Love, Chocolate, and Beer (Cactus Creek #1)(64)

“No! None of that means anything!” cried Dani. “I don’t care if she met her soul mate. You don’t just walk out on your husband and kids to be with some other guy.”

“What did you want her to do instead? Tell me.” Derek became almost brutal as he forced her to face the truth. “Did you want mom to stay with a man she only loved as a friend, knowing he loved her more than she ever could? Go through the motions every day and watch that love slowly kill them both? Did you want her to spend her life working in a brewery she never liked to begin with and instead never become the great legal mind that saved countless people throughout her career?” He grabbed her hand to prevent her from turning away. “Did you want her to forego the happy life she eventually found just so she could be a mom for you and me? Because she would have. That would’ve been the only reason she would’ve. Not for dad or anything else. We were the only thing that almost made her stay.”

“Then why the hell didn’t she?” Now Dani was tearing up, and it pissed her off since she seemed to be crying more in the last few months than she ever had in her whole life to this point.

“Dad told her to go, honey.”

Her gaze snapped back to his. “What?”

“Mom told me it was dad who convinced her she should go and be happy with that other man. He set her free so she could have the kind of love he’d always promised her she deserved.”

“No!” Dani shook her head fiercely. “I was outside dad’s office, I saw him in there reading that awful letter mom wrote him when she walked out on him that night. He was crying so hard. Oh my god, Derek. I watched his heart break right then and there.”

Derek shut his eyes and dropped his head down in pain. “Dani, I’m so sorry. I never knew. Why didn’t you tell me?” He squeezed her hand. “You were so young—”

“I was ten, Derek. Old enough to remember. Mom lied to you; she left him.”

“No. He let her go. I asked dad and he told me the exact same things she did, sweetie.”

“But that night...the letter.”

“That letter had been a thank-you. And a goodbye.”

“I don’t understand. He was crying so hard.”

“Of course he was, honey. She was the love of his life, even if he wasn’t hers. Just because he let her go, it didn’t mean he didn’t love her with all his heart. She may not have left like a thief in the night, but she left him all the same. You’re right; you did see his heart breaking that night because it was finally truly over.”

Dani was dumbstruck, still shaking her head as if objecting to the truths as they battled the facts she’d based her entire life upon.

“Now let me ask you something,” said Derek softly.

She looked up slowly.

“What do you remember about Valentine’s Day growing up?”

She shrugged, not seeing how that had anything to do with their conversation. “Not much. I didn’t have too many friends growing up and didn’t date until college. I never cared about the whole Valentine’s thing; the guys I dated were pretty stoked about that.”

“Yeah,” he interrupted sadly, “everyone knew you didn’t care about Valentine’s Day.”

Something in the way he said that made Dani narrow her eyes in defense.

“You left out the part about you working here every Valentine’s since you were a teen.”

“So?” She measured him carefully, still confused about where this was going.

“Do you remember why you started doing that?”

She frowned, never having giving it a thought before.

Derek pressed on. “The year after mom left, when you were eleven, you hatched this elaborate scheme to hook dad up with the divorcee down the street from us, remember? You got me to babysit her kids with you so that dad could go out with her on Valentine’s eve?”

Memories lit her face. “Oh yeah. Nice lady, cute kids.”

“The next year, it was a teacher from school. And the year after, a ‘dancer’ you met.”

“What’s your point?”

“Always on Valentine’s, Dani. Only on Valentine’s. You made it your mission to keep dad happy every February 14th to take his mind off the fact that mom left him on the 13th.”

Dani blinked. Only on Valentine’s Day, really?

“And the reason dad let you do it every year was simply because it made you happy.”

She shook that off as an impossibility. “No, he had fun on those dates, I remember.”

“Probably. You sure did your damndest to make certain he would. I think that’s why, in a way, Valentine’s was special to him because every year, on that day, you’d show him your crazy, determined love through your matchmaking antics.” He chortled. “Gawd, remember after he had his first heart attack? You managed to get him that cute nurse’s phone number?”

Her emotional laughter joined his. That’s right, she had been fixated on a medical professional for him that year.

“A fortunate byproduct to your seasonal scheming is that you found out how much you loved working here,” continued Derek. “At fourteen, you started learning to cook, work the brew tanks, and run the business end of things here. You couldn’t get enough of it.”