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I’m careful with my heart. So careful that when I fell in love with Austin, I did so because I was afraid to love someone like Ridge Lucas. Look where that got me.

And since then, I hadn’t stopped thinking about Ridge and what we would have become if I would have given in to him that night in his mom’s car. What we would have become had he not left that night.

Believe me, I replayed it over and over again and even imagined the night playing out differently, a night where I actually had sex with him, and we fell madly deeply in love.

Would I be in the situation I am now had I given in to Ridge?

It had been years since I’d seen him, and an hour and fifteen minutes since I’d debated, for the hundredth time, whether or not to go by his dad’s house or the track to see if he might be there. That’s probably why he’s back. His dad died a few weeks back, and I imagine he’s here to deal with his estate and family.

After leaving the school, I swing by the house, change my shirt and then I go to the grocery store and pick up food for the week. Having been out of town for the weekend, I know food is going to be sparse in the house. With two little boys that isn’t going to work.

The moment I walk into the house and set the canvas bags on the counter, my phone is ringing. It’s Austin, and I contemplate ignoring it. He’s the last person I want to talk to.

I slide my finger over the screen and hit the speaker button.

A deep breath, a pause, then I answer, and I’m not friendly in my greeting. “Why are you calling me?”

“I can’t believe you did that!”

I play dumb. Something I like doing with Austin now. I mean, why can’t I play dumb? He did for years when I asked him over and over again if there was something going on with him and Brie.

I roll my eyes and stare out the kitchen window to where Tori, my cousin who lives across the street, is making her way over to my house through the back gate, her toddler daughter walking behind her, picking all my flowers in the process. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes you do,” Austin seethes. “You do know. Brie’s fuckin’ neighbor saw you.” And then he has the nerve to threaten me with, “I could have the kids taken away from you.”

I nearly burst out laughing. “But you won’t because that would mean you would have to take them everywhere and actually be a parent 100 percent of the time.”

Too far? Maybe.

“Goddamn you, Alyson.” Look at that, I’ve pissed him off for the second time today. Mission accomplished. “You know I love the boys, and this little fuckin’ stunt you’ve been pulling lately is getting old.”

My lawyer told me divorce is ugly. At some point, it gets ugly.

This is our ugly.

Austin’s words hit me. The stuntI’mplaying? I’m not playing anything. What I’m doing is finally standing up for myself. How he can’t see that is about as surprising as me not knowing him and Brie had been having sex for years before I confronted him about it.

Just as I’m about to lay into him and point out everythinghe’sdoing wrong lately, the house phone rings, and I recognize the number immediately.

“I gotta go. The school is calling.”

He sighs, as though he thinks I’m using this as an excuse to get off the phone with him. He clearly doesn’t know me very well. If I want to end the conversation with him, I hang up. I do it all the time. “Fine.”

“Don’t be late for the parent-coaching class,” I remind him, knowing despite anything I say to him, he will be late. How can he not be? I used to be the receptionist at Jacob Law and if he doesn’t have someone telling him where and when to be there, he’s lost.

He groans into the receiver, and I can tell he’s probably shuffling around papers on his desk searching for a pen to make himself a note. “Why do we need to go to parent coaching? We’ve been doing it for eight years. I think we have it figured out.”

“I took a bat to your girlfriend’s car. . . ,” I point out and immediately regret it because I admitted it. Damn it. Maybe those blonde roots bleached my brain?

“You need anger management,” he spits out.

I hang up on him.

As I switch to the house phone, to the school calling, Tori walks in and smiles at me, three cats at her feet and one in Ada’s, her daughter’s, arms. Poor thing looks uncomfortable. The cat, not the child. She’s holding Whiskers by his head. I doubt he appreciates it. I certainly wouldn’t.

Remember when I said I was an aspiring cat lady? I don’t know when or how this happened, but I began feeding the stray cats around town and letting them come inside my house.

I name them, too. All of them, and get genuinely pissed off when their owners come looking for them and calling them by their real names.