“Oh, bullshit. Tyson. I don’t care. Well, I do. But not in the way you think.”
“How can you say that!” I cry at her. “This is your ex-husband! His loins did stuff with your loins and you have a child!”
“Ew,” she says, her nose wrinkling. “Let’s not talk about loins anymore.”
I bury my face in my hands. “Oh, Jesus.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Everything. Nothing. I don’t know.”
“Well, that was… all-encompassing. And succinct, as usual.”
“I hated you,” I say, dropping my hands on the table. “For the longest time.”
She seems taken aback by my candor. “I know,” she says. “But I won’t apologize for it.”
I shake my head. “And I don’t want you to. I was wrong. I’m the one who’s sorry.”
“Tyson, can I tell you something? Just between you and me?”
“I guess.”
“And you have to promise to let me finish.”
“When people tell me that, it usually means I’m not going to like it,” I say glumly.
Stacey laughs. “Probably. But you need to hear it.”
“Okay.”
She takes a deep breath and then lets it out slowly. She looks out the window into the afternoon, then back at me. It’s only a second she looks away, but in that second her face hardens, and her eyes turn steely. “You broke him,” she says. Gone is the laughter in her voice. “When you left. When you abandoned him. When you took yourself away from him, when you cast him off like he was nothing so you could lick your wounds, you broke him.”
“I—”
“No interrupting, remember?”
I nod and sit back, helpless.
She watches me for a moment to make sure I’m sincere before she continues. “I sent your invitation out early. We hadn’t even agreed on a design yet. He told me he’d already told you. That you were happy. That you were okay. I should have looked closer, but everything was swirling around me then. The pregnancy, him. His mood since you’d gone away to school. It was all too much. And then the day came when you stopped it all.
“He tried to hide it. He tried to go on like nothing had changed. Like he wasn’t unhappy. Like he wasn’t upset. Like he just hadn’t had his whole world turned upside down. Because whether you realize it or not, Tyson, that’s what you were. You were his world. The rest of us just drifted right on by. When you pulled away, so did he. He acted like it was nothing, but I knew him. It wasn’t nothing.”
She looks down at her hands. “We we
re never meant to be, he and I. I know that. I’ve had a long time to accept it, and I have. I’ve moved on. I have a wonderful life. I can stand on my own two feet. I have a man who loves me. I have a son I would do anything for. But even though Dom and I didn’t work out, that doesn’t mean I don’t still love him. Do you understand?”
I nod. Then, quietly, “He loves you too.”
“I know. We’re friends. But even if we weren’t, we’re always going to be bound together because of Ben. Ben has to come first. No matter what. You were Dom’s world before, Tyson, but now you’re going to have to share it. Nothing, and I mean nothing, can bring harm to Ben. Are we clear?”
I nod.
She looks a little sad. “He told me, one day. I don’t know why he came clean or what he thought would happen. He told me how he felt. You know. About you. But I had already figured it out long ago.”
“How?”
“The looks he gave you,” she says. “Like you were the only magic he’d ever known. I knew that look for what it was. And when you left, it was like a light had gone out in him.”