was so unnatural and unexpected that she’d never even recognised it.
Which described her problem in a nutshell, didn’t it? She was a mess of hesitation, and he was the kind of man who loved unreservedly. She kept too many parts of herself locked up safe, but sometimes safe was another word for trapped. She’d grown to rely on her cage, and until she was ready to change that, she should stay away from him.
Still, for the thousandth time in a handful of days, she found herself staring at his name in her phone, wondering if it would be so wrong to call.
Rae sighed, put the phone down, and bent to tangle her fingers in Duke’s silky fur. He rolled his teddy bear eyes up at her, sympathy glimmering in their depths, or possibly condemnation. Her interpretation depended on her mood.
“Take pity,” she said. “I am just a sad and lonely dog mum.”
Duke huffed and pushed his wet nose into her palm. His sweetness made her smile, but it didn’t make her whole again, didn’t even slap a bandage on her many wounds. That wasn’t Duke’s fault, or anyone else’s. Rae had changed. Become just that bit more tragic, she supposed. Must be a side-effect of feeling love slip through your fingers like sand.
“I should put some of this melodrama to use,” she told Duke, letting go of his fur with one last, wistful pat. She was sitting at her desk, determined to be productive and creative and brilliant. She still had her stories, after all, and they would never leave. In fact, her current misery was perfect for a scene she had planned, one involving betrayal by a lifelong friend and blood-spattered, tear-stained cheeks. She could do this, at least. Her wits were sharp, her talent was unmatched, and oh, for Christ’s sake, her phone was ringing. Hadn’t she turned it off?
Irritated, she snatched it up and answered without checking the display. “Hello?”
“Baby! Finally. I hope you don’t always answer the phone like that, dear. It’s not very charming.”
Rae’s stomach dropped out of her body, smashed a hole through the floor, and sank into her shiny new house’s foundations. Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
It was her mother.
Maybe Duke heard that grating, upbeat trill, because he stood and put his big head in Rae’s lap. She slid her fingers into his fur again and took a deep breath. “Hi, Mum.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any point asking where you’ve been,” Marilyn sighed. “Honestly, anyone would think I had no daughter!”
The words made Rae’s gut clench. She’d heard them too many times, thrown like grenades in an argument, to see them as anything other than a honeyed threat.
“Sorry.” She waited for more veiled barbs, for the inevitable escalation, but Marilyn just tutted. She must be in a good mood. Perhaps this would be one of their happy moments, a conversation where nothing particularly terrible happened and Rae forgot to hate her mother. That would be nice. That would be just what she needed, right now.
“Well, never mind,” Marilyn said, and Rae’s heart gave a hopeful little hop. “How are you, my dear? How’s work? What have you been up to?”
“Work’s good, thank you. The convention was last weekend—I don’t know if you remember. I didn’t win anything, but it was actually quite—”
“That’s nice, darling. It’s been a nightmare over here, of course, an absolute nightmare.”
Rae rolled her lips inward, swallowing her words. “Oh, right. Really?”
“Yes. Your father—”
“Not my father,” Rae murmured for the thousandth time.
“—insisted we get up early for some awful nature ramble, and you’ll never guess what happened.”
There was a pause.
“Well, go on,” Marilyn said sharply. “Guess.”
Rae cleared her throat, running her tongue nervously over the scar inside her cheek. “Ah… you got lost?”
“No.”
“You twisted an ankle?”
“No,” Marilyn said, sounding deeply irritated. “Honestly, Baby, it’s like conversing with a dead thing. If you don’t have time to talk to your own mother, just say so.”
And here were the warning signs. Marilyn seemed to live off confrontation like a leech fattened by discord. When Rae was younger, her mother’s unrelenting arguments had been a devastating tornado, closing Rae’s throat and making her palms sweat. She’d never quite gotten over that childhood fear.
But, for some reason, it was oddly absent today. There was no room for it. She was too busy being pissed off. “For God’s sake, Mum, just tell me.”
There was a wounded gasp. An ominous silence. And then it began. “Was there any need for that tone?”