I can’t offer her a clean slate like any of them can, but I can offer her memories of two college kids desperately in love.
I tug my phone out of the back pocket of my jeans. I scroll through the image library until I land on the most recent picture of my daughter that I have.
I flip the phone around to show Katie the brown-haired, green-eyed ray of sunshine that I love with all of my heart.
“This is Kristin.”
Katie leans forward. Her eyes skim the screen. “She’s beautiful.”
I turn the phone back to face me. The picture was taken at a playground. Kristin had just gotten off a swing. Her hair was bobbing around her shoulders. Her cheeks were flushed pink. The grin on her face was wide, revealing a missing bottom tooth.
It’s pure joy in the form of a photograph.
Katie studies my face. “What’s she like?”
Staring into her eyes, I rest both of my forearms on the top of the bar. “Smart as a whip, kind, impetuous. She’s not afraid to speak her mind.”
She breaks eye contact with me with a quick glance at a man sitting two stools away from her.
I straighten. “I’ll make you a dirty martini.”
“With two olives,” she says, smiling enough to part her lips.
I set to work making her drink with a flicker of hope that I haven’t felt in years.
Chapter 21
Kate
I sense Gage’s gaze on me as I check my phone yet again.
Since he made me a martini, he’s been busy tending to the needs of the people sitting at the bar. He seems to know most of them by their first names and their preferred drinks.
He’s chatted up both men and women, smiling at them while he prepares what they order.
He’s a natural at this. I know he worked behind the bar at a club in Hollywood a few months before we met, but I thought that was for pocket money.
I had no idea that less than a decade later he’d own a bar on the east coast.
I look down at my phone when it chimes.
r /> Preston: Dinner tomorrow night?
We’ve been texting back and forth all day. It was mostly generic messages about the weather and his schedule at work.
He landed a big deal yesterday, so he’s in the mood to celebrate.
I glance over to where Gage is talking to a petite brunette woman. I can see the flush of pink on her cheeks as she leans over the bar to showcase the top of her breasts.
Her black dress is low cut and tight.
I don’t want jealousy to nip at me but it does. Too much has happened between us for me to care if he’s flirting with someone else.
I shouldn’t feel anything for him.
I hate that I still do.
Even though I now know that he left because he found out he had a four-year-old daughter, it doesn’t change the fact that he never reached out to me after that day.