“At least he showed up,” she said, color popping into her cheeks.
I bit down on the inside of my cheek and didn’t respond as her eyes rose to meet mine.
“Sorry, that was uncalled for.”
“Nice to see you haven’t lost your spark,” I said.
“I’m sorry—”
“Don’t apologize. I deserve it,” I said. “And don’t worry, karma kicked me in the balls for you.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“My payback for doing what I did to you was the woman I married,” I said.
I watched her nod her head as she drew in a deep breath.
“I saw the wedding announcement in the paper. You two looked happy.”
“We were petrified. Pregnant by accident and scrambling for what to do,” I said.
“Where is she now?”
“Oddly enough, she’s with her boyfriend and of all the places on the entire earth, she’s right here on the island,” I said with a sigh.
“Wait. She’s here?”
“Probably jetting off somewhere else now if I’m lucky,” I said.
“What happened with you two? The wedding announcement painted you guys to be so in love.”
“That’s what they’re supposed to do. Sarah was a nice enough girl, but she didn’t want kids. Her birth control failed and she got pregnant. She wanted to terminate, and I begged her not to. Told her I’d marry her and make her as comfortable as I could if she didn’t. And she tried, but it just wasn’t for her. I woke up one morning when the twins were around ten months old and she was gone.”
“What?” Brooke asked. “She just left her husband and two babies?”
“Yep. She went off to start a new life. She had major postpartum depression the weeks following child birth. I thought it was something natural that we needed to work through together. We tried to make it work for months. Me more than her. I did every damn thing I could to help her bond with the children. In the end, she just decided it wasn’t the life she wanted. To this day, it eats me up that our children never experienced the love of their mother. Somehow, we ended up with the same faith. I grew up without my father and they’re growing up without their mother.”
“Kevin, I’m so sorry.”
“Well, that’s karma for you. My kids don’t deserve it but I’m a different story.”
“No. Not karma. No one deserves that.”
I took the last sip of my wine before setting my glass on the balcony.
“She’d been planning it for a while. There were divorce papers for me to sign in the mailbox that morning. She didn’t want to be married and she didn’t want to be a mother, so she left me to do her job for her.”
“Well, you’ve done an incredible job with those kids. They’re great.”
“Were they okay for you today?” I asked.
“They were angels, Kevin.”
“So they were temporarily replaced with alien carbon copies?”
A giggle fell from Brooke’s lips and I suppressed the urge to kiss her.
“I’m over it,” I said. “I never really loved her, though I dedicated myself to trying. But I wish she hadn’t done what she did to the kids. I know they wish they had a mother around.”