“No. No, I fucking get it. Message received. What I don’t get is why you waited this long to tell me that you have a goddamn husband!”
“He’s my ex-husband,” she said weakly. It sounded more like a question than a statement.
“Ex?” A hard laugh sounded in my throat, and I nodded past her. “Does he know that? Better yet, do you?”
October 24
Kennedy
LIAM STORMED PAST me, but I didn’t try to stop him. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to say at all now that Rhys was here. Like Kira had said, it’d been four years since any of us had seen him.
Minutes after I heard the front door shut, I turned at the sound of someone walking toward me, and found Rhys there.
A million memories hit me. Our whirlwind romance. Eloping after knowing each other for only two weeks. Being devastatingly in love with him, and then being simply devastated when he left me. I’d never loved anyone before or after him. Dated guys, sure, but no one had been like Rhys until Liam came back into my life. What we’d had was something you only ever see in fairy tales. Rhys had been my entire world, and I’d thought I was his. Obviously I had been wrong.
My family had been furious when we’d gotten married. Partly because I had barely turned eighteen when I met him, but mostly because we barely knew each other and none of them had even met Rhys before we eloped. I married him just days after graduation, and even though I’d been positive I wouldn’t end up going to college with my sister since Rhys’s job was in Tampa, college had ended up being an escape when he’d asked for a divorce just two weeks before classes started.
He’d fed me a line about how he couldn’t give me the life I deserved—complete with tears and the most heartbreaking expression I’ve seen on anyone’s face—and I never saw him again. He didn’t return to his apartment, which I’d been sharing with him over the summer, and his phone was taken out of service that day. I received the divorce papers in the mail just days later. That was the day I stopped believing in love.
My mom and sister were equally mad at him and sad for me, but my dad had been the confusing one. Where I thought he’d be happy that Rhys had left me, he’d done nothing but hold me as I cried for days. Only leaving my side if Uncle Mason was there to take his place. Neither of them ever said a word, but their worry and sadness had been unexpected.
And now, after four years, Rhys was standing in my room, in my condo, in motherfucking California.
“Why are you here? How! How are you here?” I asked him when I felt like I could finally speak again.
“Are you asking how I knew where to find you?”
“Yes, Rhys, I want to know how you knew where we were.” And I wanted to do anything but start crying again.
“Your dad told me.”
I waited for him to correct himself, or to tell me the real answer, but instead of speaking, he stared at me with the same heartbroken expression on his face as he’d worn on the day he told me we were over.
“Who was—”
“My dad told you where we were?” I asked, cutting him off. “Why?”
Rhys looked off to the side, his dark eyes wide, like he was having trouble understanding something. “He, uh . . . he knows how much you still mean to me. I hadn’t said anything other than your name before he was writing down the address here.”
The air left my lungs in a hard rush. It felt like he’d just punched me. “How much I still mean to you,” I said, the statement almost sounding like a question. “What do you—Rhys, you left me! You divorced me and then you just disappeared! I never heard from you again! I didn’t know where you went when you left, and you gave me no way of getting ahold of you so I could try to change your mind.”
Rhys’s expression changed to something between surprise and awe. “He never told you?”
“No—what? Who never told me what?”
“Your dad. He gave me his word, but you’re his daughter. I didn’t think for a second that he would actually keep it from you.”
When he didn’t offer more, I threw my arms out to the side. “Are you going to tell me what you thought I already knew, or just leave me wondering?”
Rhys looked around again, and his eyes stayed on the bed for a few seconds. When he spoke, his voice was dark. “I want to sit down while I tell you this, but if he has been in here with you, I will not touch that bed.” His eyes shot over to me and he took a step back. “Please give me the chance to explain everything.”
He didn’t wait for me to say anything else; he just turned and walked out. When I followed him, I found him standing in the living room, waiting for me to decide where to go from there. I didn’t want to sit on the couch with him, because I was afraid he’d get too close to me, and I couldn’t handle that right now. Turning, I went into the kitchen and sat down at the small table. As soon as we were sitting, he began talking.
“Kennedy, what did you think I did for a living?”
My forehead creased. “What did I think? You’re a cop. Or, you were.”
Rhys nodded and leaned forward to put his arms on the table. “A cop for the city of Tampa. You never found it odd that I didn’t know your dad or Mason, and they didn’t know me? We worked for the same police department.”
“No, because they’re detectives, you were on patrol.”
“The two still cross, Kennedy.”
I sat back in my chair, trying to put distance between us without being obvious about it. I didn’t understand what he was saying. I’d seen his uniform, I’d seen his patrol car . . . I knew he worked for the Tampa police. “What are you getting at? Did you steal the uniform and car?”
A startled laugh left him, and his lips curved up into the smile I’d fallen for so long ago. “No, nothing like that. What I’m saying is, we did know each other. When I met you, I had no idea that the two of you were related. I knew Detective Ryan. I’d had to talk with him and Detective Gates a few times when they were looking for certain gang members, but never once did I think you had any connection with them. Two days after we got married, I got called in to talk with the chief; do you remember that?”
“I don’t know—I mean, I guess I do. I knew you were supposed to be off work and you went in for a few hours, but that’s it. All I really remember from that day was going to tell my family later that night that we’d gotten married.”
“Yeah,” Rhys said on a sigh. “In that meeting with Chief, I was asked to change jobs in the department for one assignment. He told me some things about the job, and I immediately accepted it. I knew it was important, I knew it involved getting some bad people. I had no idea until after I’d agreed that I would no longer be able to have a relationship with you. For some reason, I never once realized the seriousness of this job until two detectives came in to talk to me about it. Your dad and uncle.”
I sat there staring at him with wide eyes. “My dad and uncle? What . . . what was the job?”
“To go undercover,” Rhys responded immediately. “Your dad and uncle were going to be the ones training me over the next few months because of the work they’d done while they were undercover. At the end of that meeting and their going over what we would be doing for training and when . . . they told me to start cutting ties with everyone. They said I couldn’t tell anyone, but I had to start distancing myself from even my family.”