His voice was barely a rasp. “Lauren—”
“We dated for what, a week?” she said. Had it really been that short? Images from their time together flashed through his head—Lauren taking the clothespin off his shirt at his sister’s baby shower; snuggled on the couch in her apartment, her feet in his lap while she read aloud from their presentation draft document; the hitch in her breath when he’d entered her the night before, the way she’d clung to his shoulders as he’d started to move. Their time together felt like it had been so much longer. It hadn’t been enough.
“We both knew it wasn’t going to be forever,” she said. “But it was fun while it lasted.”
And then she was walking away, her words still ringing through his head. We both knew it wasn’t going to be forever. Had they both known that? Asa felt like he’d missed the memo.
He wanted to run after her, tell her that he’d certainly been ready for forever, he was ready for it still, and if she wanted them to keep their relationship quiet a little longer, that was fine by him. But he also was shaken by how quickly she’d folded, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it transition she’d made from supposedly being in love with him to telling him goodbye. And with their differing reactions to the Cold World news, the different trajectories they apparently wanted their lives to take—who knew. Maybe there wasn’t anything left to say.
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
“Miss Lauren?”
Eddie had been trying to get her attention for the last thirty seconds, Lauren realized, and she’d been busy staring off into space. “Sorry,” she said, giving him and Ms. Ramirez an apologetic smile. “What was that?”
Ms. Ramirez had completed her parenting classes and been very dedicated to her visitation schedule after that hiccup with the first visit. She saw him twice a week and even though Lauren knew she didn’t have to attend every visit, she genuinely enjoyed spending time with them. That was why Lauren had suggested Eddie and his mom meet her at Cold World to have the day they’d originally planned back when she and Asa had ended up taking Eddie ice skating.
Even thinking about Asa put that pit back in Lauren’s stomach. She’d tried to stop thinking about him, tried to stop always searching for him, seeking him out in every room she was in, but it was impossible. Even now, she was hyperaware that he was back on the rink, skating in lazy circles with his hands behind his back, occasionally stopping to reach a hand down to a kid on the ice. She lived in fear that Eddie would ask to go back out there. How would she beg off?
“I wanted to show my mom the Snow Globe now,” he said, and she should be relieved, that he didn’t seem to have any interest in ice skating. So why did she feel a flutter of disappointment instead?
Lauren looked at her watch. Jolene was supposed to be there in ten minutes to pick Eddie back up, but she was loath to deny this experience if it was what he wanted. “Sure,” she said, gathering up the plastic wrappers from the prepackaged muffins she’d bought them at the coffee stand. “We can do that. Ms. Ramirez?”
Eddie ran ahead toward the Snow Globe, and Lauren expected Ms. Ramirez to be right behind him, but she hung back a bit to talk with Lauren instead.
“I really appreciate all you’ve done for him,” Ms. Ramirez said.
“Oh,” Lauren said. They were passing closer to the ice rink now, and Asa was skating in their direction, his head turned to one side. If he looked over, just once, he’d see—but something caught his attention, and he shifted direction, until he was skating away. Lauren swallowed. “He’s fun to hang out with. He’s a great kid. How’s the job search going?”
Right now, the main sticking points to Ms. Ramirez’s reunification with Eddie were her job situation, and her pending home study, both of which depended on each other to make the other one work out. But Lauren felt gratified that her instincts about Ms. Ramirez had been right—she really cared about her son. And she was doing everything in her power to make a safe home for him to return to, now that she was separated from her abusive ex.
Weirdly, seeing the whole situation from this angle had made Lauren set parts of her own story to rest. Parts she hadn’t even known still bothered her—lingering questions about why her mother didn’t fight for her harder, why the system hadn’t done more to help them. She still felt sad, when she thought about her childhood, but seeing how much flawed, messy humanity was at the heart of all these issues took the edge off the anger she hadn’t even realized she’d been carrying around.