“You’ve always been kind of cute when you ramble.” His shoulders rise and fall. “Might be your saving grace tonight.”
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
He blanches. “That beer couldn’t have been that expired,” he mutters.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He steps onto the porch and pulls the door closed behind him. There are two rocking chairs to my right, and he heads that way. “You want to apologize, huh?” he asks, sinking into one of the chairs. “I better sit down for this.”
“You aren’t cute when you’re being a dick,” I tell him, sitting in the other rocker.
“That’s not a good way to start an apology.”
“I haven’t started yet.”
He finally smiles a wide grin that shows off his pearly-white teeth. “So? Let’s hear it.”
“You’re enjoying this way too much.”
We sit in silence, rocking back and forth in the old-fashioned chairs. The motion is relaxing, and coupled with the sweet scent from the rosebushes planted at the end of the porch, my shoulders sink into the chair.
“I bet Mia tumbles across there, huh?” Motioning toward the front yard, I look at Dane. “It’s the perfect length for a tumbling pass.”
“She does. It makes me crazy. I’m afraid she’ll fall on her head.”
Laughing at the tortured look on his face, I shake my head. “It’s good to fall on your head sometimes. It teaches you to keep your hands up.”
His rocking slows. “Is that why you’re here? You fell on your head, and now you’re trying to get your hands up?”
“No. I’m here because I’m a guilt-stricken person who doesn’t want to go home without at least trying to apologize for things I said that I didn’t mean.”
“Here’s the thing, Neely—I think you did mean them.”
“That’s not true.”
“You sure about that?” He rocks faster again, setting his sights somewhere across the street. “I know you have feelings about Mia, and—”
“I adore her,” I cut in. “She’s a great little girl.”
“I know that,” he says quietly.
Most people wouldn’t hear the pain in his voice, but it’s obvious to me. The notes buried in the language have me wanting to reach out. To touch his arm. To make him look at me so he can witness the genuineness in my eyes.
But I don’t. Instead, I fight the constriction in my chest as I search for words. He beats me to it.
“I regret a lot of things.” He flexes his jaw back and forth. “I regret thinking I knew what was best for you and breaking up with you so you’d go to college.”
“What?” I sit up in the chair. “What are you talking about?”
“I didn’t want to go to New York. I’d just started at the mill and figured it would suit me better than some metropolitan city I had no interest in. The mill suited me, Neely. But New York suited you.”
Someone might as well be trying to explain to me the earth is flat, because none of this makes sense. I stare at him in the moonlight and wonder if I’m hearing things. “I had no idea that’s why you broke up with me.”
“I know. I felt like it was easier having you be mad at me and just going. You needed to take that scholarship, Neely. You were so damn talented, and all you ever talked about was this life of doing all this stuff.” He looks at the ground. “I didn’t want that life, and it wasn’t fair to make you pick between the two.”
My heart sits at the base of my throat. “It wasn’t fair for you to pick for me either.”
His eyes lift to mine, and we rock back and forth, searching each other’s gaze for understanding.
“I loved you,” he says, his voice so soft it’s barely audible over the crickets chirping in the yard. “I figured I’d let you go and you’d come back to me eventually.”
“I would’ve. If we were together, I wouldn’t have gone to New York after college. But we weren’t, and you had Katie and the baby and I couldn’t stomach seeing that, Dane.”
His face pales. He sucks in a deep, haggard breath before blowing it out slowly. “I’ve never truly apologized to you for that.”
“For what?”
“For Katie.”
“Dane, I don’t want to—” I say, adjusting in my seat. He cuts me off.
“Listen to me. I’m sorry for sleeping with her. I’m sorry for doing that to you. I know those words are the most overused words in the fucking English language, but I don’t know what else to say.”
Looking away at a tree growing topsy-turvy in a neighboring yard, I fight back the tears in my eyes. This is all I ever wanted to hear.
My heart swells in my chest as I force my lungs to inflate.
“You don’t have to accept that,” he whispers.
“Of course I do,” I say. “But can I ask you why?” I turn to face him. “Why her? Did you really think we would never be together again? Were you trying to move on? I just . . . I can’t understand it.”
“I don’t understand it either, really. I stopped trying to at some point because what difference does it make?” He shrugs. “My dad seems to think it was some form of self-hatred, some kind of ‘let’s just blow up my entire life now’ kind of thing, and as much as I hate to admit he’s right about anything, maybe he is.”
“He’s always right.”
We exchange a small grin.
“I regret not coming after you when you left and not trying to find a way to make us work,” Dane says. “But I will never regret Mia.”
My hand falls to his forearm. We both look at it, my pale skin on top of his tan. “Of course you wouldn’t regret her.”
His eyes draw away from my hand and to my face before he takes off rocking again. I slip my hand back to my lap and look anywhere but at him.
My thoughts are muddied. A part of me wants to run to the car and flee, taking what’s left of my pride with it. Another part wants to say what I came to say and then leave with grace. As the two parts argue, I just sit and wait.
The porch creaks with the motion of the chairs. A car door slams somewhere in the distance. It takes a long time before either of us speaks again.
“I don’t know if you know this or not, but Katie left us right after Mia was born,” he says.
“I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
He shrugs. “I’m sorry for Mia.”
My heart pulls as I wonder how she feels about that. “Is she okay with it? I mean, does she miss her?”
“She didn’t know her long enough to miss her. That’s sad as hell, isn’t it?” His eyes are as sober as a judge. “You’ve heard the stories about my mom. She was mean and awful and could swing a switch with the best of them. I’d hide Matt in my room some days so she’d take her anger out on me and not him.”
Squeezing my eyes closed, I bite my tongue. Interrupting him with a full-on rant about how much I loathe his mother won’t help anything. Still, it’s hard.
“But at least I knew her.” He places his hand on my shoulder until I open my eyes. “I knew I wasn’t missing anything when it came to her, you know? When my mom died, it was almost a relief. Mia doesn’t get that. There will be a day when she feels like she missed out or that she wasn’t enough to keep Katie around, and that’ll be a day that I can’t handle.”
I think about Katie and how she always struggled to really fit in anywhere. She went overboard on everything in hopes that she would feel like she belonged. I kind of feel sorry for her.
“What happened to Katie?” I ask.
“What? Do you hope she got eaten by a shark?”
“No. Maybe a piranha,” I joke. “Honestly, I hope she’s okay somewhere. For Mia’s sake.”
Dane smiles. “I really don’t know. But I hope the same. I hope she’s done something with herself and comes back someday sober and happy and wants to get to know our daughter.”
“Did things end badly between you?” I ask, not sure if I really even want to know.
“No.” He shrugs. “She just said she wasn’t into this anymore and was going to leave. And she left. Her attorney sent papers giving me full rights, and that was the end of it. I was suddenly a nineteen-year-old kid with a baby girl. Talk about a learning curve.”
Laughing, I decide to lighten the mood. “How’d you do with diapers and onesies?”
“I’m a champ.”
Our laughter blends together in the easiest way. It’s like the notes just know where to go to be harmonious and we hit them together automatically.
After our chuckles fade, he turns to me again. “I wonder sometimes if Katie just didn’t want me. And if somehow I’m to blame for her not wanting Mia.”
“Dane, no. That’s not fair.”
“Life isn’t fair. If it was . . .” He looks around the porch before coming back to me. “If it was fair, you and I would’ve ended up together.”
My insides turn to mush as his words hit me straight in the heart. I’ve told myself for years it never would’ve worked out between us. That Dane was a bad guy. But none of that is true, and down deep, I knew it. Hearing him say that is a vindication of sorts.