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

by Kandi Steiner

“I learned the people we love usually turned out to be one of three things: a home, a holiday, or hell.” — Beau Taplin

She reminded me of freedom and Pall Mall cigarettes, of dusty old books and stolen scotch.

“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.”

He was able to pack away the nursery — out of sight, out of mind — while I lived with the scars they left behind.

But she felt like home. That hug, it felt like the only thing I had left in the world, like the missing piece to a puzzle I didn’t know was incomplete.

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.

I would wait for her. I would wait forever.

It was as if she’d been dying from pain for years, and I was her morphine. She needed me like she needed air in her lungs, like she needed books in her hands, like she needed to feel whole again. I was her escape. And I’d gladly take her anywhere.

“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.

knew that she could get lost in books for entire days, that her eyes would light up at dinner that night as she told me about the adventures she’d been on between the pages.

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.