by Hanna Hart
He saw her coming up the pathway with a bright smile on her face, and his nerves intensified.
Something about meeting her felt wrong. It felt underhanded, like the very act of having a conversation with her meant he was cheating on Kenzie or betraying Wesley.
While Nash was normally a private person, he knew Wesley was the one he would turn to for advice about situations like this. Only now he couldn’t ask his best friend about anything related to Sophia.
He didn’t know if Wesley disapproved of him hanging around Sophia nor had the two spoken much of her over the last little while.
“Mystery man!” she shouted, waving her hand from down the path.
He looked at her side and expected to see Imogene with her, but the toddler was nowhere to be found.
“Hey,” he greeted, meeting her halfway up the path. “Why am I a mystery man?”
Sophia threw her arms around him. “I don't know,” she said wryly. “Because you wanted to meet all secretly and mysteriously?”
“I don't ever remember saying we needed to meet in secret,” he said, but he knew she was onto him.
“Yeah, but you asked about Wesley and whether he would be around later, so it was basically implied,” she said.
Nash led her into the barn and said, “I hope you’re not sick of the ranch.”
“Impossible,” she smiled.
“I’m sure Wesley already introduced you to all of our horses, but I thought I’d give you an introduction to my special girl. Her name is Alabaster, but I call her Alba.”
“Alba,” she repeated with a smile, rubbing a hand on the horse’s muzzle. “She’s beautiful!”
He’d picked up the horse at a farm auction for a mere seven hundred dollars when she was just a couple months old. The breeder said he thought she was going to need a lot of medical attention because of a mutation in her foot and wanted her to go to a home that could afford to get her surgery.
Nash was determined to help Alba. He scheduled two surgeries for her, and the first day that he saw her gallop through his fields, he had joked to his mother that it made him feel like a proud parent.
“Where's Imogene?” he asked.
“She's with Lauren for the night. Lauren has a son, so, they have playdates together,” Sophia explained, still petting the horse.
“That's too bad. I was looking forward to seeing her.”
Sophia smiled and spun around to lean against the glossy stables.
Alba took a further interest in the beautiful girl, turning her head to Sophia and trying to rub against her arm.
Sophia laughed at the gestured. “I guess you weren’t done with me yet,” she said affectionately. “So, what about you, Nash? You ever think about having kids?”
Nash shook his head. “No. I mean, Kenzie did,” he said, and it felt strange to be talking about his wife with his ex-girlfriend. “She talked about it a lot, actually. To be honest, it was something we used to fight about.”
“You were that opposed?” Sophia asked with an amused breath.
He shrugged. He had never brought this up with anyone before, but Sophia was so easy to talk to. He remembered back when they first met, if she was in the room, it wouldn’t take but five minutes before all of his secrets came spilling out.
“She knew from the beginning I didn't want kids,” he explained. “I guess she thought I would change my mind.”
“Here's to all the poor people out there who think they can make their partner change,” she said, raising her hand into the air.
“Now I wish I had,” he mused.
“Yeah?”
“Sometimes. I mean, it would have been nice not to feel so…alone, after she died. It would have been great for me and both of our families to have something good come out of all that tragedy. Plus, now I see you and Imogene, and it doesn't look half bad.”
“Doesn't look half bad,” Sophia repeated with a giggle. “Now there's a compliment.”
“Let me try again,” he said bashfully, rubbing a hand against his forehead. “She's a great kid. She's so much fun to be around. I didn't think that possible, you know? Kids are cute, but they're also usually pretty annoying.”
“I used to think that too, but it's different when they're yours.”
“Or they're as fantastic as Imogene,” he said.
Sophia nodded and turned back to Alba. “Right.”
“What about you? Did you plan on having Imogene?” he asked, genuinely curious.
“Fresh out of my breakup with you?” she smirked. “What do you think?”
“I'm thinkin' probably not,” he said.
Sophia’s eyes went comically wide and she snapped a finger toward him, announcing, “Bingo.”
“How long were you guys together?” he asked.
“Honestly?” she winced. “We weren't together.”
“Oh, wow,” he exhaled. He hadn’t meant to react so openly, but Sophia being with someone else was just hard to picture.
Not only did it ignite a small pit of jealousy in his stomach, but it also seemed wildly out of character for her.
To others, Sophia was wild and uninhibited, but Nash knew she wasn’t a one-night stand kind of girl. Whether this was because Sophia was afraid of intimacy or for moral reasons, he couldn’t be sure.
But then, breakups made people act in ways they normally wouldn’t. So maybe a fling was exactly what she wanted after they broke up.
“Yeah, actually uh, it was sort of a mess,” she said with a wince. “We…you know, but we weren't a couple and, to be honest, I never told him.”
“You never told him about Imogene?” he repeated in surprise.
Sophia shook her head, and the two of them stood in silence in the immense stable.
“Wow,” he breathed, unable to say anything else.
“Do you think that's horrible?” she asked, setting her hands on each of her forearms.
“Horrible?” he repeated as he sat down on one of the benches. He thought about his answer briefly, then shook his head and said, “No. It surprises me a little, I guess. You never really hear about that in real life. I can't imagine what that must have been like for you.”
“Hard,” she said. “Really, really hard. But we didn't want to be a couple, so why would I make him stay and force him to be in my life forever?”
“Still…” he shrugged.
Sophia let out an accusing laugh and said, “You do think it's awful!”
“No,” he said firmly. “I've never been in that situation, so I don't deserve to have an opinion on it, do I?”
Sophia sat down beside him on the lacquered bench and nudged her knee against his as she said, “I've never been to war, but that doesn't mean I don't have opinions about it.”
He laughed, but inside he thought what terrifying power women yielded over men in that regard. There was some guy out there who had the privilege of being in Sophia’s life who had no idea he was the father of her child.
“I guess it makes sense,” he tried to reason. “You weren't exactly looking to commit and settle down back then, as I recall. Especially not with a…stranger?”
“Well, he wasn't a stranger to me,” she said.
He nodded, feeling another pinch of jealousy. “Anyone I know?”
“No.”
The truth was Nash hadn’t been able to move on from Sophia until he met Kenzie. The idea that Sophia had moved on so quickly afterward left him feeling strangely hurt.
It was ridiculous, he knew. Why be upset about something that happened three years ago? But then again, wasn’t the whole purpose of him calling Sophia to the stables to talk about what had happened three years ago?
Hadn’t he wanted closure? Or maybe the opposite. Maybe there was nothing he wanted to close. Maybe he wanted to open the doors to Sophia and Nash wide open.
“Does Imogene know?” he asked, hoping he wasn’t overstepping a boundary.
“No, just my uncle and Lauren.”
“It's good you were able to have support
at that time,” he said, rubbing his hand on hers.
“I mean, it wasn't the ideal situation, obviously, but...” she trailed off, looking down at her feet. “Promise you're not going to make fun of me?”
“I promise nothing,” he teased.
Sophia laughed and looked up at him. She gave a playful roll of her eyes before admitting, “I think Imogene was a real blessing to me.”
“How's that?”
“Aside from the fact that she's amazing? She made me stop and think about my life. I mean, really think about where I was going and what I wanted to do, how I could provide for her. She made stability seem like less of a weight.”
“Why did you hate it so much?” he asked, genuinely interested in her answer.
“I didn't hate it,” she said, and he immediately wrinkled his nose in disagreement.
“That's not how I remember things,” he said with amusement.
With a sigh, Sophia corrected, “Stability didn’t scare me, I just wasn't used to it. Coming home to the same person every day and having the same responsibilities day in and day out seemed like my nightmare. No offense.”
Nash raised his hand as if to say no harm done, and she continued, “I didn't want kids, and I didn't want to be pregnant, that's for sure. I was still…I mean, my heart was broken.”
“So was mine, for the record,” he said.
Either Sophia didn’t hear him or she didn’t want to acknowledge him, because she kept speaking. “But if you have a kid, you have to provide all of those things that scared me—a steady job at a firm, not just doing freelance work for dog food companies. I needed to have a real job; I needed to have a routine. I couldn't just pretend I would be this hippie wanderer. I had to settle in, and I feel like she mellowed me in the best way possible.”
“It sounds amazing,” he said with affection.
“No, it sounds terrifying,” she laughed.
“It sounds amazing to have something so life-changing happen to you,” he began to say, then thought better of it.
His whole world spun around when Kenzie died, and he reminded himself that not all life-changing events were good ones.
“Something positive, I mean,” he corrected. “See? Committing to something wasn't all that bad, was it?”
“No,” she smiled. “She's my world.”
Nash liked hearing Sophia talk. Her voice was softer than normal: sweet and maternal. He loved hearing her talk about Imogene and a life of responsibility because it was all he had ever wanted from her back when they were together.
His affection for her back then was so deep that he knew he loved her more than she loved him. It never bothered him because it had always been something of a fact in his mind.
He could see a streak of fear in her that kept her on the edge, teetering on the line of contentment in their relationship.
She loved him, and he never worried that she would cheat or leave, but he could feel the hesitation in her soul when they talked about spending the rest of their lives together.
To hear her talk about Imogene saving her now, to hear her say that she basked in the mundane aspects of committed life, made him all the more interested in their new friendship.
“So what's up, Nash?” she asked, her voice resuming to its usual up-tempo tones. “Why did you call me here?”
“I think I was hoping to get a bit of closure, to be honest. There were some questions I thought I needed the answers to,” he said, choosing his words carefully.
“But now you don't?”
He shook his head. “I don't think so.” He’d gotten all he needed from Sophia tonight, and he was more than happy with that. “You're different, Sophia.”
“Bad different?” she asked with a smile.
“Not in the slightest.”
Chapter Twelve
Sophia
When Nash broke up with Sophia, she had been furious.
Their first day apart, she swore that she would never have anything to do with the Haven boy ever again.
After the first week passed and she still hadn’t heard from him, she was fuming, but also confused.
Why hadn’t he called?
Was it really over?
They had never been the off-again-on-again type of couple, so she didn’t know why she had expected Nash to come crawling back to her, but she did.
After that first week, the hits kept coming.
He changed his status on his social media page to single. POW!
He blocked her number. BAM!
These tiny, spiteful actions didn’t hurt her. She had no room in her heart to be hurt. She was incensed, but not upset.
She thought he was being immature and stupid, but she felt no love for him in those days.
Even at four weeks, she still didn’t believe it was really over.
How could it be? They were Nash and Sophia. Wonder couple.
It wasn’t until week five, when she heard that Nash had moved out of Dallas, that her heart started to break.
The first person she spoke to about Nash leaving town was his brother Gage.
Gage was the eldest Haven boy, and up until a month prior, Nash had been working at his brother's ranch. He'd been wildly devoted to the business, and she couldn't understand why he would abandon it.
She had no idea he was in Tillsonburg, starting a new life at a new ranch. She'd known years ago that the family was looking to expand, but his three-month trek to buy property had never turned up any solid properties.
“I'm sorry,” Gage had said, heaping an awkward sigh when Sophia called. “He wants to start fresh, and I promised him I wouldn't tell him.”
“I need to talk to him,” she insisted, but Gage wouldn't budge.
“Sophia, you know I care about you. You were like family, okay? But I can't betray his trust. He wants to go off the grid for a while.”
“To get away from me, you mean,” she snapped.
Gage shrugged. “If that's how you want to see it, sure.”
“He blocked my number,” she said. “How am I supposed to get a hold of him?”
“That's the thing,” he said. “You're not.”
There was such finality to the way he said it that Sophia felt as though he'd pulled a rubber band and snapped it against her heart. For the first time since the breakup, she finally broke.
“He just…left?” Lauren asked later, in shock as Sophia told her the news. The two of them sat on her bed, Sophia in Lauren's lap, sobbing like a child.
“He got a job somewhere,” Sophia cried, curling up into a ball. “I tried to ask Gage where he went or why he left the ranch, but he wouldn't tell me!”
Lauren stroked her hair as she cried and continued telling her the grim tale of lost love. She couldn't understand why Nash needed it to be so final between them. He'd broken up with her, but it was clear he still loved her, so why did he need to leave?
This was a question she asked over and over. She cried so hard, she felt sick to her stomach. Her head throbbed so hard with each cry that she knew she had to calm herself down.
Lauren brought her soup, two Ibuprofen, and a giant glass of cold tea and sat on the floor in front of the bed, looking up at Sophia.
She distracted Sophia with gossip about their friends and news of her mother's travels to Wales in England. She refused to let the conversation turn back to Nash until Sophia finished eating.
Once she had cleared her plate, Lauren reached up and held Sophia's hand, prompting her to start crying again.
“Honey,” Lauren said softly. “He proposed, and you said no. What did you think was going to happen?”
Sophia gave a long, hard stare at her friend. Then she relented, “I know, I know.”
“You didn’t want to be tied down, remember?”
Sophia cried harder and shook her head. Lauren didn’t understand the scope of things yet, but she was about to.
“Lauren,” she said, barely able to push the words out. “I’m pregnant.”
Lauren wa
s the first person Sophia had ever told about being pregnant, and she certainly hadn’t known it when Nash proposed.
They had been dating for two years when he did it.
It was nearly sunset, and he had driven them down an old road in the middle of nowhere. It took thirty minutes to drive down the wide stretch of desert highway.
It was a spot they both loved coming to because it was such a long stretch of flatland, and when the sun started to set, it looked like the whole sky was on fire.
They sat in his car, listening to a new album by one of their favorite artists, savoring each song without saying a word. They did this often, running an album from front to back without commenting until the record was complete.
As the last song ended, Nash pushed his thumb against the volume button on his dash, silencing the album.
“What did you think?” he asked with excitement.
“A little sappy at times, but for the most part, I loved it,” she said, and Nash scoffed.
“A little sappy at times?” he repeated, clearly disagreeing.
“She said, 'I wish that you were here,'” she said, quoting the lyrics. “That doesn’t seem a little sappy to you?”
“The album is supposed to symbolize water and being taken away by the waves,” he said, and she loved the way he always spoke with his hands and how he could get lost in music like that. “She wasn't talking to a person; she was talking to the water. That's not sappy.”
“You're right, it's just sad,” she said with a laugh.
“Do you ever hear songs and think of me?” he asked.
“Of course,” she smiled.
“Like what?”
Sophia pressed her lips thin and tilted her head back like she was thinking about it.
“Like that old Billy Walker song,” she said, snapping her fingers as though trying to remember. “Oh! 'I'm so miserable without you; it's just like having you around'”
“Har-har,” he said with a playful roll of the eyes. “I'm being serious.”
“So am I!”
Nash moved his hand up to stroke her cheek. He raised both brows, his expression sweet and well-humored as he said, “I'm trying to have a moment with you, Soph.”
“You don't force moments, they just happen,” she said, then realized he was being serious and burst into a fit of giggles. “Relax! Okay, okay, give me some inspiration then. What song makes you think of me?”
