The Right One - Felice Stevens Page 0,4

in Leo that after the last stroke and with the damage to her heart, if she didn’t listen to them and try and help herself, there wasn’t much they could do for her. Another stroke could prove to be deadly.

Her bad attitude hadn’t been affected, and she’d continued to hurl her abuse upon anyone within range.

“The doctors don’t know shit. So you can all fuck off and leave me alone.”

Such a charmer, his mother.

“Mom, no one knows. But it makes sense to listen to the doctors. If you had the first time, you might not’ve had the second stroke. The third time you might not be so lucky.”

“It’s not fair. Why did this happen to me? It should’ve happened to Robert, that bastard. He’s the one who cheated and left me. That piece of shit.”

And while Leo wouldn’t have minded if all sorts of horrible things happened to his stepfather, in his eyes, his stepfather wasn’t the only guilty party in that marriage.

When Theresa Ryan had married Joseph DeLuca, she’d expected to be taken care of like the princess she was raised to be. Spoiled by her parents, Theresa knew that Joey, a contractor of luxury homes on Long Island, would give her the life she’d dreamed of. Unfortunately for her, Joey died, leaving her with an eight-year-old boy to take care of and loans on the business. A month after his father’s death, she’d leave Leo with a babysitter each night to husband-hunt, and barely a year later, she married Robert O’Toole, a lawyer she met at a singles’ night, whom she dazzled with her smile. He paid off her debt and moved them into a big house in Mill Basin, where Theresa entertained every weekend. They bought a boat and a beach house in the Hamptons, where she’d spend every summer perfecting her tan and drinking iced white wine. Leo was sent to sleepaway camp, despite his pleas to stay home.

His mother, having no patience to deal with a sad little boy who missed his father, left it up to Robert, who was more than happy to bend Leo to his ways. Robert had never wanted children and didn’t care that Leo was lonely. He didn’t want to watch ball games or play catch in the backyard. He wanted Leo to go away.

Crack. The hand across his face snapped Leo’s head back, but he refused to cry, and that drove Robert to even greater fury. He slapped Leo again. And again.

“Stop being a pain in the ass. No one wants you around. Go to camp like every other normal kid, and shut your mouth with all your whining.”

So Leo had shut up and gone to camp. He’d shut up when Robert would beat his ass for not getting good grades or for anything else that pissed him off about Leo. Which was almost everything. The only thing Leo had excelled at was sports, but Robert didn’t give a damn about that. And Theresa never gave a damn about anything Leo did either. She’d floated through life in designer clothes, smoking cigarettes, gossiping endlessly, and drinking her white wine. When he grew older, Leo suspected she and her friends traded husbands as easily as they did each other’s secrets.

Then Theresa had her first stroke and a second within the year, and Robert had no use for a wife who couldn’t keep up with his lifestyle. He walked out, leaving her with the house, a nice settlement, and a boatload of resentment. Robert moved to the city and remarried six months after the divorce was finalized. He and Theresa had been married for over twenty-five years, and he was gone as if he’d never existed.

“Mom, is there anything I can do for you right now? I don’t see the point of complaining about Robert again. It’s been three years since you got divorced.”

“I know, and the bastard is living it up with that bitch of a girlfriend. I saw a picture of them—she looks like me twenty years ago. After I gave him the best of myself.” His mother had moved on to the maudlin part of the program now and began to cry. “He couldn’t wait to pay me off and leave. Nobody loves me. I’m going to die alone in this house. You only come to visit me because you’re my son and you’re forced to. But you don’t love me. I gave you a wonderful life. You had everything you could’ve wanted, and what do I get?