After the Climb (River Rain #1) - Kristen Ashley Page 0,30
that had no hope of rooting out that disease, he faced the consequences of a wife who had lucid stretches of understanding something was terribly wrong, and deciding to take the path of denial and not treatment.
That was Dora’s.
And eventually, she’d owned it.
Unfortunately, by the time she’d done that, not only was their divorce final—and it being further after he’d endured more abuse from her accusing him of picking up with “his women” after he “got done with her,” when, for her sake, he hadn’t started dating—she’d finally found a therapist who could reach her.
But it was too late.
Because he’d met Betsy.
He hadn’t started anything with her, but he’d met her, and he intended to start something.
He did.
Betsy had since moved to Park City, a move that Duncan was not willing to make with her, and she was not willing to stay in Prescott, which told the tale of how committed they truly were, and that ended.
But now it was Imogen.
And he had no idea what Genny had to do with anything.
He’d told Dora about her before he’d even asked her to marry him.
And from that time on, it had never come up.
They’d opened their store in Bend eight years ago.
Sully had been thirteen.
And Duncan knew nothing about this.
“What happened after she hung up?” he asked tightly.
“She lost it, Dad. Totally destroyed the kitchen. Tore everything out of the fridge and threw it around. Ketchup everywhere. Tomato sauce. Salsa. Mayonnaise. Broken jars. Stuff came out of the pantry and mixed with it. Pasta. Flour. Spices. Bottles rolling around. Her slipping all over it. I stopped her before she got out the plates. But I had to do that physical. I had to lock her down. In the end, she threw back a pill and went to bed, but it took me, like, three hours to clean up that mess.”
“Son, you should have told me.”
The pain for his boy carved through his voice.
And his heart.
“Dad, what would you do? Seeing that and her coming to, you know, like she did, snapping into being with it, and then getting so worried you’d be mad and making me promise.”
“I wouldn’t have been mad. But I would have done something about it.”
“Well, I was too young to know then. I see it now. It was her being, you know…her. How she’d get shady. Like, she fed off being sick. She got something out of it. You know, negative attention is still attention. That kind of thing. And she didn’t want you to take it more seriously, how messed up she was. Maybe commit her or something.”
Duncan drew a sharp breath into his nose and said nothing because they both knew all of this was true.
“And while she was throwing shit around, she was ranting about Imogen Swan. How you were trying to find her again. How all your ‘other women’ were blonde and blue-eyed and she was the love of your life. And you were longing for her. And since she was married to some tennis guy, you’d never have her back, so you were fucking a hundred Imogen Swans to get her back—”
“Okay, son,” Duncan cut him off, not for himself, but because this couldn’t be easy on his boy.
“I’m not done, Dad. She showed me a picture of you two. After she calmed down. To prove to me she wasn’t crazy. She showed me a picture. And there you were, together. But she said you kept it in your wallet with you all the time. She found it there. In your wallet. She didn’t seem to get that you were in Bend, we were in Prescott, and she went to the basement to get that picture, so obviously it wasn’t with you all the time in your wallet. It was something in those old boxes of junk you said you’d get around to clearing out, and never did. And she found it and, well…it set her off. And that’s it.”
Duncan did not know what to say and he had no idea what to do.
Which brought back the feeling of frustration he thought he’d left behind, because he had spent a lot of the last part of his marriage not knowing what to say or do.
“Mom follows you on Insta, Dad,” Sully warned.
“I don’t know how that works, son,” Duncan reminded him.
“You can follow a tag or a hashtag. And that pic with you and Imogen Swan has been both. By the way, you guys’ hashtag is isitgonnabeimoway.”