Pieces of Us by Hannah Downing Read Free Book Online Page B

or spoken with Cameron since. I’d moved to Boston and tried to start my life over. I changed my name back to Charlotte Barnes, and within twelve months of leaving Fairfield, the divorce was final. My father had liaised between us for the divorce proceedings so there was no face-to-face contact needed. I was eternally grateful to my dad for understanding my need for space.
    About a year after the divorce came through, I met Owen. He was a police officer who’d pulled me over for speeding. He always joked that when I handed him my driver’s license, he’d memorized my address so he could call me later.
    Owen was everything Cam had turned out not to be: loyal, trustworthy, and dependable. I turned down his advances time and time again, but despite my apparent disinterest, Owen pursued me relentlessly. After the debacle that had been my marriage, I wasn’t in a hurry to trust a man. I wasn’t sure my heart could take being broken again. But one night, about three months after we met, I found Owen standing outside my apartment in the rain, waiting for me to come home and holding a bouquet of flowers. Taking pity on him, I finally agreed to the date. A part of me hoped it would go really badly so he’d finally leave me alone, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed being with him. The pain of my divorce lessened when I was around him, and I discovered I was still able to laugh and have fun for the first time in two years.
    We spent more and more time together, and as the months passed, I found myself not only trusting Owen, but feeling connected to him. I could talk to him like I hadn’t been able to talk to anybody, even my ex-husband, and it was a refreshing change. What started as a pity date evolved into a true partnership — one that I quickly knew I couldn’t live without. We traveled to Italy on vacation for our first anniversary, and not long after that we moved in together. On my twenty-seventh birthday, after we’d been dating almost a year and a half, Owen asked me to marry him. As the words left his mouth, his face flashed through my mind, but I pushed it aside, refusing to allow the past to haunt me any longer.
    Even if my feelings about my previous marriage weren’t completely resolved, I wanted to be happy again, and I knew I could find that with Owen. I had no doubt he loved me, and I loved feeling like I was his whole world. I wouldn’t pass up spending the rest of my life with the man I loved and the first person in years I’d been able to trust. I’d accepted Owen’s marriage proposal and never looked back — until today.
    As we drove past the “Welcome to Fairfield” sign, my stomach rose into my throat; I wasn’t sure if I was ready to be back. My dad had been asking me to move home for years, and he finally got his wish when Owen accepted a job as a police officer in Hartford, Connecticut.
    Owen had actually brought up the idea of moving back before he had employment. He’d been adamant that there were issues in Fairfield that needed to be resolved before we could move forward with our life together. I was against the move. I thought I’d moved past the person I was when I lived there, and I was happy with the life we were building in Boston.
    Then Owen came to me and said he felt like I was holding some part of myself back from him. He didn’t want me to have any doubts. I knew I had baggage from my ex-husband and my mother — issues we had discussed at length — but I hadn’t realized how deeply they were affecting Owen and our relationship. Realizing my very future depended on it, I agreed, reluctantly, to go.
    We’d contacted my father, who was overjoyed to hear of our decision but wasn’t able to offer Owen any work. I was secretly relieved, thinking the lack of a job would convince Owen we should stay in Boston. But my father had connections with the Hartford Police Chief and managed to secure Owen a position.
    Since he’d be working there, I thought we could live in