Page 40 of This Beautiful Lie
Women who’d never had to smile through something they should’ve run from.
The words hung there, weighty and uninvited.
Dean didn’t respond right away.
His fingers tightened around the steering wheel as we curved around a bend, a subtle shift, like he needed something to hold onto.
The silence stretched, thick with things neither of us said.
Then, finally?—
“It started with a picture.”
I glanced over.
His eyes were on the road, jaw set as if he were bracing for something heavy. Not angry. Not defensive. Just... distant.
The kind of distance that made me watch him a little closer.
“A client gave me a photo frame as a thank-you gift. I didn’t think anything of it and set it on my desk before a business trip.”
He paused, eyes focused straight ahead.
“When I got back, people had started asking questions. Apparently, the man in the photo—some random stock image—happened to look like me. Standing in front of a fountain in Florence with a beautiful woman with short brown hair…”
“They wanted to know who she was. If she was my girlfriend. If we were serious. I tried to explain at first, but no one wanted to hear the truth. They’d already started to believe the rumors they’d made up while I was gone. So eventually… I just said yes.
“Yes, that’s my girlfriend.
“Yes, we’re in love.
“Yes, I was with her last weekend—and not camping alone with my dog.”
He smiled faintly, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“But the thing was… things got easier after that. No more questions. No more setups. No more people asking what was wrong with me for not settling down like they thought I should. The pressure was… gone.”
My throat tightened, and I watched him closely. I had to admit, those same flash judgments had entered my mind when we first met.
Shameful really, because I could almost relate to him now.
Those kinds of questions—however harmless—had a way of crawling under your skin.
They stayed with you long after the conversation moved on.
They weren’t meant to hurt, but they did.
Over time, they wore you down.
Made you wonder what you were doing wrong.
So no—what he had done didn’t sound strange to me.
Not at all.
“I get it,” I said softly.
He glanced over, as though my answer surprised him as much as it did me. For a second, he held my gaze, and the air shifted—like a breath passed between us, shared without words.
