Chapter Twenty-One
“I’m heading out. You need me to do anything else?”
I look up from the paperwork and shake my head. “Thank you,
Serena. See you tomorrow.”
She nods and walks away, leaving the door to my office open.
Allysa’s last day was two weeks ago. She’s due any day now. I have
two other full-time employees, Serena and Lucy.
Yes. That Lucy.
She’s been married for a couple of months now and came in
looking for a job two weeks ago. It’s actually worked out pretty well.
She keeps herself busy, and if I’m here when she is, I just keep my
office door shut so I don’t have to listen to her sing.
It’s been almost a month since the incident on the stairs. Even with
everything Ryle told me about his childhood, the forgiveness was still
hard to come by.
I know Ryle has a temper. I saw it the first night we met, before we
ever even spoke a word to each other. I saw it that awful night in my
kitchen. I saw it when he found the phone number in my phone case.
But I also see the difference between Ryle and my father.
Ryle is compassionate. He does things my father never would have
done. He donates to charity, he cares about other people, he puts me
before everything. Ryle would never in a million years make me park
in the driveway while he took the garage.
I have to remind myself of those things. Sometimes the girl inside
of me—the daughter of my father—is really opinionated. She tells me
I shouldn’t have forgiven him. She tells me I should have left the first
time. And sometimes I believe that voice. But then the side of me that
knows Ryle understands that marriages aren’t perfect. Sometimes
there are moments that both parties regret. And I wonder how I’d
feel about myself had I just left him after that first incident. He never
should have pushed me, but I also did things I wasn’t proud of. And if