His Second Wife

I had nine months to tell my best friend the truth, and I used every one of them being a coward.

Sylvie Vaughn picked me when we were fifteen. She stood on a folding chair at my graduation and whistled in a silence, in front of nine hundred people, because nobody else came. She taught me to drive. She found my car and haggled the man down eight hundred and fifty dollars. She is the only person in my life who has ever chosen me first.

Her father is forty-eight years old, and I knocked on his door at twenty minutes to one in the morning, and I knew exactly whose house I was standing in.

He said no. He meant it.

Then he called me back.

Now I'm sitting in a coffee shop on Third at thirty-four weeks, waiting for a girl I haven't seen since January, and I have two things to tell her. The first one takes away the only bearable version she's got. The second one is that she's getting a sister, and if he ever asks me, I'm going to be her stepmother.

I'm not going to ask her to forgive me. I'm not going to explain why it happened, because when people explain why, they're asking for something.

I just have to sit here until she walks through that door.

A dark, forbidden age-gap romance with a guaranteed happily ever after. Contains explicit content and is intended for adult readers.