If I Break THE COMPLETE SERIES Bundle (183 page)

“Hi,” the little girl says before she takes a bite of a cookie I baked earlier.

She’s wearing a milk mustache, and she warms my heart. I know it’s her because she looks just like him. I was always afraid that when I saw her, I’d hate her. It’s crazy to think you can hate a child, and I never wanted to be that person, but I thought I would. The product of their love, their affair, his betrayal—but she’s sitting there, and she’s none of that. She’s just a cute little girl who looks like the man I love, and I feel sick. I’m confused, and Will sees it.

He stands quickly. “Willa, you finish off these cookies and your pictures, and when I come back, we can go see the horses,” he says in a voice reserved for children.

It’s soft and kind, and I want to block it from my ears. He ushers me into the living room, and I pull away from him as soon as we’re there.

“What is this? Is Lisa here? Are you working things out with her? Why didn’t you say anything?” I say frantically.

“Lisa’s gone.”

I look at him skeptically. “What do you mean gone? Like she’s gone while you spend time with your daughter?”

“No, like gone and she’s not coming back for her,” he says, looking me in the eye.

I can only swallow hard. “That doesn’t make sense.”

He gets me to sit on the couch, and he explains that Lisa left for San Francisco, that she feels as though she can’t be a mother. She left Willa’s birth certificate, medical records, and a box of other documents.

“Is she serious?” I ask, rubbing my temples. This is so much at one time. I don’t know how to process it.

“She also left you this,” he says. He hands me an envelope that says “For Gwen.” “Before you open it, I want you to know how much I love you. I want you to know how much I hope you’ll forgive me, but I know this could be a lot, even for you, and I don’t want to guilt you into doing anything you don’t want to.”

With tears in his eyes, he takes my hand and kisses me on the forehead before getting up and heading back into the kitchen. My head is pounding, and I hear blood coursing through my ears. My hands are shaking. I stare at the envelope for so long. I don’t know how long exactly, but I know Will and Willa have finished their cookies and gone out to the barn by the time I let out a deep sigh and open the envelope. There’re three pieces of paper, one of which says, “Read first.” It’s folded, so I open it and see that it’s handwritten.

I know you said you’ve forgiven me. I wonder how that’s possible after everything I did and all the pain I caused you and your family. You only ever treated me with kindness. It hurt to see in your eyes that you meant it, that it wasn’t some bullshit you spouted to feel better about yourself but you really meant it. I was angry that day. I wished you did hate me. It would have made me feel that much better because in that moment, I realized the difference between a girl and a woman. As much as I liked to believe that I was this forward-thinking, beautiful, adventurous woman so many men desired, I realized I was still just my mother’s little girl… You showed me how a real woman should be, how a good woman is, and I aspire to be that one day. Right now, I’m not, and I know me and Will have taken so much from you already. My selfishness, my needs always came first, and I’m going to do my best to work on that. I promise. But before I do, I have one last selfish request to ask of you. I ask that you don’t hate my daughter, that you love her like you would have loved your own, that you give her what she needs to not become another me. That you help Will raise her, guide her, love her. She’s the best of both of us, and I don’t want either of us to ruin her. I hope that you consider this. If it’s too much, I think that Lauren, Chris’s wife, would be the next best thing, but you are my first choice.

With sorrow and a plea for forgiveness,

Lisa

I open the other stapled letter. My hear drops when I see it includes the adoption papers she’s already signed. Next to the line marked Adoptee is not just Will’s name but my own.

O
ne year ago, I’d never thought I’d have my granddaughter asleep on my chest, my husband asleep by my side, and his daughter between us with her arm over me. I never thought I’d consider his daughter my own. A year ago, I hadn’t even known he had a daughter. I hadn’t known the pain I’d face. The betrayals I’d discover. Going through that pain was worse than anything I’ve ever faced.

Six months ago, I’d thought I’d be divorcing my husband as his daughter with my son’s best friend was the flower girl in my son’s vow renewal. Six months ago, I never thought Lisa, the woman my husband betrayed me with, would be in my prayers, that when she called and checked in briefly and infrequently, I’d smile when I heard her voice, that I’d be grateful for the gift she gave me.

I’d always imagined my house full of laughter and children, but I never imagined it’d happen this way. A year ago, I thought I was losing my son, that my dream of having children run around was lost. But today, with my little granddaughter Caylen; a daughter I call my own, Willa; and my son’s wife, Lauren, expecting twins, I know that my dream, though nothing like I’d imagined, has come true.

Some people would never be able to see this as a happy ending. They’d think I was desperate and foolish to forgive. To them, I say that when you’re hurt, you want to hold on to that pain as though it’s a life jacket. You think that by letting go of that pain, you’re saying its cause isn’t important. What you don’t realize is that pain weighs you down. The hurt suffocates you, wraps around everything good about you.

Animosity is a weapon, and it’s not used against the person you can’t forgive—it’s used against yourself. Your bitterness doesn’t hurt them. If they love you, it will hurt them for a while, but it doesn’t stop them from living their life. Your anger doesn’t make them carry their pain or their hurt any longer. I realized that when Gia told me she hated me and she’d never forgive me. It hurt like hell for a while, but each day it hurt less and less, and there were some days I never even thought about it.

I could have left my husband and been brokenhearted. I’m sure I could have found someone else to love. I don’t know what could have happened if I’d chosen differently, but I realized you don’t get to choose what happens to you. You do get to choose what happens after though, and the best thing to choose is whatever makes you happy, and I never thought in my wildest dreams happiness would be this way, but life has a way of surprising us all.

Thank you for reading! For a sneak peak into my next work and to follow Lisa’s story keep reading.

Aidan

Y
ou ever woken up with the feeling that you were going to have a really shitty day? When everything goes wrong from the moment you open your eyes? You look out the window and the weather is crappy, and your grams forgot to wash your favorite pair of underwear, and instead of her making your favorite pancakes for breakfast, she’s out globe-trotting with her
lover
and you’re stuck eating old people cereal- the crappy flakes with no taste- that you can’t even make edible with sugar because you stopped buying it after her doctor suggested she use Splenda instead, and she’s never even here to not use the sugar she’s supposed to be avoiding… and you forgot to go grocery shopping to get cereal that’s actually worth eating?

Splenda sucks. It’s sugar’s ugly cousin.

I choke down the last spoonful of tasteless crap, and my stomach is still growling. The fridge is stocked with bacon and sausage, but it’s all frozen. At times like this, I question my bachelorhood and think it’d be really cool to have a girlfriend who could cook when my Grams decides to go all single twenty-year-old. That thought doesn’t last long though. It shrivels up and dies as my phone vibrates. It’s my sort-of-ex Hillary, the blond bombshell. I call her that because she’s hot and explodes all over the place, and she’s a sort-of ex because she acts like an ex, but we were never really together.

Why? Well, aside from the fact that having a girlfriend is like renting a house when you can live in a whole lot of hotels for free, Hillary pretended to be normal—like all girls do—then turned out to be bat-shit crazy—like all the girls who get on this ride are. That is exactly why I don’t do girlfriends. My track record is embarrassing.

My first g-girlfriend—I can’t even say the word without shuddering—was in middle school. Cassandra Beyers was a cute little redhead who was the first girl in our class to
need
a training bra, and I wanted to be the first guy to learn to take one off. I was successful and grinning from ear to ear after she let me touch what was then the Holy Grail, but afterward, for some reason, she thought I was her boyfriend
and
that she could tell me all her secrets. One of those secrets was that she liked to sniff her armpits.

Like, who the hell likes to sniff their armpits? I broke up with her the next day. It
really
wasn’t a breakup since we were never really together, but she slashed the tires on my bike, years before girls were supposed to go psycho on dudes. I had a woman before her time.

In high school, I was smart and made sure to date as many girls as possible, so my next girlfriend wasn’t until after high school. I met Shawna right after I graduated and before I enlisted in the army. Shawna was great. She was a singer, cute, didn’t want to smell any weird body parts, and had an amazing ass. But for some reason, she was intent on having a fucking kid. I hadn’t known her for more than four months before she wanted me to have a baby with her. I wasn’t even nineteen yet. After I caught her poking holes in my condoms, I got the hell out of Dodge!

Which brings us to Hillary. The moment I saw her, I knew I wanted to do her. She was one of the sexiest women I’d ever seen. She was like a potty-mouthed Kick Your Ass Barbie. I met her through my best friend Chris’s wife. We were at dinner, and Chris’s fiancée was giving his wife, Lauren, a bunch of shit. How Chris has a wife and fiancée is a whole other story, but anyway, Hillary practically attacked the fiancée, Jenna, over giving Hillary’s best friend, Lauren, shit. The way Hillary flew over the dinner table after throwing a pitcher of water in Jenna’s face, who really is a bitch who deserved it, I thought I was in love. Nah, just kidding.

I knew I was in lust though.

That night, Hillary was screaming my name louder than she’d been screaming at Jenna at dinner. It was the best sex I’d ever had, wild and passionate. She was like a fuckin’ porn star, and she got it! That I didn’t want anything serious. Well, she claimed to get it, until she didn’t. She started to want to go out all the time—which is fine, I’m always down for a good time—but then she started to get crazy jealous, which was not a good time at all. I wanted to cut her loose, but she’s my best friend’s wife’s best friend, and I didn’t want things to get ugly.

So I kind of kept sleeping with her because the sex was phenomenal.

Then she sort of started to act as though we were a couple, which was
not
supposed to happen. We were just supposed to be having a lot of fun. Hillary lives in Chicago, and I won’t lie, being with her there was a breath of fresh air from stale Madison, Michigan. I was going back and forth because Chris and I are opening a car restoration shop in Chicago, and it was kind of cool to have someone on speed dial there who got that sometimes good sex is just good sex. Well, until she started not to get it.

I’ve lived a lot of places. My dad was a sergeant in the army, so Mom and I followed him to so many different states: Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio, New Jersey, California, Ohio and even spent a little while in Paris. But Michigan always felt like home. For one, it was where my grams lived and was always kind of our home base, and two, it was the only place that I had real friends growing up. It’s funny how a decision like where you live can change your whole life. If my dad had chosen to live anywhere other than on Pine Circle, who knows who I could have become or how I would have turned out. But since he did choose Pine Circle, it was pretty easy for me and my next-door neighbors to become best friends.