Page 162 of The Heart Breaker

We get the best parts. We get to hang out with them when our friends need a break, spoil them for a couple of days, and then hand them back and go right back to sleeping in late and being able to bend my wife over the kitchen table whenever I feel like it.

It’s the perfect system.

I take a seat at the table, dragging Aurora onto my lap as everyone around us grabs pancakes, syrup already getting everywhere when the kids pour way too much.

“Wish Soph could be here,” Aurora says.

I let out a sigh and drop my head onto her shoulder. Yeah, me too. “So does she. Trust me. She won’t stop bitching about her professor.”

Sophie’s twenty-six and in grad school now, studying to become a lawyer, which still fucks with my head if I think about it for too long. I used to be focused on getting her through one day at a time. Now she’s got a whole future in front of her.

Aurora’s mouth twists. “Well, he can’t be worse than mine.”

Aurora met up with her dad a few weeks after he reached out. She even met her little brother, but it didn’t take long for her to figure out he wasn’t doing any of it because he wanted to know her. It felt more like obligation than anything else. Like it was out of guilt.

She still talks to her brother, still meets up with him sometimes, but she doesn’t talk to her dad.

Just like I don’t talk to mine.

I have no clue if he drank himself to death or pissed away every cent he ever had, and I don’t give a fuck either way. I spent too many years thinking about him, hating him, figuring out how to get away from him.

The second Sophie was safe and out of that house, I stopped looking back.

I didn’t need to anymore.

I’ve got the best family in the world.

I look around the table, unable to stop the smile pulling at my mouth. This house is loud as hell and chaotic half the time, but it’s full of joy, full of love, full of something I never thought I’d have in my life.

There was a time when I couldn’t picture a future that went any further than getting Sophie out and keeping my head above water. I thought that was all life was ever going to be for me—surviving one day, then the next, then the next.

I didn’t know the people around me would become my family. I didn’t know Aurora Prescott, the girl I spent years telling myself I hated, would become the woman I can’t imagine a single part of my life without.

One day we’ll all grow old, these kids will have lives of their own, and we’ll all sit here, looking out at the beach, wondering how the hell time went by so fast.

For so long, I thought happiness was unrealistic—something huge and life-changing that most people never really got to have.

Turns out it feels a lot like this. Sitting here with our friends, my wife in my arms, looking around at the life we built, and knowing there’s nowhere else in the world I’d rather be.

The End