Page 10 of Where She Belongs (A Different Kind of Love #3)

SIX

Always around. Always available. Always watching her.

Simon’s words rattle in my head as I pull out Andrea’s chair at the main table. The worst part isn’t that he’d noticed. It’s that until he pointed it out, I’d never questioned why I kept showing up all those years.

Why a three-hour drive for dinner never seemed too far.

Why I remembered Tristy’s favorite soccer player when her own stepfather couldn’t be bothered.

If I’m being honest with myself—really honest—maybe there was something there in the beginning.

It’s not as if from the first day at her clinic, watching this petite Filipino-American dynamo challenge conventional treatment protocols with such passion and conviction, I’d been captivated.

Andrea’s easy smile, her bright brown eyes, her thick brown hair that was always tucked in a ponytail or a bun, only to be let down whenever she’d meet me and our colleagues for a night out.

But Andrea was my mentor, married, and so out of my league and so I kept my distance, keeping my admiration professional.

Then came the informal meetings of the Integrative Health Society that she held at her home which landed me back in her orbit every month.

Pure coincidence, I’d told myself. Just luck that the organization she headed matched my interests perfectly.

Well, that and her parents who always had a complete meal waiting for us at every meeting.

Fried lumpia, pancit, chicken adobo, and dessert that included turon or fried plantain egg rolls, maja blanca (cream-style corn cooked in a base of coconut milk, sugar and cornstarch), and cassava cakes.

Then Tristy caught me watching Premier League highlights between sessions.

You follow soccer? She’d been seventeen then, all attitude and eye rolls until that moment.

Since I was a kid. I remembered scrolling through scores on my phone. You play?

Her face had lit up. Forward. But my stepdad says it’s a waste of time since there’s no future in it. No one really watches women’s soccer.

I’d glanced at Simon then, watching him hold court in Andrea’s living room, talking about market forecasts while his stepdaughter’s achievements gathered dust on the shelves behind him.

Show me your technique sometime? I’d offered, and something in Andrea’s expression as she watched us—relief maybe, or gratitude—shifted something in my chest.

After that, friendship came easily. Too easily.

Every month I found new reasons to stay later, to help clean up after meetings, to meet Tristy at the park so she could practice new techniques while her grandparents, Maribel and Eduardo Martin, chatted with their friends on the benches or when her grandparents would stay for months at a time in the Philippines, watch one more match with Tristy while Andrea graded resident evaluations.

Simon was usually “too busy” to join us, caught up in faculty meetings.

“You okay?” Andrea’s whisper pulls me back to the present. “You’re pretty quiet.”

“Just thinking about what he said.” I reach for my water glass, buying time. “About me having an agenda all these years.”

She touches my arm. “Hey, don’t let him get to you. Simon sees ulterior motives everywhere.”

“Except in his own house,” I mutter, then immediately regret it when her hand withdraws. “Sorry. That was out of line.”

“No, it was honest.” Her smile is sad but steady. “Something Simon never quite mastered.”

Across the table, Tyler’s father launches into a story about his son’s first gaming tournament.

I pretend to listen while watching Andrea from the corner of my eye.

She’s wearing that expression I’ve seen a thousand times—the one that says she’s compartmentalizing, filing away feelings to deal with later.

I used to admire how she could do that. Now I wonder how many of those feelings are still locked away, unprocessed.

How many times did she paste on that same smile when Simon missed another of Tristy’s games?

When he started coming home later and later?

When she walked in on him fucking his mistress on their bed and managed to make it back to her car without losing it?

As the emcee takes over and announces the evening’s traditional hula demonstration and the dancers take the stage, my mind drifts back to that night six months ago when Andrea finally broke down.

Up until then, she’d held it together through weeks of divorce negotiations, maintaining her composure as Simon’s lawyers tried to claim half of everything she’d built before their marriage.

That night, after a particularly brutal meeting where he’d brought Kitty along “for moral support,” she called me in tears.

I could have just listened to her over the phone but I was on the road within minutes. Took me two hours to get to her but the moment she saw me as she opened the front door of the house she used to share with that asshole, everything she’d been holding back came pouring out.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she’d sobbed into my shoulder. “I can’t keep pretending I’m fine.”

So I did what any friend would do. Drove her to Frontier, ordered her favorite tostada with extra green chile, and let her cry between bites.

When the tears finally stopped, I made stupid jokes about my latest dating disaster until she laughed—that real laugh that starts in her belly and lights up her whole face.

“What would I do without you?” she’d asked, wiping chile sauce from her chin.

“Probably eat less chile,” I’d replied, stealing a sopapilla from her plate. “And have way fewer stories about my disasters with women.”

“They’re only disasters because you’re afraid of commitment,” she’d said as I lathered honey over my sopapilla and took a bite, knowing she was right.

Looking back now, I wonder if that’s when something shifted. If watching Andrea piece herself back together made me see her differently. Not as my former mentor or Tristy’s mom, but as Andrea—strong enough to rebuild her life, vulnerable enough to let me see her cry.

I broke up with Courtney shortly after that night, my inability to tell her I loved her suddenly making perfect sense. The words wouldn’t come because they weren’t true—not for Courtney, not for any woman I’d dated. Had I been saving them, unknowingly, for someone else?

For Andrea?

“And now,” the emcee’s voice breaks through my memories, “we invite our couples to join us for a quick hula lesson!”

“Mom! Gabe!” Tristy calls from the next table. “Get up there!”

“We really don’t—” Andrea starts, but Tyler’s already filming with his phone.

“The mother of the bride and her hot young doctor have to participate!” someone calls out. “It’s tradition!”

Hell, it’s tradition. As made up and inescapable as every other “tradition” that appears the moment someone gets a camera ready and alcohol is flowing freely.

But as other couples make their way to the stage, including Dax and Harlow, I know we have no choice.

“I hope we don’t regret this,” Andrea says as she takes my offered hand.

“Just pretend we’re dancing the bachata,” I whisper as we join the line of guests.

Growing up with two sisters who used dance competitively meant spending countless hours as their practice partner.

Bachata, salsa, merengue—they’d drilled the steps into me until rhythm became second nature, something Andrea is aware of when it comes to hanging out with me. The hula should be no problem.

As the music starts and the instructor begins to dance, we find enough room beside Dax and Harlow. With other couples filling the dance floor, I position Andrea in front of me, giving her more space to move to the music.

Slowly her initial nervousness begins to melt away as her movements become more fluid, her laughter more genuine.

There’s something mesmerizing about the way she moves and standing this close, I notice details I’ve seen countless times but never truly absorbed, like the elegant line of her neck framed by the fragrant lei, the musical quality of her laughter as she attempts the hip movement.

The way her dress catches the torchlight.

Even the space where her wedding ring used to be.

The lead performer approaches us with a warm smile. “Would the happy couple join us for a special dance?”

“No!” Andrea exclaims but it’s too late. Their phones are all out again as Tristy and Tyler urge us forward.

I exhale, forcing a grin.

Oh well, if you can’t beat them…

The crowd erupts in cheers as I guide Andrea to the center of the stage.

“You got this, Andie. You’re a natural,” I tell her as the dancers demonstrate the basic steps again, the drums building a hypnotic almost seductive rhythm.

“Yeah, right,” she says but she’s laughing, as if realizing it’s futile to go against the crowd’s demands.

As she follows the dancers’ movements, her skin glows with a warmth I’ve somehow never fully appreciated before. The shadows dance across her face, highlighting angles and curves I’ve seen a thousand times but never truly observed.

Here, away from the sterile lights of her clinic, without her white coat and the weight of responsibility she carries, Andrea transforms. Not just into the mother of the bride, but into a woman who’s allowing herself a rare moment of joy.

Her smile reaches her eyes in a way I haven’t seen since before Simon’s betrayal—uninhibited, genuine.

When was the last time I’d seen her like this? Had I ever?

The torchlight catches in her hair, highlighting strands of silver among the deep brown that she never bothers to hide.

Those silver strands tell stories—of late nights at the clinic, of raising Tristy alone while building her career, of weathering storms that would have broken someone with less resolve.

But why am I noticing these details now, after all these years?

“I think I’m getting the hang of this,” Andrea says with a laugh as she executes a perfect hip movement, looking back at me with a spark in her eyes I rarely see—playful, almost flirtatious.