed when I came out of the bathroom, steam still clinging to my skin from the shower. I sat on the edge of the mattress and leaned down to kiss the top of his head.

“You okay, bug?”

He nodded. “Chloe’s making omelets. I wanted cereal.”

“I know you did, but eggs are better for you.”

“Why can’t I eat the same things everyone else does?”

“You do.”

“No I don’t. The kids at art camp all have Twinkies and cookies and brownies for snack time. I have to have string cheese and sliced apples.”

“Twinkies are full of preservatives. Why would you want to eat those?”

“Because they taste good.”

“I don’t eat Twinkies.”

“You’re a grown up. That’s different.”

I bit back a smile because he made it sound like a crime to be grown up. “How about this? You eat the eggs Chloe’s making and I’ll go buy a box of Twinkies on my way home from work and you can have one at art camp tomorrow.”

He popped up, his face a circle of joy. “Really?”

“Really.”

He held out his hand to me. “It’s a deal.” We shook on it firmly, his enthusiasm shaking my arm all the way to the shoulder.

“Now go downstairs and let me get dressed.”

“Okay!”

He ran off, slamming the door behind him. I smiled, already mentally calculating the changes in his insulin requirements for such a sugary snack. It would throw his day off a little, but not too badly. And it was almost worth it to see him that happy.

I got dressed, choosing a simple black dress that was a little tighter, a little showier than what I normally wore to the office. It was one of those dresses I used to reserve for top clients when I worked at the record company. It made me feel confident, sexy. I wanted that today.

Gentry was standing at the front door as I came down the stairs. I opened it, smiling at the way his eyes widened slightly at the sight of me, his gaze moving appreciatively along the length of me. I stepped back and gestured for him to come inside.

“The party’s in the kitchen.”

He nodded, but he didn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave the little bubble we were currently in, this quiet space outside the chaos. He touched my hip and drew me to him, pressing his lips to my temple. He smelled heavenly, clearly fresh from a hot shower just as I was. I tried not to imagine him standing under the hot spray of the water, his naked body warm and wet.

“You’re beautiful,” he whispered in my ear before moving away, strolling so casually into the kitchen I wanted to hit him.

“Hi,” Noah said, watching the two of us come toward the table where he was already sitting, Chloe perched beside him with his pump in her hand.

“Noah, this is Gentry Stone.”

I knew my son knew the name, knew he understood the significance of it. I expected a reaction: shock, surprise, excitement. What I got was a dull nod.

“I know.”

“You know?”

“His picture’s in my memory book, Mom. Remember? You put it there.”

Of course, I knew. I just didn’t realize he’d made the connection.

Gentry glanced at me, a little confused. Noah seemed to pick up on his confusion.

“I know you’re my dad,” he said calmly. “You’ve been in Germany, right?”

“I have.”

“What’s it like there?”

Gentry shrugged as he turned a chair around and straddled it. “Beautiful.”

“Do you think you could take me there someday?”

Gentry glanced at me. I shrugged. Gentry focused on Noah again.

“I’ll make you a deal. You teach me about your fancy robot parts there,” Gentry said, gesturing toward the pump Chloe had finished using to bolus for Noah’s meal and was shoving back into his pocket, “and I’ll take you to Germany and show you all the places I visited while I was living there.”

“Cool!”

And that was all there was to it. My son and his father bonded over ham and cheese omelets like they’d never been separated. I was relegated to the role of observer, watching from the sidelines, not sure if I should be pleased or disappointed with the lack of drama.

Maybe a little bit of both.