“You’re being paid to say things like that.”
“Like he was trying to erase me.”
Clark set his coffee down.
“Then don’t let him. Don’t you want him to see how happy you are without him?”
I stared at him.
There was no smugness in his voice, no rehearsed line.
Just a steady, patient question.
“Then don’t let him.”
“I don’t know how to do this,” I admitted.
“You don’t have to do anything,” he said. “Just stand next to me. Smile at your children. Enjoy your son’s birthday. I’ll handle the rest.”
I thought about my son’s eyes in the doorway that morning.
I thought about the baby.
I thought about twenty years of believing I was safe.
Then I took a slow, shaky breath and nodded.
“I don’t know how to do this,”
