Page 84 of Stealing Home

“We?”

“Yes, Gavin. We.” Ethan’s composure cracked enough for irritation to show. “Your name opened as many doors as mine did. The clients trusted you. The crews trusted you. I can bring in the projects, but I was never the one who could stand on an empty piece of land and see what it could be.”

“I don’t believe this,” Gavin muttered. He glared at his ex. “You flew here because you want me to build houses with you again.”

“I flew here because I want us to get back something the fire had no right to take.”

Gavin sat back and folded his arms. “Ethan.”

“Just listen to me,” Ethan pleaded. “Then if you really want it to be done, I’ll leave, and you never have to see me again if that’s what you decide.”

“I already decided when we signed divorce papers.”

“Divorce papers we signed while we were both trying to get through a day without tearing each other apart.” Ethan wrapped his hands around his cup. “I’ve spent the last nine months trying to figure out whether our marriage ended because we stopped loving each other or because every time we looked at each other, we could only see what we lost.”

Gavin looked at the door to the coffee shop. It was less than thirty feet away, and his truck was just beyond that. He could walk away without signing, have his attorney figure out the details, and never answer another message from Ethan. But that would leave another thing unfinished.

He kept his arms folded against his chest. “What answer did you come up with?”

“I don’t think we stopped loving each other.” He said it like it was an irrefutable fact.

Gavin looked at the man he had expected to build a life with. He had loved Ethan. And maybe some quiet, altered pieces of that love would always exist simply because so much of Gavin’s life had his fingerprints on it. But that didn’t make it a future.

“We didn’t stop caring about each other,” Gavin said quietly. “But that doesn’t mean I want the marriage back.”

Ethan’s grip tightened around the cup. “You don’t know what it would be like now. We never got to see what it would be like after the worst of it passed.”

“I know.” Gavin forced his arms to loosen and rested his hands on the table. “But you needed to rebuild everything exactly the same as it had been. You couldn’t understand why I couldn’t breathe every time you talked about it. And I didn’t understand why starting over felt more important to you than admitting we weren’t okay.”

“I admitted we weren’t okay,” Ethan protested.

“You treated me like another problem you could fix if we both worked harder.”

“Because that was better than giving up.”

The old accusation struck with familiar precision, and Gavin felt it in his chest before he could remind himself that Ethan no longer had the power to wound him.

“Leaving wasn’t giving up,” he said quietly. “It was the first honest thing I did after the fire.”

Ethan stared into his coffee, silent.

“I’m sorry for the ways I hurt you,” Gavin said. “I mean that. But I’m not moving back. I don’t want to rebuild the company, and I don’t want our marriage back.”

“You can’t know that for sure unless we try.”

“I know because I don’t want to try.” He said the words gently, but Ethan flinched anyway.

Ethan lifted his gaze, and the hurt there was controlled but unmistakable. “Is there someone else?”

Dom’s face rose in Gavin’s mind: sunlight turning his eyes gold, his cheeks red as he pretended he hadn’t been staring, his voice rough when he said, “Don’t slow down.”

“There’s someone I want to know better,” Gavin said carefully. “But he isn’t the reason I’m saying no. I would say no even if I’d never met him.”

“Have you known him long?” Ethan sounded genuinely curious.

“Long enough.” That was all he was going to say, and Ethan seemed to understand that because he nodded and slid the papers closer to Gavin.

Gavin signed and initialed in the flagged places. When he was done, Ethan gathered the pages and aligned them with the edge of the table. That habit hadn’t changed either.