I’ve forgotten the way he knocked me off my feet when I was fifteen, and I refuse to admit, even to myself, that no one has ever lit me up the way Nash Geary did one hot, summer night.
I forget I ever dreamed of a future with him…until the night something crazy forces me to remember.
Chapter Three
Aria
Twelve Years Later
“Ms. Aria March?” The man at the door is dressed in a fitted white polo shirt and khakis. He’s reasonably attractive and familiar-looking in a bland sort of way, but I can’t remember meeting him before.
And the way he said my name wasn’t exactly friendly, more…determined.
Not an old friend, then. He must be one of the people Mom said would be stopping by about the house renovations, even though Mom just renovated three years ago and we seriously don’t need fresh carpet on the stairs or new finish on the kitchen cabinets.
“Yes? Can I help you?” I hitch Felicity higher on my hip, wishing I’d left the baby in the backyard with the rest of the family. My nearly one-year-old is way too keyed up to have patience for a chat about cabinet stains.
We’re in the thick of a family barbeque to celebrate my sister Lark’s engagement and Felicity’s been running Mason, Lark’s fiancé, ragged playing ball in the grass. I should have let them play, but I was afraid to disappear for more than a minute or two, even to use the bathroom. Felicity’s been so clingy lately. And whiny. And not inclined to tolerate me being out of arm’s reach without throwing a fit to end all fits.
She’s just tired, I know, but so am I. We’re both running on empty. Neither of us has slept through the night since Felicity was born, and eleven months is a long time to go without more than three hours of rest at a stretch.
I’m seriously starting to lose my mind a little. Sleep deprivation is a form of torture in some particularly brutal prisons. It can make a person’s brain malfunction, a fact I prove by blinking in confusion when the man holds out an envelope and says, “You’ve been served, ma’am.”
“Served?” I continue to blink, unable to make sense of the words. “What?”
“It’s all there, ma’am,” the man says, pressing the envelope into my free hand before backing down the walk, heading for a beige Volvo idling at the curb, poised for a quick getaway.
My forehead furrows. This has to be the weirdest special delivery in the history of special deliveries.
“What’s all there? Hey wait!” I call after him, lowering my voice when Felicity begins to chant—
“No, no, no, no, no,” at the top of her lungs.
Felicity knows three words: “No,” “mama,” and “deer.” The last thanks to my father’s twisted fascination with taking his only granddaughter down to the basement to view his vast collection of mounted deer heads.
Which Felicity loves. For some inexplicable reason.
“Oh, hush, it’s okay,” I whisper, kissing the baby’s forehead half a dozen times, until Felicity’s chant becomes a yawn and she leans in to put her cheek on my chest.
I smile, my heart overflowing the way it so often does when my little girl is in my arms. I might be sleep deprived, exhausted, overworked, strapped for cash, and a struggling single mom, but I have never been more in love with anything or anyone than this sweet monkey. Felicity is my world, and the major reason I still spend a good portion of every day smiling, despite the fact that my ex continues to refuse to send money for diapers or baby food, let alone come see his daughter the way he promised to do when I left Nashville to move back in with my parents in Bliss River, Georgia.
But then, Liam is probably still busy. With Carrie, or Sherry, or Nanette, or whatever the heck his latest conquest’s name is.
I’ve done my best to forget their names, all of their names, every girl Liam slept with in the three years we were together. I don’t want to think about Liam rolling around in bed with other women while putting off our wedding again and again, until I ended up pregnant and giving birth to Felicity outside of marriage.
If my parents knew Liam and I were never officially hitched, their brains would literally explode. There would be pieces of traditionally-minded, middle-class couple all over the soon-to-be-freshly-stained cabinets.
The thought makes me shiver as I close the door against the August heat, and move back into the air-conditioned house to find a place to put Felicity down before opening the mysterious letter.
If my parents ever find out the truth, it will be a family tragedy. I will never hear the end of it, and by extension, neither will Felicity. My parents like to think they keep grown up talk in front of the grown-ups, but neither one of them can hold their tongue when things get heated, and I really don’t want my daughter to grow up feeling like there’s something “not good enough” about her birth—at least in the eyes of her grandparents. And so, I lied and told Mom and Dad that Liam and I eloped to get hitched in Vegas a year before we split.