“Same number since high school.” She put up her hands. I’m sorry. “Changing numbers is not a good business move for me. Still, I think we may have taken the hiding-in-plain-sight idea a little too far.”

“I’m not hiding.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“I’m not doing it well,” I admitted. “He was the one who left.”

Shelly didn’t press me, thank God. We walked into her bedroom, where Bailey slept in the middle of the queen-size bed wrapped in fuzzy pajamas, her little fist against her mouth. I scooped my baby girl up, huffing a breath under the weight. Well, she’d be two years old in a few short months, not exactly a baby anymore.

Turning sideways through the bedroom doorway, I left Shelly’s place and carried Bailey down to our apartment, depositing her in her own secondhand princess bed. Already in her pajamas, she slept on as I tucked her in under the sheet. I gave her a kiss on the forehead and paused to breathe in her scent. That turned out to be a mistake, because she chose that moment to wake. I calmed her as she fussed, singing my small retinue of nursery rhymes until my voice had gone hoarse and her eyelids stopped fluttering.

This was how I protected her, by keeping the darkness separate.

I couldn’t give her a mother who was whole, unbroken. But I could be here for her, night after night, day after day. And if I went on an occasional date night, if there was a twisted side of me let out only then, she never had to know.

I padded into my own bedroom, convinced I’d made the right choice in not seeing Colin again. Men had one use in my life, and that was what the club was for. I wasn’t in a good place for anything more than that, would probably never be.

Colin seemed like a nice guy, not like my usual dates. But I’d been wrong about a man before, hadn’t I? So I’d made the right choice. Almost definitely.

When I lay down in bed, though, I thought back to the way he’d been with me, the way he had touched me. The way he had licked me. Jesus.

Most kids loved getting presents, but I hated it. After every present people would look at me expectantly, waiting for the gasp of surprise, the exclamation of how much I adored it, and the obligatory hugs all around. I worked at these happy displays, and if it wasn’t up to par, I suffered the disappointment. It got to where receiving presents was associated with letting people down.