“Take the week and consider my offer. We can discuss you being involved in Clementine’s life by moving in with me further next weekend. There’s no rush.”

I swallowed. “Okay.”

His grin felt more genuine as it softened. “Okay,” he agreed.

I turned to leave but twisted back. “Oh, Michael, Heidi called.”

His face froze on that grin.

“She asked if you could leave her final paycheck at your office and she’d pick it up in the morning.”

He nodded. “Of course, I should have thought of that.”

My nails were biting into my palms. “I have to run. I have a lot to accomplish today. But thank you for this weekend.”

“I enjoyed it too,” he responded, and went back to his computer.

I was breathing so hard my entire body was shaking as I started what had once been my sister’s car. As soon as I got out of the garage, I opened the window. The air was crisp and cool. I breathed in. I pushed the air out. My panic was mounting. I knew how to defend myself physically, but emotional warfare was nothing I was prepared for. Michael was using that precious little girl to get what he wanted, and what he wanted was me.

Michael just suggesting it sounded crazy enough, but me considering it was insane.

I plugged my phone in to charge and started driving. A few minutes later, the sound of my cell ringing broke my concentration. I looked down and saw blocked call. Fear seized me. I shoved it away. For the next five minutes it just kept ringing, but I refused to look at it again.

I feared who it was. Was it the same blocked caller again with some scary message, or was it Michael with more ways to make “us” work? I refused to look and hit ignore.

When I was far enough away from the house, I opened the window wider and tossed the rose out of it. With that anchor away from me, I let my mind go free. I’d held it tightly captive over the last two days and couldn’t stand it any longer.

Logan was gone from my life.

Sadness suddenly washed over me. I’d been alone for many years, but I’d never felt more alone than right now. I missed him desperately. I wanted to call him. Hear his voice. Feel his body against mine. Talk to him. Ask him what I should do.

Over the past two days I had saved my tears for late at night when I was in bed and wished I could feel his arms around me. The great loss of him in my life came barreling at me as I drove home. This time I didn’t try to push the tears away or keep my sobs at bay; the minute I let go, the memories of our time together flashed before me.

Sitting across from him eating a hamburger, walking through the park with him, sitting beside him as he drove us through Boston talking about nothing and everything—our favorite foods, places we’d been, running, the Boston Marathon that we’d missed this year but vowed to train for together and run next year. Even in the midst of the craziness, being with him over the past month was the happiest I could ever remember being.

My fingers had gone stiff from gripping the steering wheel by the time I exited the highway. Crying wasn’t going to bring Logan back. I had to worry about myself—no, not myself, that little girl. In my head I replayed what I knew about Michael. The way he was around me—mostly kind and considerate, at times manipulative. Then I thought, everyone has flaws. Could I be with him? For Clementine? Was his proposal even real? I knew it was. What kind of woman traded herself to a man to have his child in her life?

Never in a million years would I have thought me. Yet, I found myself seriously considering Michael’s offer.

And if that didn’t make me want to cry even more, because I knew he was going to take her from me if I didn’t say yes and I couldn’t let that happen. What if there was more to Michael than I knew? What if he did have a dark side? I wasn’t going to let Clementine grow up like I had. I didn’t care what I had to do to stay beside her. What I had to sacrifice. Was that what my mother had thought, too, I wondered?

When I finally pulled up in front of my house, the thought of not living there anymore widened the crack in my chest even further. It was that old familiar ache that came every time I had gotten attached to our new home when I was a child, only to be told it was time to move again.

By the time I unlocked my door, all I wanted to do was crawl into my bed and sleep the day away. My world felt like it had tipped on its axis and would never be right. Feeling off balance, I tossed my bags to the floor and then hurried up the stairs to get out of my jeans and slip on a pair of sweats.

My closet doors were closed and I opened them to throw my dirty clothes inside. When I did, I froze. Logan’s things were still hanging in the place I’d cleared for him weeks ago. I’d never checked the closet on Saturday.

In a frenzy, I ran into the bathroom. His toiletries were all still there. Toothbrush, razor, and the bar of soap he preferred to my lavender body wash.

I glanced around the room and nothing had changed since I’d left. He hadn’t been back. Everything must have been as it was on Saturday. Worry flickered in my chest.

Things come in threes.

Had something happened to him and I misread the situation?

Oh, God.

I rushed over to the dresser, and that’s when I heard the front door open and close. Blood swooshed between my ears and my pulse raced at the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. I knew the sound his sneakers made on the steps.

Creak. Creak.

The louder those footsteps grew, the harder my heart beat.

I began to lose my stability. The dresser I was clutching became the only reason I was still standing. My legs had gone limp, my knees weak, my feet numb.

The more audible the creaking, the closer he drew, the more intense the aching pang in my chest grew, and then suddenly the air in the room felt thicker.

“Elle,” he said with that familiar rumble in his voice.

Like always, my body responded to his tone, but I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t. The high and the low that came with his arrival was hard to bear. It meant he was okay, but it also meant he had left me. I took a breath so deep it lifted my shoulders. “Why did you come back?” I asked.

“Elle,” he repeated, but this time he sounded pained.

It didn’t matter. My heart was in pieces, splintered and shredded. I just couldn’t look at him. “You should have taken everything when you left, or at least come back for the rest of your things when you knew I wasn’t home.”

The floor creaked from behind me and I knew he’d stepped inside my room.

I couldn’t stand it. Didn’t know what to do. I opened the drawer I had cleared out for him expecting it to be empty, but it wasn’t. Everything was still inside it, and so was the small silver box his grandfather had given him. The one he never would have left behind. It meant the future to him, not in the monetary conversion it could provide, but in the hope he saw in it. The hope that life could possibly be normal for him someday. All the air was sucked from my lungs. Something wasn’t right.

“Elle,” he said my name again and it was like a plea. “Please look at me.”

Ever so slowly I turned around, and I quickly glanced away. He was standing in the doorway, unmoving. For no good reason, the world seemed to right itself, no longer tipping and throwing me off balance.

Light and shadow painted him as he always had been. I didn’t have to see him to know what I was looking at. Broad shoulders, chiseled jaw, and the strong lines of his face were the first things that came into view. His face, with the scar just below his eye, was both a warrior’s face and beautifully exquisite, at the same time. And his eyes, those ever-changing sometimes brown, sometimes green eyes, were eyes I wanted to get lost in. If he smiled at me they would crinkle ever so slightly, and everything hard and rough about him would instantly soften.