My mind wouldn’t stop running through the torment of everything he’d revealed.
After Amelia had died, after I’d confessed to him how I really felt, it had taken a long time for Ryder and me to get back to a place where we could be friends. To a place where we were comfortable around each other. Where looking at him didn’t ache so horribly that I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
He’d stayed away from me for months. During that period, we’d only seen each other in passing, and every single time I’d felt cracked wide open.
Like I was missing an intrinsic piece of myself.
What had made it even worse was when the lender had called and told me my loan was going to go through. It was the one time I’d gone to Ryder to speak with him. I’d told him I couldn’t accept it. It was the first time he’d ever shown any anger around me. Rage clouding his eyes before he’d simply refused.
So, I’d taken it.
Poured myself into renovating the restaurant and making it mine.
I had made an oath to myself that I would repay him as quickly as I could. Considered it a loan and tried to compartmentalize it as that.
It was the most I’d spoken to him until the day Kayden had been born. There’d been a light knocking at my hospital room door, and it’d been Ryder who had poked his head through the crack.
He’d said he couldn’t go on with the way things were between us. He said it wasn’t supposed to be like that. We were family, and he cared about me, and he wanted to be a part of my life.
That day, he’d held my newborn son in his arms and whispered that he was beautiful. Promised he’d always love him, and he was there for both of us, no matter what we needed.
We’d never discussed any of the things I’d admitted that day in his foyer.
And now that I understood it, why he’d turned me away, the reason he’d lied and told me that he didn’t love me, I wished that I didn’t.
I jolted when Paisley’s voice broke into my thoughts. “More coffee?”
“Sure.”
She grabbed the carafe from the coffee maker and carried it over, eyeing me as she refilled my mug that I’d been nursing for what had to have been the last six hours. I felt like I couldn’t physically move.
Stagnant and stuck.
The fact I’d even managed to make it out of bed had to be considered a miracle.
“Thank you,” I told her.
She sank into the chair next to me. “How are you doing?”
I brought the steaming mug to my lips, inhaling the scent more than actually tasting the coffee. “As good as can be expected.”
I turned back to look through the windows. Lost. In a trance that I didn’t know how to pull myself from. Because this whole thing had to be a bad dream.
A nightmare I’d fallen into.
“I don’t expect you to be feeling a whole lot of good right now, Dakota.”
More tears clouded my sight before they fell. Frustrated, I swiped them away. “I can’t believe he kept that from me for all these years.”
Paisley’s hair was twisted in a loose, messy knot on top of her head. It fell over the side when she reached for me from over the top of the table. She set her hand over mine that I had fisted on the wood and squeezed. “But if he thought that money was getting him out and it was used for a valid purpose? For something good?”
“Drug money, Paisley?” A high-pitched sound came out with the whisper. “He gave me drug money.”
Agony slayed, slicing through my middle. I tried to suppress another cry, but it ripped out, anyway.
Sympathy pinched Paisley’s face. “I don’t believe Ryder is a bad person. He’s not greedy, Dakota. He’s not, and you know it. And if he said he was trapped? Then I have to believe that.”
“Does it make it any better, though?”
She blinked at me as she squeezed my hand tighter. “I guess only you can decide that, but the one thing I do know is that we all have things in our lives that we regret. Things we would take back. And most of the time we get lucky enough that there is good that comes from it. A silver lining that we couldn’t see. We learn a lesson we needed. Find out what’s important. It teaches us how to walk better in the future. And I need to believe the same of Ryder.”
I sniffled, blinking as I turned my gaze back to the soaring panes of glass. “He put us in danger.”
The pad of her thumb rubbed over the back of my hand. “Which is why he stayed away from you for all these years. He can’t help it that my bestie is irresistible.”