The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 269

269 /381

LUCAS’S POV:

He called me on a Thursday evening.

I almost did not answer. I had been managing the not-talking-to-Martin situation reasonably well, which meant. I was thinking about him approximately forty times a day instead of seventy, so progress.

I answered.

“I need to tell you something,” he said. “The full story, please and not the version from before because I left something important out and you deserve the whole truth.”

“Okay,” I said.

He told me about James.

He talked for a long time and I sat on the sofa where we had spent so many evenings together and I listened without saying anything. About the friendship that had started at a football match. About fourteen years and what they looked like. About the diagnosis and the months that followed. About the last conversation and the promise. About the years of showing up for a little boy and a grieving grandmother because his best friend had asked him to and he had said yes because he loved his best friend and that was the right thing to say.

“He is not my biological child,” Martin said. “He is James’s child. And James died and asked me to be there for him and I said yes because it was the right thing and because I loved James and I was not going to let Sam grow up without someone in his corner.”

I was very quiet.

“Why did you not tell me this at the beginning?” I asked. “The first night, when I asked you to come over, why did you let me believe he was yours in the other sense?”

“I panicked,” he said. “You were so quiet and I was so scared and I told you things in the wrong order and then you asked me to leave and I did not get the chance to finish. And then I was scared that if I called the next day you had already decided and the calling would make it worse. So I waited for you to be ready. Which was wrong. I know it was wrong.”

I sat there.

“Lucas,” he said. “I kept all of it from you because I was scared you would leave. That was the original reason. And I know that is not an excuse. I know I should have told you from the beginning, I know I should have trusted you with it. But I loved you too much to risk it and I ended up risking it anyway by being a coward about it. Which is what cowardice always does.”

Something had shifted in me while he was talking.

Not all the way to everything being fine. But the shape of the thing had changed. This was not a man who had hidden something because he was careless about the truth. This was a man who had made a promise to his dying best friend and had been keeping that promise over the years. And he had been so terrified that the person he loved would look at it and see a complication instead of what it actually was, which was one of the finest things a person can do.