Chapter 6: Best Laid Plans

The North Bay hills rolled past in soft gold and green, the late-afternoon light slanted through the windshield in long golden bars, beginning to take on that late-October haze. The lines fell through the window, catching the soft rise and fall of Sophie’s breathing as she slept, clutching her stuffed giraffe under one arm. Lily sat quiet in the opposite corner of the back seat, earbuds in, eyes half-closed, the thoughtful stillness she always wore after a full day of new sights. Soft music played low from the speakers, something easy and wordless that Mike had chosen, filling the spaces between the girls’ quiet and the steady hum of the tires on the road.

Mike drove with one hand on the wheel, and just like on the drive up to the nature preserve, his other hand was resting lightly on my thigh the way he always did, with his thumb moving in slow, absent circles that felt warm and familiar through the denim, completely unaware of the mark that sat just beneath his fingers.

I stared out the passenger window as my mind drifted, not to any single moment, but to the quiet shape of the life I was still trying to hold together. I loved this man. The knowledge sat solid and heavy in my chest, the same way it always had. Mike was the steady center I had built life around. He never pushed too hard and was the first man who truly made me feel whole. He had taken the broken pieces of my earlier self and never once made me feel like they were too sharp to hold. I loved the way he looked at his daughters, the careful patience in his voice when Sophie asked the same question three times, the quiet pride when Lily noticed and pointed out something important the rest of us had missed. I loved the idea of being part of that, of weekends like this one, of the ordinary safety of it, of the future I had once pictured so clearly that it still ached when I let myself look at it too long.

And yet the ache was no longer clean.

A billboard flashed past on the right side of the freeway: a tall, smiling Dutch woman in traditional dress wearing wooden clogs standing beside a black-and-white cow, bright text advertising a local creamery and farm store just off the next exit. The image snagged something small and sharp in my memory: the pair of wooden clogs from Amsterdam on Tyler’s bookshelves right next to the carved wooden fork. The thought of that shelf, of the tidy, unexpected order of his place, of the way I had walked through his door to get closure but had instead made everything much more complicated. The sex had been ... to say the least, extraordinary. That was the only word that still fit without needing more. I turned my face harder toward the window and felt the familiar heat of self-disgust rise under my ribs.

Stop it.

There was more to life than sex. I knew that. I had always known that. Mike and the girls and the quiet future I still wanted sat on one side of the scale, heavy and real. Tyler occupied the other side with a force that made no rational sense, and I hated how much space he already took up inside my head. I did not understand the draw, why the thought of him could still send a low, traitorous pulse through places that should have been quiet by now, why the simple knowledge that he existed somewhere across the city could make the rest of the day feel slightly out of focus. I was not a teenager. I was twenty-six years old, with a good job, a man who loved me, and two little girls who already treated me like I belonged in their orbit. None of that should have been negotiable. Yet the obsession kept circling back, stubborn and unwanted, and every time I pushed it down, it only seemed to wait for the next quiet stretch of road.