He was so stunned it took him a moment to decide how to react to this wildly unexpected occurrence. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for.” He tried to return the cookies. He didn’t expect gifts from her. He didn’t expect her to be friendly to him, either. He didn’t even know how to react to kindness, not when it came from her. He just wanted her to stop being so spiteful and mean to Maddox and Jada, since they had nothing to do with what had happened to Atticus. “I know I’m the only one to blame for everything.”

“You were seventeen,” she said on a sob and, ignoring his attempt to get her to take the bag back, she turned and left.

22

“Are you nervous about seeing Tobias?” Karoline asked.

Harper pretended to be far more engrossed in doing the dishes than she actually was. The girls were in the other room, watching a Disney movie with their cousins while their uncle watched professional basketball on his phone. “No, why?”

“Just wondering.” Her sister grabbed a dish towel and dried the pot Harper had just put in the rack. “Did you get your Christmas shopping finished last night like you wanted to?”

Harper kept her gaze on the spatula she was scrubbing. “For the most part. Thanks for watching the girls.”

“It was no problem. They just played with their cousins.” Karoline wiped down the counters. “Seems like you were out pretty late,” she added a few seconds after.

“The malls stay open later during the holidays. And I had a long drive from LA.”

“What did you end up buying?”

“A few stocking stuffers for the girls,” Harper said, but that wasn’t all. She’d purchased a nice watch for Tobias from an expensive sporting goods store. But she wasn’t going to admit that to anyone, not even him. She didn’t care how expensive or wildly inappropriate it was—or that she felt the need to hide it. As soon as she’d found the watch, she’d known she wanted to get it for him. It was her one indulgence, her own little celebration of the season, and she wasn’t going to second-guess herself or worry about it now that she’d already made the decision. She was just going to enjoy imagining him out in the wilderness, using that great watch while she was in Colorado, facing the hard work of putting her life back together—whether or not that included her ex-husband.

“Things still going okay with Axel?”

“Yeah, of course. Why?”

“You didn’t say much when the new flower arrangement arrived this morning.”

Because the flower arrangements made her nervous. She kept remembering the clip she’d seen of him accepting something from that fan in the front row and wondering if his extravagance was meant to compensate her in some way.