Page 138 of The Complete Truth Duet
Some fun facts I learned:
Penn had gone to MIT—like holy shit, the real MIT.
According to his diploma, he was an architect. Blink. Blink. Blink.
According to his bank account, he was something of a real estate mogul. The only mogul status I’d ever gotten close to was in the field of bed bug extermination.
He still owned the oceanfront house he’d shared with Lisa in Florida, which was kind of sad and a lot intimidating.
He had paid a guy hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the identity Penn Walker. Considering he’d paid me a million dollars to escape it, I thought he’d gotten a pretty good deal.
I’d gone into that conversation desperate to learn who he was, but I wasn’t ready for the answer.
His favorite color was, in fact, still blue.
But that was where the similarities ended.
However, with a breaking heart and a forced smile, I gave him the benefit of the doubt and kept listening.
After we’d covered all things Lisa, he started telling me about our first few weeks together. It was crazy to hear my memories from someone else’s perspective. Some parts were funny. Like when he told me how he’d dropped the first batch of Maury Poppins cupcakes and had to drive all the way back to the bakery to get more.
Other parts were mortifying. If there hadn’t been bacon involved, I’d have crawled under the bar when he started listing all the times he’d caught me staring at him. Apparently, I wasn’t nearly as smooth as I’d thought.
And then I thought my heart was going to beat out of my chest—and not because I was on my third cup of coffee—when he told me why he never touched my star necklace.
“Every moment with you felt like a reprieve. When I looked at you, when I touched you, when you touched me. Guilt wasn’t devouring me. Failure wasn’t consuming me. Hate wasn’t suffocating me. And on the off chance that you felt the same, I wanted to give that back to you. I’ll never be able to forget Lisa, and I don’t expect you to forget Nic. But I didn’t want to remind you of him. And the minute I touched that necklace, your mind would have jumped to the loss, the pain, and the past. I wanted you with me in the present, where I could protect you from all of that.” He’d paused, spatula in hand, one side of his mouth curling adorably, and then finished with, “And only about point zero zero zero zero five percent of that had anything to do with me being jealous that he got to you first.”
I laughed and threw a piece of bacon at him. (It was a burnt bit. I wasn’t a total animal.)
To which I reminded him I was younger than Savannah when I’d met Nic.
To which he scrubbed his face so hard that it looked like he was giving himself a facial.
After we covered all the “how we got here” basics, Penn gave me his backstory.
He was an only child who had come from money and grown up in private schools.
His mother had died of cancer. His father of a stroke a few years later.
He loved to ski—water and snow.
He knew enough Spanish to get by.
He’d traveled to six out of the seven continents.
And I was still me.
Cora Guerrero. Single mother, felon, and all-around dreg of society.
I didn’t want to feel it. Not with him. But the inadequacy was shrieking inside me with his every word spoken.
Penn had left me for a reason. He’d claimed that it was to keep me out of the line of fire. Protection, safety, blah blah blah. But after hearing all of his stories about the past, learning who Shane Pennington really was, while sitting in his fancy apartment, staring at the gorgeous and successful man, I had to remind myself that Penn had never intended to stay with me.
And that wasn’t a woe-is-me fiesta. It was the truth. He’d said so himself.
Don’t get me wrong. I was a real catch. Maybe not when I had two men controlling my life and a building full of working girls depending on me twenty-four-seven—that was a teensy bit of baggage. But I was a good person. I was kind and smart and funny. I had a great ass and quasi-perky boobs, even. But a man like the one in front of me was from a completely different ocean.
He hadn’t meant to fall in love with me. His words. Not mine.
And he wouldn’t stay in love with me, either. My words. Not his.
In a lot of ways, that realization cut me like the sharpest knife.
But, in others, it set me free, my anger and frustration at his betrayal ebbing into nothingness.
The truth sucked.
But it was a lot like knowing that someone was lying to you. You didn’t have the expectation that anything they said would actually come to fruition. And because there was no expectation of truth, there could be no pain caused by the lie.
