Page 100 of Mom Com
I shake my head. “You still lied to me.”
He sighs, deflating. “Believe it or not, I thought I was doing the right thing.”
Bingo. All the frustration and hurt I felt a half hour before comes back tenfold. “You thought you were doing the right thing by playing me and Kate off one another?”
“What?” he says with emphatic shock, his eyebrows jumping up his forehead. “No. I’d never do that.”
I give him a look likeoh, come on. “And what about when you told me you cut all contact with her?”
“I did cut contact with Kate.”
“So you weren’t talking to her the same day that you kissed me? Telling her that you liked the idea of her working for your family?”
He hesitates. “Is that what she told you?”
Now I pause, embarrassed by how much I care. This isn’t the conversation I was after. I wanted to ask him about my father and the addendum. Ask him if he ever heard about the dream. I got jumbled somehow, got my signals crossed and knotted. “It doesn’t matter,” I start, but he cuts me off.
“It does matter,” he says in all seriousness. “Because I said no such thing, especially not to Kate. I did however speak to my mother and tell her that if Kate was redecorating the offices, I wouldn’t begrudge her the job but that I also wouldn’t be involved in the process. It was part of the reason I was so annoyed when she brought it up last night.”
I stare at him. “Were you or were you not engaged to Kate a few weeks ago?”
Wilder falters.
“That’s what I thought,” I say, knowing I’ve caught him, only not feeling happy about it the way I imagined.
“It’s not as simple as you think. Yes, we’d talked about engagement, or rather our families had, but it wasn’t official. No rings were exchanged.”
“Just a bracelet?” I quasi-hate the way I feel saying it, as though it somehow betrays that I once secretly hoped for something just as symbolic.
“That would be my mother inserting herself again,” he says with a hint of frustration, signaling that what Liv said earlier was true. For a brief second, I waver. But there is no good situation with Wilder where his mother is actively rooting for someone else, evidenced by the fact that he broke up with me once just because she asked.
I shake my head, hating that I’m getting worked up over this, but unable to hit the brakes. “I wish you told me yourself, Wilder. I felt foolish last night. Hell, I feel foolish right now. You don’t just call off a potential engagement and then kiss someone else. And if you do, it’s not meaningful. It’s a rebound. I did this once with you when we were teens, and I really, really don’t want to do it again. Not when so much hangs in the balance.”
“And what if I told you that the last thing you are is a rebound.” His expression is so sincere that I scowl at him.
“I’d say I don’t believe you. And again, it doesn’t matter. This is what we do. This is what we’ll probably always do—back and forth, push and pull; there is no happy ending for us, Wilder. And that’s why I left last night, to put an end to it before we fell headfirst into our terrible pattern.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re not wrong with the way you remember us. But you were never at fault. I was the problem.”
I hesitate, surprised he just owned it like that, but before I can get out a retort, he continues.
“I told you last night that there were pieces of our story you were missing. And there still are. Yes, my mother wanted me to break up with you—”
“Which you readily listened to,” I clap back.
“Yes, you’re right. But what you don’t know is that I thought I was doing what was best, making a hard decision so that you wouldn’t have to.”
“Oh, come on—”
“There was a mistake in the deed for your dad’s bakery,” he says quickly, probably sensing I’m about to stand up.
I close my mouth, the conversational one-eighty leaving me dizzy.
“A measurement error,” he continues before I get my bearings. “The property line of your father’s bakery is actually four inches smaller than anyone thought, which my mother only discovered when she set out to remodel the property next door and had an appraiser come in.”
