Cara Welsh > Quotes

“He's become the man who'd never have hurt me – by hurting me.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“tell me what it is." He looked up at me finally, off the floor, and his face was open and ruined and completely lost, a man holding a page in a language he couldn't read. "Please. If it's not the money, if it's not – I'll do anything, I keep saying it because it's true, just tell me the thing and I'll–" "That's the whole answer, Cole." My voice cracked then, right where I'd known all along it would. "If I have to tell you what it is, then you don't have it. And if you'd ever actually had it, I wouldn't have had to find out about my own marriage”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“I don't know how to forgive a man for becoming wonderful too late.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“There was one moment. We were doing the volcano table, and his hand and mine reached for the same roll of tape and touched. We both pulled back fast. There was a second, a long one, where the whole easy evening went tight and electric, and I felt the old thing, the pull of him, eight years deep. I saw him feel it too.”
― Cara Welsh, The Vow He Faked: A Billionaire Second-Chance Marriage Romance

“the worst part was he'd never really chosen you, the person, that he'd married a situation”
― 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

“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

“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