Page 149 of Fierce-Colson

“I’m glad you’ve got that.”

“Got what?” he asked. “A teenager blowing my phone up with silly pictures?”

She turned and cocked her hip. “Colson. How often did you text your parents silly things as a kid?”

“That would be a never. But I didn’t have that kind of relationship with my parents.”

“Well, I had a good relationship with my parents and I didn’t do it either. Or rarely.”

“Really?”

She moved closer and smacked her lips to his. “Really. Teens, they don’t want to be with their parents that much. They’d rather be with their friends. Hence the reason Bella is at Tiff’s.”

“True. But I’m not her parent.”

“Don’t kid yourself. You’re her father in every sense of the word other than actually being it.”

“It’s how I feel now. I didn’t two years ago.”

“Because life handed you one more thing to navigate and you’ve done it well.”

“I’m trying,” he said. “What can I help you with?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s almost done. Grilled cheese and soup isn’t a two-person job.”

The microwave dinged and he moved to pull a big container of tomato soup out that she’d picked up.

“Guess I just proved you wrong.”

“Ohhhh, I stand corrected.”

“DA Conway is admitting she might be wrong? You didn’t do that earlier.”

Her smirk dropped, the laughter in her eyes with it.

It wasn’t what he wanted.

“Sorry. I wasn’t trying to tell you how to feel. Just letting you know how I felt back then and, looking back, it seemed the right choice.”

“We don’t know what the past would have been like.” He held his hand up. “But in this instance, I will say, you’re right. I would have held on. Maybe for the wrong reasons. And then I would have been more hurt in the end when you walked away.”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” she asked, flipping the cheesy grilled bread over one more time. “That women walk away from you. Have you ever left someone?”

“I have,” he said. “But no one I was really close to.”

“But you admitted that your marriage and engagement, that you were feeling close to the same things as them when they left.”

“The engagement to Stephanie, yes. Jill, that one not so much. I was willing to make it work more, she wasn’t.”

“Do you think she wanted you to fight for her and you didn’t?”

He frowned. “I don’t know. Maybe you’re right, but I took it as she didn’t want me, so why bother?”

Which might not have been the best road to drive.

“And we don’t need to go down that path again, because it’s over. I’m just saying that sometimes we don’t know the right things when they are happening, but we learn from them.”

“What have you learned?” he asked.