What He Doesn't Know (What He Doesn't Know Duet, #1)

by Kandi Steiner

They say there are two sides to every story, and I suppose in most cases, that’s true. But the one I lived inside of? It had three. On the northeast side of Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania, there was a house. But there was no longer a home.

Charlie Reid was married, she was Charlie Pierce now, and still, it didn’t matter. I loved her, anyway.

“Books aren’t meant to be in perfect shape,” she said when we reached her room. “They’re meant to be read, to be inhaled like oxygen.” Her fingers ran over the spine again, and she smiled. “This book has been breathed. It’s been loved.”

Those marks on your stomach, while they are forever a part of you, they do not define you. They are not a sign of your weakness or of your failure.” I smiled then, rubbing the pad of my thumb along her cheek. “They are a reminder of your strength, of your love, and of the miracle of life.”

“For the same reason you don’t hold your hand in a fire just because it’s warm,” I answered. “Because it burns.”

A beautiful, strong, broken shell of a woman. A beautiful, strong, broken shell of a woman whom I wanted so desperately to save.

And I realized it then. He was what separated us now. And he was only a man.

Death changes us. It takes everything we thought we knew about our lives and fast pitches it out the window, shattering the glass in the process. Wind whips in, hard and cold, and throws everything we’d had neatly in place flying around the room. No one is the same once they lose someone they love. They just have to learn to exist in the new world, no matter how messy it is.

She needed me like she needed air in her lungs, like she needed books in her hands, like she needed to feel whole again.

We both saw stars. Not the soft, sweet, majestic kind that sparkle in the distance on a dark night. No, we saw the black holes — we became them — two blazing suns burning up in each other’s atmosphere.

“If I am a river, you are the ocean. It all comes back to you in the end.”

But if I was a river, and he was the ocean, then Cameron was the storm that raged over the point where we met. And lightning was about to strike.

It was a house that was once a home, one where my wife and I would end every night together — no matter how good or bad the day had been. Until now.

One thing I knew for sure, I wasn’t going down without a fight. If I truly lost her, if he was to have her, he’d have to beat me in a fair fight.

So, as the bartender slid me my check and I made my way back into the cold night, I cracked my knuckles and prepared for war.`

They say there are two sides to every story, and it was in that moment, in that dark, desperate snapshot of my life that I realized I hadn’t asked him for his.