Page 163 of Broken Vows

I watched it happen.

I watched him come to me like I was a job. And then I watched him forget how to treat me like one.

Now he’s standing here telling me he hadn’t counted on any of it. That happiness had been so far outside what he planned for himself, it never even made the list.

Something cracks open in my chest.

“Didn’t count on…,” he stops. “You know.”

“I don’t know,” I say.

The irritated look comes back, but there’s no heat behind it. It looks more like panic now. He scrubs a hand over the back of his neck and looks away.

I wait.

The seconds drag out, one after another. He looks like the next word might actually hurt him.

Then he exhales hard.

“Loving you.”

Everything in me goes still.

Because I believe him.

And because I love him too.

It’s not sensible, or safe. Not in any way that makes sense after what he did. I love him despite the lies, despite the job, despite the violence that lives too close to the surface. Despite the fact that so much of him is not okay. But so much of him is. The way he tried. Clumsily, badly, with all the grace of a man wrestling a locked door—to become better because someone had finally expected him to.

But trust doesn’t come back because someone says the right word. So I ask the first question that comes to me. One I already know enough about to hear whether he lies.

“You threatened my teacher with a knife?”

“He was being an asshole to you,” Levi says, like that explains everything.

It does not.

“And you knocked my husband’s teeth out?”

“Just one.” He looks away. “Might’ve loosened a couple more.”

I give him a flat look.

“I don’t like how he treats women.”

For a second, neither of us says anything. Then I look down at the ground, because the next question feels too ugly to ask while looking directly at him.

“And you kill people for a living?”

“Not often,” he says. “They’re bad people, mostly. If that helps.”

“It doesn’t.”

That sad, defeated expression crosses his face again. It tugs at me.

When I adopted Fifi, Diane told me my bleeding heart was going to get me in trouble one day.

She was right.