Blake closed his eyes.
The porch suddenly felt too small to contain all the devastation surrounding us.
Julian looked as though someone had struck him.
“My brother introduced you to the man whose messages destroyed your marriage.”
“And then profited from the fallout,” Blake said.
None of us spoke.
Inside the house, one of the boys laughed. The sound drifted through the doorway, bright and innocent, painfully out of place.
Blake opened his eyes.
“I’m not here to take them away from you,” he told me. “I’m not here with lawyers. I swear it.”
I wanted to refuse to believe him.
That would have been easier.
But the man standing on my porch was not the same man who had confronted me at the airport. That man had arrived armed with contempt. This one looked as though everything that had once protected him had been stripped away.
“I missed their first steps,” he said. “Their first words. Their birthdays. I missed everything because I believed a lie I was arrogant enough to accept.”
