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

by Kandi Steiner

Charlie Reid stood before me like a ghost, one that had haunted me for more than a decade, one I longed for just as long but never truly imagined I’d ever see again.

The ring on her finger was a symbol of her commitment to another man. That alone should have sobered me. That alone should have been at the forefront of my mind, but it wasn’t.

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

I should have hesitated, should have remembered that she belonged to another man, but it was instinctive in that moment — the urge to stop her pain.

“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.”

I wanted to crawl inside her and hold the most tender parts of her. I wanted to wrap her heart in my arms, soothe her bruised and aching soul with my touch.

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.”

How could he do that to her, to the woman he vowed to love forever, to the woman who vowed the same to him? More than that, more than just the promise of marriage, it was Charlie. She was broken and hurting, she’d lost their children — and he’d run out on her. I’m going to murder him.

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.

That wedding ring on her finger didn’t mean a goddamn thing. She was mine.

It was like I’d been swimming upstream for years and years, exhausting myself, and finally I’d let go and floated where the river wanted to take me. I didn’t feel guilty or sad or angry with myself. I felt relieved.

“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.

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.