Hot Mess - Elise Faber Page 0,4
. . .” Ann’s tone was uncomfortable. “Brian and Billy are actually camping in the backyard tonight. I . . . um . . . don’t want to disturb them. Dad and son time, you see.”
Dad and son time.
Not Dad and daughter time.
“I wouldn’t call if it wasn’t important,” Shannon said, stifling the sharp spike in the back of her heart, knowing that Rylie wouldn’t get that. That her daughter had never had it.
Knowing that when she got older, it would wound deeply.
Because Shannon had lived that truth herself.
And she knew those deep injuries never fully healed, that they always ached, always made a person wonder if only they had done something different, if only they had been better . . .
Then perhaps their parent would have loved them more.
“I—”
“Please, Ann,” Shannon said, hating that she was begging but some part of her praying this was some horrible mistake and that Brian really wasn’t trying to sell the house out from beneath her.
He knew about her father.
He knew about her past.
He was the father of their fucking child.
So, he couldn’t be that bad. Right? Right?
A sigh drifting through the speaker. “I’ll go get him.”
She winced at the sound of Brian’s cell colliding with something hard, but then the noise cleared, and Shannon waited for Brian to come to the phone. Then waited some more. And even more. Then, when she was just starting to think that he wasn’t going to come, that Ann had shoved the cell into some drawer to be forgotten about, she heard a scrabbling sound and air pulsing through the phone’s speakers.
“Yeah.”
Annoyed. Clipped. One word. Even better, one syllable.
This was the Brian she’d grown familiar with over the years—not the Brian she’d fallen in love with in high school.
But people grew. People changed. People moved on.
She needed to do the same.
“Hi, Brian,” she said, keeping her voice carefully calm. “Thanks for coming to the phone. I’m sorry to interrupt your time with your . . .” The word son caught in her throat, the reminder so damned painful, even after more than a year of knowing her husband had made another family. “With Billy,” she forced out. “But I had something troubling happen today, and I need to talk about it—”
“Fuck,” he groaned. “Why is it that even though I’m almost finally divorced from you, I’m still stuck talking to you?”
Slice. Punch. Slam.
She closed her eyes, held on to her calm by a hairsbreadth. “Why did a real estate agent come to the house today?”
Silence.
“I asked for one thing, Brian,” she said. “I gave you the money from our joint accounts. I didn’t go after your retirement or alimony and child support. I took over the payments for the car you couldn’t fucking afford so that Ann could have something new. A car I fucking hate driving—”
“Then sell it,” he snapped. “You don’t need a car in Stoneybrook. You can just walk everywhere.”
Calm. Calm. She inhaled, released it slowly. “You promised I could keep the house. That Rylie and I would always have a home here, so I’m trying to figure out why suddenly there was a realtor showing up at my front door this afternoon.”
“I need the money.”
Her breath caught, that last sliver of hope that she’d somehow been wrong, that this was all a misunderstanding, died out.
“Brian,” she sighed.
“Ann is pregnant again,” he said, sticking the emotional knife into her gut as effectively as if he’d stabbed her with a real blade.
“You promised,” she whispered, chin falling to her chest.
“We need a new place.”
“Need or want?”
Silence.
And she had her answer.
“You’d really do this to me, to Rylie? Upend our lives even more—”
“You two were always fine on your own.”
“Define fine,” she gritted out. “Because I thought I was pulling my weight in a relationship where my husband was working just hard as I was, rather than sticking his fucking dick in a woman and knocking her up when we were trying to make our own kid—”
“Not this again,” he muttered.
“No. No,” she said, voice going cold. “You don’t get to do this to me again. This is not my fault—”
“You had such a stranglehold on every part of our lives, Shannon,” he interrupted. “I couldn’t keep living like that.”
“Then why didn’t you just say something?” she screeched. “Why—” She caught herself, forced her voice to lower so she didn’t wake Rylie. “Why didn’t you just end things between us?”
A beat.
“Because I couldn’t handle you looking like the same beat-up puppy as you did when