Page 47 of This Time Around (The Can’t Have Hearts Club #3)

Her apology sounded hollow, and she wasn’t even sure what she was apologizing for. Wade? The money? For not telling him about the pregnancy? All of it?

He was staring at the trunk again, though she sensed he wasn’t really seeing it. She could tell his mind was someplace else, someplace outside this attic, outside this moment entirely.

When he met her eyes again, it was like he’d already left the room.

“It’s always going to be like that, isn’t it?” he asked softly.

“Like what?”

“You covering up anything that doesn’t mesh with the perfect version of events that you’ve mapped out in your mind. You with all your secrets and me sitting here wondering when you plan to clue me in or drop the next bombshell.”

“Jack, no.” She shook her head, though she couldn’t think of any argument to counter what he’d just said. “I can earn your trust, Jack. Please. I can work on it.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “You’ve had a long time to figure out how to be forthcoming, Allie. If it doesn’t come naturally for you, it’s never going to.”

“But we all have secrets, Jack.”

“I know that. And I don’t need to know every last deep, dark secret in the bottom of your soul. Everyone has things they keep private. But I can’t spend my life worrying that you’re leading this parallel existence and keeping me out of it.”

She was still struggling to think of what to say when he stood up. The sight of him towering over her, shirtless and distraught, was enough to undo her. A tear rolled down her cheek, and she swiped at it with the back of her hand.

“I’m sorry, Allie. I’m sorry for what happened sixteen years ago.

I’m sorry you felt like you had to go through that alone.

” She watched his throat move as he swallowed, seeming to force himself to form more words.

“And I’m sorry this was painful for you to tell me just now.

I appreciate you finally letting me know. ”

“Jack—” She reached her hand up, imploring him to take it. Willing him to sit back down and talk through this.

His gaze dropped to her hand and stayed there for a few heartbeats. He didn’t take it. When his eyes lifted to hers again, she knew it was over.

“I can’t be pulled back into this,” he said. “Into the secrets and the half-truths and the need to ignore anything that disrupts the storyline.” He swallowed again, eyes glittering in sunlight streaming through the dormer window. “I’m sorry, Allie. I can’t.”

With that, he turned and walked away.

For more than a week, Jack ignored his phone.

He used it to swap “I love you” texts with Paige, and to find out when she needed to be picked up from a playdate. He even used it to test apps for his company, now that most of his crew was up and running in the new Portland office.

But the calls from Allie went straight to voicemail.

So did the ones from his father, who had continued to send messages imploring him to get in touch.

The irony wasn’t lost on Jack. The thing that made him angriest with Allie was the same damn thing he was doing now.

Avoiding conflict. Pretending things were peachy-fucking-keen when they weren’t at all.

When there was a giant, gaping hole in the middle of his chest that he knew damn well hadn’t been there the last time he and Allie split up.

He didn’t know why it seemed to ache more this time around, but it did.

But she’d lied to him, dammit. Not just sixteen years ago, when he distinctly remembered her telling him she needed to skip the concert to study for exams. She’d lied about Wade.

She’d lied about the money. Lying by omission—by avoidance .

That was still lying in Jack’s book. It was something he couldn’t live with day in, day out, for the rest of his life.

“Daddy, you’re doing it again.”

Jack snapped his attention back to his daughter. She was sitting across the dining room table twirling a rainbow-striped game spinner and giving him a look of mild annoyance. They were playing Life, a board game she loved almost as much as he had at her age.

“I’m doing what?” he asked.

“You’re wrinkling the money.” She reached over to pry two paper bills from his hand. “You’ve already put wrinkles in three fifty-thousand-dollar bills.”

Jack frowned. “Have I pointed out that’s not an actual form of currency in the real world? Like you probably shouldn’t expect to put a down payment on a home with a single bill.”

Paige rolled her eyes, giving him a glimpse of the teenager she’d be very soon. “You’ve mentioned that several thousand times. Now stop being a grump and hand me an action card.”

“Say please,” Jack said as he flipped the top card off the stack. “And I’m not being a grump. I’m stewing.”

“ Please ,” Paige repeated, and at first Jack thought she was being sarcastic about his grumpiness, which he should probably own.

But she was just taking his cue about the manners, which he would have noticed if he weren’t so busy stewing.

“And thank you,” she added as she studied the card he’d handed her.

“It says, ‘Ballet rehearsal: Pick an opponent. Both twirl like a ballerina and spin.’”

“It does not say that.”

“Does so.”

She held the card out to him, and Jack heaved a sigh. “I swear they never made us do stuff like this in the old version of the game.”

“Things change,” Paige said as she hopped out of her chair looking giddy. “Get used to it.”

Jack stood, too, and he had to admit it was tough to stay grumpy with a ten-year-old twirling in circles in front of him. He lifted his hands over his head and spun in his best approximation of a pirouette. His elbow smacked the bookcase, and he felt mildly dizzy, but he found himself smiling.

Paige finished her dance, then plunked down and twirled the spinner. “Eight!” she announced.

Jack spun and got a five.

“That’s another fifty Gs for me,” Paige announced. “Plus a hundred K at the end.”

“When did you start talking like a ten-year-old gangsta?”

She grinned. “Your turn, Daddy.”

Jack spun, then moved his game piece six spaces to the “get married” spot. He caught himself wincing before he had a chance to stifle the reaction. If his daughter noticed, she didn’t say anything. Just handed him a pink peg to stick in his blue plastic car.

“You have to spin for wedding cash now,” Paige ordered.

“Yes, ma’am.” Jack fumbled his new wife into the slot, feeling awkward and distracted and totally fucking useless.

The pointer landed on a black space, so Paige forked over a hundred thousand dollars and took her turn spinning.

“Another action card,” she announced. She stretched across the table to grab it this time instead of waiting for him, which was probably smart.

“‘Fired for sneaking your cat into work,’” she read.

“‘Return your career card to its deck, shuffle the deck, and take the top two cards.’” She looked up and grinned. “Awesome, I get a new job!”

“Good,” Jack said. “I think that police officer thing was going to your head.”

“Says the guy who picked ‘Fashion Designer’ over ‘Pilot.’”

“What? I need a creative profession.”

That earned him another eye roll. “Remember what grandma said about not taking the game so literally?”

She pronounced it lit -rall-ee—three syllables instead of four, another one of Caroline’s quirks.

How had his wife done that? Managed to infuse her infant daughter with linguistic idiosyncrasies through eighteen months of murmured lullabies and bedtime stories?

It was a trick Jack would never understand, but there was a soft comfort in hearing his late wife’s voice tripping from their daughter’s tongue.

It assured him he’d managed to do something good in choosing a mate and a life and a?—

“I think I’ll be a rocket scientist,” Paige announced. “And before you say it, I know that’s going to be hard with four kids.”

“Not if you’ve got a partner pulling his share of the weight.”

She stared at him, then shook her head. “It’s a game, Daddy.”

“Right.” Jack spun for his turn, landing on a stop sign that ordered him to choose between “Family Plan” and “Life Path.” For chrissakes, what was this? A fucking Ouija board? He hesitated.

He was still hesitating when his phone buzzed on the table beside him. It was facedown on the table, and he resisted the urge to look at it. Paige’s eyes darted to the phone and Jack watched her brow furrow. “You’re not going to answer?”

“Nope. I’m with you. Remember how we discussed staying focused on the people you’re with in real life and not blowing them off for the people on your phone?”

“Yeah. I just thought—” She stopped there, biting her lip. “I thought it might be Allie.”

“It might be,” he admitted as the phone fell silent. “But we talked about this, remember? Allie and I decided it would be best if we stopped seeing each other.”

Paige glanced at the phone again and frowned. “You both decided, or just you decided?”

He tried not to flinch. She’d asked the question without any trace of judgment, but he felt guilty anyway. He leaned back in his chair and sighed.

“Look,” he said at last. “Sometimes it just works out that one person just can’t stay with another person no matter how much they might both wish it were different. That’s just the way life works.”

His daughter stared at him, fiddling with her plastic car. She seemed not to notice she’d just dumped out her boy-and-girl twins, landing one in the path of an oncoming vehicle and the other in the middle of the ocean.

“When you were boyfriend and girlfriend with Allie before, who did the breaking up?”

Jack swallowed. “You mean sixteen years ago? You’re asking if Allie broke up with me or if I broke up with Allie?”

Paige nodded and grabbed one of the twins by the head before jamming it back into the car. “Yeah. Did you break up with her, or did she break up with you?”

“She broke up with me,” he admitted. “Sixteen years ago, I still had a lot of things to figure out.”

His daughter seemed to consider that for a moment as she stabbed the other twin into the backseat. “So did you break up with Allie this time?”

Jack hesitated. Honesty , he thought. You promised her honesty.

“Yes,” he said. “This time, I broke up with Allie.”

He braced himself for the question. For the “why” he knew was coming. But that wasn’t the next word out of his daughter’s mouth.

“So you’re even,” she said. “And now you can make up.”

The simplicity of it was so sweet it made his chest ache. “It doesn’t work that way, honey. I wish it did, but?—”

“But what? I know you love Allie and Allie loves you. It should work that way. It just should.”

Her little voice quivered, and Jack put his hand on hers.

“It should,” he said. “You’re right. But one thing I’ve learned in life is that it’s pretty frustrating to spend your time hung up on how things should work.

To get so invested in how you thought things would go that you forget to deal with the way things really are. ”

Paige stuck the end of her braid in her mouth and looked at him. He wondered how much of it she understood. How much any of it really meant to her.

Hell, Jack wasn’t sure he understood.

At last, Paige got out of her chair, came around the table, and put her arms around him. “I love you, Daddy.”

Jack’s chest felt tight as he wrapped his arms around her and hugged hard. “I love you, too, sweetie. So much.”

He breathed her in, feeling simultaneously hollow and filled to the point of bursting. He gave her a quick squeeze, making her squeak a little.

“Daddy!” She giggled and sprung back, whacking his phone with her elbow. They both watched as the gadget flipped end over end, coming to rest with a smack on the hardwood floor.

Jack looked at the screen, then at his kid. “You are so lucky right now that I spent the extra eighty bucks for the drop-proof case.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he said, planting a kiss on her forehead. “Things happen.”

The phone began to buzz again, and Jack lunged for it. But he wasn’t fast enough. Paige grabbed it first, glancing at the screen as she held the phone out to him.

“Who’s Deadbeat Dickhead?” she asked.

Jack gave an inward groan as he picked up the phone. He’d programmed his father’s number into his contacts eons ago on a whim, certain he’d have no occasion to use it. Several times he’d reminded himself to delete it, but he’d never gotten around to it.

Probably for the same reason he hadn’t deleted Allie yet.

He tapped ignore on the screen, or at least that’s what he tried for.

“Hello? Son, is that you?”

Oh, shit.

Jack stared in horror at the screen as his father’s voice blared at him and the speaker function lit up like a beacon.

“I uh?—”

Paige stared in wonder, and Jack fumbled at the screen, doing his damnedest to take the stupid thing off speakerphone.

“Look,” his dad said quickly, rushing to get the words out. “Before you hang up, I just need to say something to you.”

“Who is that?” Paige whispered as Jack jumped up and started for the other room. He tripped over the gym bag he’d tossed next to the coat closet and cursed his own clumsiness, his stupidity for not blocking the number, his inability to turn off the goddamn speakerphone?—

“Jack, I know I’ve been a shitty dad,” he said. “But I want you to know I’m dying. I’m dying, son.”