This time the gasp I held back slips out and I slap my hand over my mouth, my eyes going wide. I shake my head and she looks at me with kindness in her eyes.

“I understand best friends more than you can imagine, Megan. I’m the same way with Lee, well, minus the whole falling in love part.” She smiles, the kindness still there, but this time there’s something else in her beautiful green eyes. Something that I’m not sure I want to hear. “I see the way he looks at you.”

I shake my head and she returns my denial with a bigger smile and another nod.

“Oh, I see it. And I see the way that you look at him when you don’t think anyone is paying attention. You two have been dancing around it for almost a year now, Megan.”

“All you see is two people that happened to have shared one night of drunken sex and that’s it,” I fume, finally finding my voice.

“Bullshit.” She moves, sliding her legs off the cushion and adjusting her sleeping son while turning to look at me. “You’re afraid. I didn’t get it. Not until you explained all of that just now. I thought you were playing games, but now I get it.”

“Get what?” I ask impatiently.

“The fear.”

I look at her. My eyes blinking a few times while my breathing comes in quick bursts.

“You lost your husband and honey, I feel you. I hate that you lost that and although I will never understand what you feel physically, I do know what the thought of a life without my husband would feel like. But you didn’t die with Jack and I know he would want you to move on. Do you think he would want Molly to be alone too? You lost your husband, but baby, she lost her father.”

Her words wash over me like someone had just thrown an ice bucket over my head. Then as they replay in my mind I feel the blow just as hard as if it was physically thrown.

“Please leave.”

Her eyes widen and a soft gasp comes out of her full lips.

“Now.”

“Megan,” she starts.

“No.” I shake my head and will the tears back. “I’m going to go get ready to go get my daughter from school. When I come back out here, please be gone.”

I get up from the couch and walk on wooden legs to my bedroom, her words slamming around in my head.

I know I’m being unfair to Dani. She doesn’t know how hard the slap of those words hit.

You lost your husband, but baby, she lost her father.

You lost your husband, but baby, she lost her father.

She lost her father.

I stop at the mirror in my bathroom and look at my pale skinned face reflecting back at me.

She lost her father.

I take a deep breath.

You lost your husband.

I squeeze my eyes closed and clamp them tight.

She lost her father.

My pulse speeds up and my skin goes from ice cold to burning hot.

You lost your husband.

My fingers dig into the counter at my hips and I feel one lone tear sneak past my tightly closed lids.

She lost her father.

I open my eyes, look back at my face and feel nothing but rage. Picking up the closest item I can, my hairbrush, I rear my arm back and hurl it at the mirror. When the brush strikes the surface, the mirror splinters and I turn just as the pieces shatter from the force of my throw.

I did lose my husband and when he took his dying breath, I lost every single piece of the only person that ever loved me.

But she’s wrong. It isn’t the fear from losing Jack that keeps me from opening up. It isn’t that I don’t want to fill the loneliness that I have lived with every day since Jack left—until that night in Liam’s arms. No, the part that I struggle with and have struggled with every day since, is the feelings that he brought back into my cold life are so much more powerful than what I ever felt before. Even with Jack. The images of Liam—Liam and me, Molly and us—that had filtered through my mind while I slept in his arms, they scared me. I loved my husband, but I was never in love with my husband, and the feelings that Liam Beckett created in my gut have been a burning guilt of that fact since I snuck out of his bed before the sun came up.

She lost her father.

God, if she even knew.

I HIT SAVE ON THE document I’ve been working on for the past few hours and turn to smile at my daughter, her eyes still tired since she just woke up.

“Can I go play with Mr. Axel again?”

I smile, reach up and hold her soft cheek in my palm. She smiles bigger, her dark brown eyes sparkle with happiness.

“Please,” she whispers loudly.

“Little bird, I think Mr. Axel has other things to do than play with your adorable self.”