Page 110 of The Homemaker

“I just want to know you.Reallyknow you.”

“You’re engaged to another woman.”

“And I’ve cheated on her. So the least you can do is help me understand why.”

Her jaw drops. “Help you understand?” She coughs a laugh. “I didn’t back you up against a door and tell you to unbutton your dress. I didn’t kiss you, lift you onto a counter, and pull off your underwear. I didn’t cheat?—”

Callen.

He’s not so casual. I can see it on her guilty face. Maybe she’s not engaged, but she’s taken. Callen wouldn’t be okay with what happened between us. And I wouldn’t blame him.

“Yes.” Her shoulders relax. “I like watching plays.”

“So what were you doing at the soccer fields the day you met Callen?”

Alice frowns. “I’m sorry. I know you want to know me because you feel like you can’t trust me. And I can’t undo the past, no matter how much I try to make you understand it.” She holds out her hand. “I’m Alice Yates. Can we start over?”

“Start over?” I laugh. “Like erase the past? Which part of it? Just the tragic parts? The two weeks we spent together?The day you unbuttoned your dress for me in the bathroom? The encounter in the kitchen? The other bathroom?”

Her hand drops to her side.

“If I pretend none of that existed, then my feelings for you—which I can’t avoid—are incredibly inappropriate,” I say.

“They are anyway.”

I shake my head. “Alice,” I lace my hands behind my neck and drop my head, staring at my feet, “I think about you nonstop. When I’m supposed to be working. When I’m running in the morning. Every time I see the swimming pool. When Hunter plays music in his study. Morning, noon, and night.” I look up. “I fucking think about you when I’m in bed with my fiancée. Not because I want to. I don’t. I love her, and that should be enough to stop thinking about you for one goddamn moment, but it’s not. Do you have any idea what that’s like?”

Tears well in her eyes, so she averts her gaze and wipes them. “Yes,” she whispers.

“Can you tell me one truth?”

She sniffles and looks at me.

“Was I just an escape, an actor in your play, an illusion in your two-week break from reality? Or were we real?”

She flinches.

“I feel like”—tipping my head toward the sky, I rest my hands on my hips and sigh—“I’m lost. Buried in a dozen perfectly wrapped, nested boxes. And to find what I’m looking for, I have to rip everything apart.”

Alice furrows her brow, then returns several tiny nods. “I ripped everything apart.” She laughs, but it sounds like a partial sob. “Then I burned it to the ground with myself in the middle.”

I don’t hear the cars on the streets, the people passing by. And everything around me blurs until it’s just us in a bubble.

“For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t trust me either.”

I sag in regret. Why did I say that to her?

Alice smiles, and it feels like an invisible lifting of my chin, as if I shouldn’t feel remorse.

“There’s a reason why you’re engaged and I’m living on the outskirts of someone else’s happily ever after.”

Jesus …

“Alice—”

She shakes her head. “Don’t. When I was unwell, I honestly didn’t think I’d make it to thirty. After Chris died, breathing felt like a luxury I didn’t deserve. Literally everything in my life gets compared to death. When I didn’t have a job, I thought, ‘Well, at least I’m not dead.’ Marriage? A family? Love? That feels incredibly indulgent for someone who probably shouldn’t even be alive.”

“What?” I say like someone knocked the air from my lungs. Without hesitation, I grab her face, forcing her to look at me. Then I lower my forehead to hers. “Don’t ever say that. Do you hear me?”