Home For The Holidays - Jordan Silver Page 0,3

wasn’t much of a fight.

Two months later, aunt Sharon was married to the man she’d been secretly seeing, a man who was richer and a few years younger than her ass of an ex. I think the fact that uncle John was younger is the thing that really got under my aunt’s ex’s skin.

It didn’t help that his mistress always drooled over uncle John and things got even worst when my cousins started calling him dad. I love to see that shit because I’m a hot sticky mess who loves drama.

Anyhoo, since my aunt knows the bitterness of being cheated on and the hell that is a nasty divorce, she was ready to skin someone alive. And that’s where I found that snake, Tessa. Tessa had been introduced to the family by Deidre. She’d been her maid of honor, and I think the person she trusted the most outside of family.

According to what mom said, Tessa had seen Deidre kissing some guy when they were out together one night while Deidre was a few months pregnant. According to mom, Tessa had taken this news to Tom, who, without asking his wife for the truth, had taken it upon himself to take her friend’s word and decided that his wife, whom he loved, was a lying cheating slut.

Even me, not the one closest to her, saw the red flags in that story. Now mind you, I don’t know Tessa that well, but the few times I’d seen her, she reminded me of the mean girls from high school. Now me, being the born bitch that I am and am always accused of being, can see right through that shit from a mile away.

I’m a nerd through and through. My brain is just wired that way. But I was born with mom’s exceptional beauty, my grandma’s gravity-defying tits, and my dad’s money. I’m a mean girls’ worst nightmare. I always used my smarts to make them look stupid whenever they came at me or for someone they found less fortunate than them. They hate to see me coming.

Anyhoo, because of my own experience with that ilk, I had seen the signs in Tess the mess the few times our paths have crossed, so I wasn’t buying this story. The thing that I could not understand while trying to read between the lines of mom’s missives to aunt Sharon is why there was no communication between Tom and Deidre.

Apparently, these two people who loved each other to the moon and back didn’t have it in them to sit down and talk like two rational beings. Tom believed the worst, including the thought that the twins weren’t his, something I’m sure Tessa had told him, and Deidre was just so hurt that he’d even believe her ex-friend’s lies that she wasn’t even trying.

I spent the next few weeks reading mom’s private messages to my aunt and trying to follow along on everyone else’s social media. Tessa had a lot to say about people cheating on their spouses and how just because you’re friends with someone, that doesn’t mean that you should condone their behavior. That was her bid for saint of the year. I barf!

My idiot brother wasn’t saying anything, but actions speak louder than words, and he was out of the house before the twins were even born. Deidre had deleted all social media profiles and chose instead to focus all of her energy on raising her kids the right way. The only thing I wanted to knock her head off for is the fact that she’s still in love with my brother, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

So, after I’d pieced the whole sordid mess together from mom’s messages and Tessa’s daily pick me rants on social media where she was doing her best not to have anyone look too closely at the fact that she was screwing her best friend’s soon to be ex-husband by painting said best friend as a cheat and a liar, I was left with a dilemma.

I couldn’t tell my family how I found out the big secret, which I’d learned everyone had decided to keep from me at dad’s request because he didn’t want his baby stressing while hundreds of miles away from everyone and everything that was going on. Dad knows me so well; he knew that I’d forsake everything else and pick at this thing like the scab on a festering wound.

So I had to keep my knowledge a secret and pretend not to