Cara Welsh > Quotes

“Did you tell them the rest? Who it was?" "No." "Good," she said, soft. "That's yours.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“the terrible thing was that I could. I could see it perfectly. He was telling the truth. He'd been peeling my sister off him when I walked in. Nothing had happened. He was horrified. I could see all of it, and it didn't matter. It didn't touch the thing the image had already done. The blade was already in, three months deep.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“I drove home wanting him and terrified of wanting him, and somewhere on the highway I understood that this might be the actual shape of the rest of my life, if I didn't decide something soon.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“my own parents, Margot. My dad gave me a little speech about how love that comes after is the best kind. They feel sorry for Cole.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“Stop offering me the money. You just offered to sell your company on the kitchen floor. Cole, look at me." He didn't, so I said it down to the top of his head. "I don't want the company. I don't want the house. I never wanted any of it. That's the thing you have never once understood. I married you when you had a folding table and you bought our rings for forty dollars and I would go back to that tonight. I would go back to the apartment over the dry cleaner this minute, with nothing, if any of it had been real. The money was never what I was here for. Not once. Not for one single day." He went still against me. I felt the whole of him take it in. And what came up through him then was worse than the begging, because I think some part of him finally understood what I was telling him. That he had just laid the only thing he had at my feet. Everything. His whole life's work, the wall he'd spent eight years building around us. And I was telling him it was worth nothing to me. Not because it was too little. Because it was the wrong thing, it had always been the wrong thing, the only language he knew how to love me in was one I didn't speak and had never spoken. I was telling him he had nothing to give me. A man with everything in the world, and nothing to give me.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“I told him. All of it, finally, three months late. The affair. Who it was with. The courthouse. The lawn. The apartment two nights ago, Sloane's hand on my chest and my wife in the doorway. Theo is the only person alive who really knew me at twenty-four, and he listened the way he does, with his coffee going cold. When I finished he didn't say any of the things a worse friend would have said. "Her sister," is what he said, eventually. Very quietly. "Jesus, Cole.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“Lily worked it out in about nine days, because Lily works everything out; she cornered me in the kitchen with her binder under her arm and said, in the voice of a small auditor, "Are you and Daddy dating,”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“The real thing, the thing underneath, was the one nobody could ever pass, because it had already happened, eight years ago, in a courthouse, and no amount of love after the fact could go back and make it a choice.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“I was getting her out the door when you–" He stopped. "I didn't invite her. I would never. You have to know I would never. Not her, not anyone, there's no one – Nora, there's only ever been–" "I know," I said. And I did. I'd watched him take her wrist off his chest like roadkill. I knew, with total certainty, that Cole had done nothing tonight. That he'd sooner have put his hand in a fire. That he loved me. That the rejection was real and absolute. It just didn't matter. That was the thing breaking me, standing in his doorway. Sloane had seen it before I had. It proves nothing. He loved me now. I'd stopped being able to doubt that weeks ago. The pottery. The apartment. The orange booth. And none of it reached back eight years and made him have chosen me. She'd found the exact center of the wound and put her thumb on it. I could believe every bit of his love and still know I'd only been the woman a pregnancy handed him. He would shove Sloane away a hundred times. He'd shove the whole world away for me now. And I would still be standing here, thirty-two years old, knowing the best thing in my life had just been too decent to leave.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“Sloane turned around and looked at me, and she smiled. "Well," she said. "This is awkward." She wasn't even embarrassed. That was the thing about Sloane, the thing that had always been the thing about Sloane. She stepped back from Cole, unhurried, smoothing her dress, and looked at me with that bright pitying warmth she'd worn at our parents' table. She was not ashamed to have been caught with her hand on my husband, because in her mind, in her actual mind, I understood, she hadn't been caught doing anything wrong. She'd been collecting something she believed was hers. "Sloane is leaving," Cole said. His voice was shaking with something I'd never heard in it. "Right now. Sloane is leaving and she is never coming back here, and if she contacts me again I'll–" "He turned me down," Sloane said to me, conversational, like Cole wasn't talking, like we were two women having a chat. "In case that's what you're standing there looking like. He said no. Very loudly. You can stop clutching your chest." She tilted her head. "But you should have seen it, Nora. You should have seen how fast he had to do it. How hard. A man who didn't feel anything wouldn't have to say no like that. You don't shove away a thing you're not afraid of." "Sloane–" Cole started,”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“My sister, in my husband's apartment, standing close enough that her hand was on his chest, her face turned up to his, the whole shape of them intimate.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“he went. Actually went, out the back door of my classroom into the dark, to his car. I heard it start and pull away. He'd built my science fair, said tell-Lily-I-came, and left.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“I've never had a first date with the mother of my children,”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“You think I should take him back," I said. Flat. "I think," my mother said, choosing the words like stones across a river, "that you have more than most people ever get. And I think you should be very, very careful before you decide it's worth less than it looks." I didn't fight them. You can't make someone see a thing they don't have the eyes for, and my parents did not have the eyes for the difference between a man who loves you and a man who is good to you, because to them those had always been the same thing, the way it's the same thing to Cole. They were Cole's people more than they were mine.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“how do I get past the fact that the only reason he's finally this is that he lost me?”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“He put the pen on the folder, his own pen, the heavy one, the deal pen. "Here's the door, open, with everything you'd need on the other side of it. Sign it, or don't. Take a week, take a year. I will love you exactly the same on either side of that signature for the rest of my life; the papers can't touch that, nothing can touch that, that's the one thing in this folder that isn't yours to keep or return." He pushed his chair in, gently, the way he closed doors in a house where children slept. "But whatever you do next, Nora, you'll be the first version of you that ever did it with the door open. That's my gift. It's the only thing I've ever given you that money couldn't buy, so it's probably the only thing I've ever actually given you." And he left.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“the parents don't know it was her." "Nobody knows. Nora never told them." I had worked this part out in the night, lying on the couch I no longer let myself sleep on, and saying it to Theo made the shape of it final. "She's been protecting them for three months. From me, and from Sloane, and from what it would do to the family. She's been carrying the whole thing alone so their family stays standing." I looked at the city. "And two nights ago Sloane walked into my apartment because she knows that. She knows the secret is a wall and she can stand behind it and swing at Nora forever, and Nora will keep taking it, because Nora would rather bleed than burn her parents' house down." Theo watched me. "So you're going to burn it down." "I'm going to tell the truth. To her parents. All of it, including me, especially me." I said it steadily, because I had already decided and deciding is the part I know how to do. "Sloane's only weapon is that nobody knows. The day they know, she can't get near Nora again. Not at a dinner, not at a holiday, not anywhere.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“Cole. Wait a second. There's something I have to tell you." He stopped. He set the keys back down, and his face did the thing it always did when I asked him to stay for anything, the small terrible lift, the hope he couldn't help. I made myself say it before the hope could finish forming. "I went to see a lawyer." I'd braced for the wrong things. I'd lain awake rehearsing the reactions, the way you do, and I'd prepared for all of them. I thought he might finally get angry, the anger I kept waiting for through this whole thing and never got. I thought he might go cold and clipped, the rich man's reflex, we'll let the lawyers handle it then. I thought, most likely, he'd argue, all that fast reasonable urgent talk from the morning I made him leave. I had not prepared for this, because in eight years I had never once seen it, and it had genuinely not occurred to me that it was a thing that could occur. He came apart. It wasn't slow. There was no warning in it, no lean, nothing that gave me a second to brace. He was standing there and then his face just went, broke open all at once like something structural giving way, his legs stopped holding him, and he went down. Onto his knees. On the kitchen tile, in front of me, hard enough that I heard it, knee then knee. He reached up for my hands and didn't find them and got a fistful of my cardigan instead, the hem of it, and held on like it was the side of something he was falling off. "No," he said. "No, no – please. Please. Not a lawyer, Nora, please, we don't – there don't have to be lawyers, please, please don't–" His voice had a sound in it I had never heard from him. I'd heard Cole tired and Cole worried and Cole, twice in eight years, afraid. But never this. Never this raw scraped thing that wasn't really words anymore.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“the parents don't know it was her." "Nobody knows. Nora never told them." I had worked this part out in the night, lying on the couch I no longer let myself sleep on, and saying it to Theo made the shape of it final. "She's been protecting them for three months. From me, and from Sloane, and from what it would do to the family. She's been carrying the whole thing alone so their family stays standing." I looked at the city. "And two nights ago Sloane walked into my apartment because she knows that. She knows the secret is a wall and she can stand behind it and swing at Nora forever, and Nora will keep taking it, because Nora would rather bleed than burn her parents' house down." Theo watched me. "So you're going to burn it down." "I'm going to tell the truth. To her parents. All of it, including me, especially me." I said it steadily, because I had already decided and deciding is the part I know how to do. "Sloane's only weapon is that nobody knows. The day they know, she can't get near Nora again. Not at a dinner, not at a holiday, not anywhere." "They'll hate you," Theo said. Not arguing. Measuring. "Those people love you like a son. Her old man tells the courthouse story at parties. You walk in there and tell them the truth and you lose the only allies you've got left." "They're not mine," I said. "That's the thing I finally saw. They've spent three months being kind to me because they only have half the facts. I've been living off borrowed sympathy, and every day of it costs Nora something. Their kindness to me is a stone on her chest." I stood up and got my jacket. "Some allies you're not supposed to have.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“somewhere in the second hour I noticed her hand. And the bare place on it where the forty-dollar band had lived for eight years, gone now, a pale stripe of skin like a scar that's healing. Something went through me that I kept off my face, because the bare hand was the price of the honest road. I had chosen the honest road, and a man doesn't get to grieve the toll while he's driving on it.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“my hand moved. It went down. Toward him, toward his bent head right there below me, to put itself on his hair, the back of his neck, the thing my hand had done ten thousand nights without being asked, the thing it knew in its own muscles. Because the sight of him like that was the worst thing I had ever seen”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“I came to see how he was," she went on, riding over him, her eyes never leaving me. "My recently single brother-in-law. And do you know what I found? A wreck. A man who isn't sleeping, who looks like death, who is so far gone over you that he can't even be civil to family. And I thought: good." She stepped toward me, and her voice dropped, gentle, the gentlest knife there is. "Because here's the thing you've never let yourself understand, little sister. I'm not the threat. I was never the threat. I came here tonight and I threw myself at him and he said no, and you know what that proves? It proves nothing. Because he loves you now. Anybody can see he loves you now." She was very close. "But ask him, Nora. While you've got him looking like that. Ask him whose bed he was in the month you found out you were pregnant. Ask him whose idea it was that he do the decent thing. Ask him whether he ever once, in eight years, chose you on purpose, or whether a baby chose you for him and he's been a good soldier about it ever since." Her eyes shone. "He'll say no to me all day long now. That was never the question. The question is whether you were ever anything but the thing he got stuck with. No amount of him being heartbroken now is ever going to answer that, is it? That's the one he can't fix. That's the one I came to remind you about." "Get out," Cole said.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“He sees me now. I believe that. I've stopped being able to not believe it." I wiped my face. "But he saw me too late to have not done it,”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“it went like that, back and forth, easy and electric at once, two strangers who knew everything about each other,”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“even at the bottom of it, the kids were the thing that reached him.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“My father, I would learn much later, called Cole that same night to make sure he was eating. Nobody called to ask if I was.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“Before the marriage. Nora and I had been together almost two years." "How long did it go on?" "Two months." "Keep going," her father said. "At the end of the two months I told Sloane I was going to leave Nora. I had decided. I meant it." I said it plainly, into the middle of the table, because there was no way to say it that spared anyone, and sparing people is how we all got here. "And then Nora told me she was pregnant.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“I kissed him.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“Ms. Okafor”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“the parents don't know it was her." "Nobody knows. Nora never told them." I had worked this part out in the night, lying on the couch I no longer let myself sleep on, and saying it to Theo made the shape of it final. "She's been protecting them for three months. From me, and from Sloane, and from what it would do to the family. She's been carrying the whole thing alone so their family stays standing." I looked at the city. "And two nights ago Sloane walked into my apartment because she knows that. She knows the secret is a wall and she can stand behind it and swing at Nora forever, and Nora will keep taking it, because Nora would rather bleed than burn her parents' house down.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance