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  “I love all those things too.”

  It was the perfect time for him to say something more, even if it was a kiss. Matthew only stared. And Stella began to break.

  “Matthew, I love you,” she told him.

  Matthew looked startled. Then, for the briefest of moments, pleased. But he still said nothing, and from his pocket, his phone gave another bleat.

  Stella stepped back. Let him go. She waited for him to choose her, to choose them, but Matthew pulled his phone out to look at the message. He grimaced and tucked it away again.

  “Will you be here when I get back?” he asked.

  “Do you want me to be?”

  “Yes. So we can talk.” He kissed her cheek. Gave her shoulders a squeeze. He grabbed his coat and keys from the rack by the door. He did turn back in the doorway to look at her. There was that. “I’ll bring home takeout from that Indian place you love. Okay?”

  “Sure.” Stella nodded.

  She waited until he’d closed the door behind him before she let herself begin to shake. Then her knees gave out and she went to them on the cold, hard tile of his entryway. Her hands slapped flat on the floor as her shoulders bent and she tried to hold back the sobs splintering her throat. Scalding her eyes. She couldn’t, of course. Her grief surged up and out of her, Cthulu rising from the depths to destroy the world and everything in it.

  She got to her feet before she was done weeping, but she couldn’t stay there on the floor forever. In his powder room, she washed her face and drank cool water from her cupped hands, gulping it until her stomach protested. Then she leaned over the toilet, waiting for her guts to erupt...but she breathed her way through the sudden nausea. Got to her feet again. Smoothed her hair. Her clothes. The woman in the mirror was pale, with shadowed eyes. Her smile a grimace. Stella touched her fingertips to the glass for a second, but yes. That was her. No through-the-looking-glass moment here.

  She didn’t write a note to go along with the key she left in the bowl on the hall table. There were no words. He’d figure it out. Then she let herself out the front door, took the elevator to the lobby. Had Herndon call her a cab.

  She left him.

  Because loving Matthew was like trying to fill a cracked glass—she could pour and pour and pour, and the glass would always be empty. There would never be anything for her to drink.

  She would always be thirsty.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  There’s no explaining fate or serendipity. It happens, most of the time unrecognized, but when Stella ran into Craig again at the same old coffee shop where she’d stopped after work to pick up a box of muffins, all she could think was how often and how hard the universe had tried to push them together.

  She asked him to dinner. “Not a date,” she told him. “But I’d like us to talk.”

  “I’d like that,” Craig said.

  She took him to a nice little place with dim lighting and soft music and an eclectic menu. Not a date, though it could’ve been, she thought as they both ordered glasses of wine and their knees bumped under the table. If she’d reached for his hand, he might’ve taken it. She didn’t reach.

  “Why do you think we didn’t work?” she said bluntly. “Was it as simple as me being married? If we’d had a chance, if we’d met each other when I was alone...would it have been different?”

  Craig sipped from his glass and studied her. “Yes. Maybe.”

  “I don’t believe in soul mates or anything like that. I don’t believe in one true love. I’m not sure, to be honest, that I even believe in monogamy.” Stella broke a bread stick into small pieces she arranged on her plate without wanting to eat them.

  “Yeah.” Craig laughed. “Well, it’s easier, though.”

  She smiled at him, and that was when she reached for his hand. A quick squeeze, no linking of fingers, nothing to indicate romance. He looked surprised and squeezed back.

  “I do still miss you sometimes,” she told him. “We always had fun together. I always felt like you’d listen to me, no matter what I ever had to say.”

  “I would.”

  Stella’s smile tightened. “I should’ve told you lots of things, Craig. I was so dishonest with you. Not a liar. Just never fully truthful about me, my life, my feelings. I wonder if it would’ve made a difference.”

  “You can’t ever know what might’ve been, Stella. Do I wonder? Yeah. Would I have liked something different? Yes.” Craig shrugged. “But you can’t spend your time second-guessing.”

  Stella took a deep breath. “I lost my oldest son in a car accident. He was almost nine. My younger son and ex-husband were fine, but I had a lot of injuries. My son Gage never regained full consciousness. He was on a respirator and feeding tube in the hospital. We decided to take him off both a month after the accident. He kept breathing on his own, so we took him home. He lived another five months.”

  Craig reached for her hand and, this time, held it tight. “That must’ve been really hard for you.”

  “It was hard for everyone. Not just me. I blamed my husband for the accident. I blamed myself for not being the one who’d been driving, thinking maybe if I had been, I’d have been able to stop it somehow.” Stella drew in a cleansing breath and found a shaky but sincere smile for him.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t feel you could tell me back then.”

  “I didn’t want you to feel sorry for me. You were one of the few people in my life who didn’t know. To you, I was not ‘that woman who lost her son.’ I liked that feeling, that anonymity. But, Craig,” she said, “I am that woman who lost her son. I will always be that woman.”

  “You’ll be a lot of things,” he told her.

  * * *

  The call from Jeff surprised Stella, but warily, she accepted his invitation to breakfast. Just the two of them. He took her to their favorite place, the diner where they’d gone while they were dating, when they’d often stayed up so late night became morning.

  It had been a long, long time since she and Jeff had spent any time alone together without Tristan between them. Stella watched him salt and pepper his eggs the way he always had done. She passed him the ketchup before he asked for it. You couldn’t live with someone for fifteen years without memorizing at least a few of his habits.

  “You should eat something more than that,” Jeff said brusquely, pointing with his fork toward her pair of eggs-over-medium and toast. “You’re getting too thin again.”

  He paused to look closely at her before she could even take a bite. “What’s he done to you?”

  At first, she thought he meant Tristan, but then she understood. “We broke things off. That’s all.”

  “Does he need a kick in the balls?”

  Stella burst into startled laughter. “You’re going to kick my ex-lover in the balls for me?”

  “If he needs it.” Jeff laughed too.

  They hadn’t laughed together in far longer than they’d eaten breakfast together, and though the humor was bittersweet, it was better than being solely bitter. To appease him about her breakfast, Stella had ordered French toast in addition to the eggs. Jeff passed her the syrup before she asked for it.

  It was nice.

  “I have something to tell you,” he said when they’d finished eating and were sitting, sipping coffee.

  “I figured you did.”

  Jeff looked embarrassed but proud. And something else. True to form, he didn’t try to soften his words. “Cynthia’s pregnant.”

  In the space of one heartbeat to the next, Stella waited for pain or grief, but all she found was...well, not joy. Not exactly. But happiness, for sure. And it was also bittersweet.

  “Congratulations,” she said.

  Jeff started to cry. His shoulders hunched, his eyes grew red. He covered his face with a hand, turning toward the