The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 267

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MARTIN’S POV:

I knew, even while I was doing it, that not telling Lucas about Sam was wrong. I knew it every single day. I rehearsed the conversation so many times. I had versions for every occasion. The casual version, the serious version, the version where I did it over dinner and the version where I waited until we were alone on a quiet evening. I rehearsed all of them. In every rehearsal Lucas was understanding because Lucas is a person who understands things. In every rehearsal it went fine.

Rehearsals do not come with stakes.

The real conversation has a face across from it. A face you love. And the terror of watching that face in the moment it receives something you have been holding back is not something that exists in a rehearsal.

I was a coward. I am prepared to say that plainly and own it.

But I also need to explain James.

James Osei was my best friend since we were seventeen years old.

We met in high school at a football match where we had both been supporting the team that was very much not the home side and had independently come to the conclusion that standing near each other was safer than standing apart. He had looked at me sideways that first time and said, in the most serious voice, “I think we are going to have to be friends now for survival purposes.” I said okay. That was the beginning of fourteen years.

James was the type of person who made everything more interesting. Not in a loud way, though he could be loud when the mood was right. In the way of someone who thought about things differently from most people and made you think differently too just by being around him. He was brilliant in a way he barely noticed himself, which was one of the most endearing things about him. He drove four hours every other weekend to see Sam after he and Sam’s mother separated and he sent photographs to everyone he knew with the same caption every time: look at my boy. He loved that child with everything he had.