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

But there was no apron that morning, no dancing, no laughing. Just the sad, melodic voice of Bon Iver and a table set for one.

Had Mr. Henderson noticed how that smile had changed over the last five years, how it had lost the vigor and brilliance? Did anyone even see me at all, or was I as dead to them as I felt inside?

It wasn’t like she hated that I was there, or that she was still mad at me, and it definitely wasn’t that she was happy to see me, either. It was worse — because she didn’t seem to have any reaction at all.

And ever since then, whenever he drove us anywhere, his hand always found me — my knee, my thigh, my hand. It was always there, it was always mine. I couldn’t remember when that stopped.

Those books taught me everything. Except how to live my life when the babies we were so ready for never came home.

If it meant I got to have this night with her, I’d wish for him to screw up time and time again.

“Sometimes, I have entire days go by where I don’t think of either of them,” she said softly. “On a weekend day, a Saturday or a Sunday, when I play in my garden or clean around the house or lose myself in a new recipe. And then when I think of them again, I feel terrible for ever forgetting, even if just for twenty-four hours.”

“It’s okay to keep living,” I assured her, still rubbing her back with a warm, hopefully comforting hand. “You know they would have wanted you to. They’d want you to be happy.” “I know,” she said, but she shook her head. “It’s easier to say that, though, than to actually believe it. To actually do it.”

My little tadpole, no longer innocent, no longer untouched by the cruelty 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.

My brother was having a child. It hit me like a cloud of glitter and a bucket of ice water all at once.

I needed to keep searching for something to feel like home, and not in her. It wasn’t Charlie’s job to save me. Even if I wished she would.

There was heat, and concern — want and denial. And I was like a moth drawn to that flame, wanting so badly to see inside it, to figure out how it burns, to live within its warmth. But I knew to touch it was to die.

every ounce of manhood I had left not to give into the urge to cry in that instant.

Crying is manly and healthy. Come on.

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.

He was right there, my husband, and yet he was nowhere near me at all. I wondered if we’d ever really be in the same room ever again.

I tried to find my husband in the man who stood before me, in the eyes glossed over with unshed tears, in the hand wrapped around my wrist. I tried to find the boy who had shook the first time he took me to bed, who had danced with me in the rain the night he asked me to marry him, who had held my hand through every beautiful, agonizing minute of the birth of our children. But I couldn’t see him. I only saw a stranger, one I didn’t want to pretend with any longer.

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.

“This is a family. We all go through challenges that hurt us, but they strengthen us, too. Sometimes we get hurt.” His voice caught, and for the first time, he found my eyes backstage. He held my gaze as his own eyes glossed over. “And sometimes we even hurt each other. But at the end of the day, we’re a family — and that will never change.”

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.