“It could’ve been all those minutes and more, but I knew that morning, when I woke up and found you hiding in the bathroom, that I wanted you. And there wasn’t a damn day that went by that I didn’t think of you, Jillian. I should’ve told you that the first night I saw you.”

Air halted in my lungs.

“I always wondered about you, about what you were doing, how things were going for you . . .” His eyes opened and they were dark. “I wondered if you found someone. And I asked about you—I asked often.”

“What?” I breathed.

“Your mom . . . she kept me, well, informed. You didn’t know that?”

I hadn’t. A burst of anger lit up my chest, because Mom really shouldn’t have been keeping Brock up to date on my life, especially without telling me.

“I knew when you dropped out of college. I knew when you got the job at the insurance firm,” he explained, and my lips parted on a sharp inhale. “I knew when you started dating someone. I also knew you never brought him home to meet your parents, so I knew it couldn’t be that serious.”

Holy crap.

Thunderstruck, the anger gave way to surprise. “Why didn’t she say anything to me?”

“I asked her not to. I was . . . I was sure you wouldn’t want me to know any of those things. You had made it clear the last time we had talked that you didn’t want me in your life.”

A twinge of regret blossomed in my chest. It had been that last holiday I spent with him and my family. “You . . . you brought her to the house.”

I think that was what broke me the most about Brock back then. The girl he’d been flirting with, the girl he’d ditched me for, wasn’t just some one-night stand who was forgotten the moment he walked out. It was the girl he ended up getting involved with. It was the girl he finally settled down for. It was the girl he proposed to.

He turned his head slightly, looking away as if he couldn’t go eye to eye with me. “I wasn’t thinking.”

A knot formed in my throat as that night came rushing back. It had been the Christmas after everything had happened and Brock had come to Christmas dinner. He hadn’t come alone. Roughly four months after he’d broken my heart and my life had literally imploded, he’d brought Kristen to my family dinner, and I . . . I’d lost it.

Face still practically a wreck and healing, my mental state nowhere near stable, I’d come downstairs for one of the rare times to join my family, and I could still remember it like yesterday.