and his wife and kids.”
“So your mom ended up marrying Ned?”
Ian’s father had split nearly the moment he’d been conceived. When he was in high school, his mother had started a fairly serious relationship with Ned. Ned had one son of his own, a few years younger than Ian. “Yeah, they got engaged not long after you...” His voice trailed off. He was about to say “not long after you dumped me,” but they were stuck here together. There wasn’t much point in antagonizing one another, at least on the first day.
Bree’s mouth tightened a bit, knowing what he’d been about to say. After a moment, she pasted back on her cheery smile. “How is everyone doing? I think about your family sometimes and wonder what they’re up to.”
Did that mean she thought about him, too? Ian knew he shouldn’t care, but a part of him wondered. She’d certainly been on his mind over the years. Sometimes he was angry and bitter. Most times he just felt disappointed.
“Ned is getting ready to retire and my mother is trying to figure out what she’ll do when she has to look at him all day. His son, Jay, and his wife just had their second child. They’re all great. I actually haven’t seen them in a while. Work has been pretty hectic.”
Bree nodded and turned back toward the stairs. “You sound like my dad.”
Ian noted the flat tone of displeasure in her voice. Bree and her father still had their issues, he could see. The man had been chained to his desk twenty hours a day when they were in college, and he blamed Mr. Harper in part for their relationship’s demise. “How are your parents?” he asked.
Bree reached the top of the stairs and turned back to look at him. “Dad’s recovering from bypass surgery after his second heart attack in five years.”
Ian felt his own chest tighten in response. Bree had accused him of turning into a workhorse like her father. He tried not to work longer than eighteen-hour days, but that probably wasn’t enough of a distinction in her eyes. Or the eyes of a cardiologist. “Is he okay?”
“Yes. He’s too driven to die. But the doctors want him to scale back his hours and pass the running of the company on to his partner. That—” she laughed “—might actually kill him. That and the diet his doctors tried to put him on.”
Ian nervously pulled at the suddenly tight collar of his sweater. He imagined the candy, coffee and liquor he consistently consumed was not on the doctor’s recommended eating plan. “I’m glad he’s doing okay. Is he back to work yet?”
“Yes,” Bree said. “He returned to the office the day his doctor released him, although I suspect he’d been sneaking in some and checking his email from home. My mother divorced him last year, and he said it was hard for him to sit at home alone with the housekeeper. I find that kind of ironic considering that’s how I’d spent most of my time. But his business is important to him. He’s already sacrificed his family and his health for his job. It’d be a shame to lose his company, too. It’s all he has left. You’d be wise to learn from his mistakes.”
* * *
Bree had no idea why she’d said that last part, but the words left her mouth before she could stop them. It wasn’t helpful. Or polite. Or any of her damned business. But a part of her just had to do it. If he was going to start a family, he should know what the price of his workaholic lifestyle would be. He should know what it would be like for his child.
Ian frowned at her and put his mug down on the side table. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Bree took a deep breath and shrugged. “You know what kind of hours you keep, Ian. They’re probably worse than they were back in school when you forgot my birthday and left me alone night after night.”
Ian widened his stance and crossed his arms over his chest. “Are you still mad that I missed your birthday? I apologized twenty times.”
“So did my dad, Ian. He apologized and bought me something expensive to make up for it, just to do it again. That’s the point. You can work yourself to death, like my dad does. That’s his choice. That’s your choice now. But not when you have a family. Things are about to change for you. You can’t work as hard as you do when you have a child at home who doesn’t understand why you’re never there.”
“Since when do you know anything about me and what I do, Bree? You walked out of my life nine years ago.”
That was an interesting way to look at how their relationship had ended. Her interpretation of the past was quite different. Bree planted her hands on her hips and prepared for battle. The minute she’d found out she was coming up here, she’d worried this moment might come. The presence of his fiancée would’ve kept the old feelings and hot tempers in check, but stuck alone? It was time to have the fight they’d never really had.
“How long did it take you to notice I was gone? A week? Two weeks?”
Ian clenched his jaw, fighting to hold back words he’d obviously suppressed all this time. “I noticed, Bree. I noticed that the woman I thought loved me just turned her back on me when I was at one of the lowest points in my life.”
Bree scoffed at his cold assessment of her actions. “I didn’t turn my back on you. You’re the one who made this huge lifestyle shift and shut me out. Suddenly, you were all about working at that record company and you had no time for me anymore. You missed my birthday. You stood me up for that dance. You left me sitting alone at a restaurant waiting for you, twice. I did you a favor by easing your guilty conscience. You didn’t have to feel bad about ignoring me if I was already gone.”
“Thanks so much. I’m sure you were only thinking of me when you walked away. I made that huge ‘lifestyle shift’ because I was struggling to find my place in the world, Bree. You never realized how lucky you were. You were a talented photographer and you knew that your work could become a successful career for you. I had to face the ugly truth that my music wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t good enough. Do you know how much it hurt when my advisor told me that?”
Bree snuggled deeper into her fleece jacket, trying to disappear. She had assumed that time was hard on him, but he’d never talked about it. He had been like a steam locomotive that switched onto another track—he’d just kept on going. He’d started working at the record label, dropped out of school and charged ahead at full speed.
“How could I know anything, Ian, when you wouldn’t talk to me about it? You never talked about anything important with me. You never shared your feelings. You saved it all for your songs. And when you lost that, you just clammed up and worked even harder.”
She saw a touch of the anger ease out of his posture. His tense shoulders relaxed and his jaw unclenched. Ian shook his head sadly. “I never intended to shut you out, Bree. I just didn’t know how to talk to you about it. I didn’t know how to handle everything that was happening.”
“I felt like I was losing you, little by little, like sand slipping through my fingers. At first I thought that job at the record label would help, but it just took over your life. You dropped out of school, moved off campus and wouldn’t return my calls. What was left of the Ian I’d loved vanished. You were distracted, dismissive... I felt like I didn’t matter to you anymore.”
Ian ran his hand through the short, dark strands of his hair, the pain of that time in his life suddenly fresh in his eyes again. “Yeah,” he admitted, “I threw myself into that job. But I was trying to find something
