Page 14 of True Ruin

Gabi would never understand that choice. She’d put Sam first from the beginning, when she’d only been a kid herself.

“Three,” he said, bargaining, shoving one Oreo into his mouth and two into his pocket for later, then leaving the packageforgotten on the counter as he hopped down. With the book back in hand, he dragged a chair out from the table, climbed into it, opened to a page, and began to read.

Gabi slid a cinnamon roll recipe out from under her shoe, eyeing him suspiciously. “Are you doing homework? Without me having to bug you?”

Sam shrugged, dragging his finger across the page. “I’m gonna win the contest.”

Gabi rose with a groaning stretch, wondering if frozen pizza would pass for dinner tonight. She needed a hot bath, a glass of wine, and the latest episode ofFriends, and she needed them now. “What contest?”

With an eye roll, Sam fished an Oreo from his pocket. “I told you about it on the way home. If I read more pages than Dallas this week, I get to work with him again. Doing drywall, whatever that is. He’s a big reader, like a book or two aweek.” Sam looked up, her adorable scamp, clearly aware he was about to ask for something. “I’ll clean my room, too, if you let me go to the mill again.”

“Deal,” Gabi said, realizing Sam’s idea of cleaning his room involved shoving dirty clothes under the bed. But she wasn’t arguing with progress.

While Sam read, she sorted recipes into neat piles across the Formica table—tarts here, muffins there, scones beneath her palm—while her thoughts kept circling back to Dallas.

Which was inconvenient.

The way he’d been with Sam was danger on top of sexy. He’d beengoodwith him. Really good. Kind. Patient. Interested without being performative, which mattered more than it should have.

She knew the difference.

Theo had never bothered to play the devoted father in public, but other men had tried that particular trick on her. One manin particular—a friend of a friend from Little League—had spent an entire practice helping Sam with his pitching grip, crouching behind him with endless patience and praise, acting as if he found her son fascinating. Later that night, he’d walked Gabi to her car, tried to push her against the door, making it clear he considered the whole fatherly performance foreplay.

She’d gone homefuriousat the way being a single mother meant some men saw Sam not as a child to care about, but as a locked door they could charm their way through.

Dallas hadn’t been like that. He hadn’t seemed to be trying to impress her at all.

He’d spoken to Sam like he was a person. A funny, bright, sawdust-dusted little boy with chalk on his fingers and a serious opinion about where invisible walls should go. He hadn’t used him to sway her. He’d simply been decent.

God, decent was devastating.

Gabi tossed a danish recipe onto the wrong pile and frowned down at it.

She wasn’t used tothisDallas. The confident man with a scar on his temple, a cast on his ankle, and that deliberate way of looking at her, as if he knew exactly what made her tick. In her mind, he still belonged half to memory: a skinny, sharp-boned teenager, pretending not to care whether anyone noticed him.

Now everyone noticed.

Especially her.

“Dallas’s mom died,” Sam said suddenly, with no sense of the weight behind the words.

Gabi’s hand stilled over the recipe card.

Sam didn’t look up from his book. “He told me. Not in a sad way. Just because I said you make me do homework and eat vegetables and stuff. He said he wished he’d had that.”

Her throat tightened. “He did?”

“Yeah.” Sam turned a page, casual in the brutal way children could be. “He said I was lucky to have you.”

For a moment, Gabi couldn’t move.

The kitchen blurred around the edges: the turquoise table, the bag of Oreos left open on the counter, the folder of contracts waiting for her signature, her son sitting with one leg tucked under him, close to entering a world she wouldn’t be able to control.

Dallas had lost his mother young. Gabi had known that, of course. Everyone knew pieces of everyone in Promise, but knowing a fact was different from hearing it passed through her son’s small voice, stripped of gossip and history, made tender.

He thought Sam was lucky to have her.

Her heart did something foolish and painful.