She took a deep breath. "What did you mean by you left first?"
"Gwen." He turned sideways. The long, narrow space was lined with shelves and barely wide enough for one body, let alone two. "Missy’s whole senior year, anybody could see you were checking out. You’d raised her, and you were both getting ready to leave. All the signs were there. You stopped ironing my shirts, having sex with me, making that bacon and egg thing I like. A man notices these things. I wasn’t going to let you fire me. I quit."
Had she been leaving? She definitely hadn’t been having any sex. They hadn’t for… well, she couldn’t remember. That probably told the story there, didn’t it? But the bacon frittata, the shirts? She’d been ironing plenty. Missy’s senior year hadn’t felt any different than any other year of their marriage.
She felt her breath catch, her eyes fill with tears. He was wrong. She hadn’t been leaving him. She’d never fully been with him. It had been Max. It had always been Max, and for that love, she had nothing to show. She was alone in every way that mattered, and she’d left Steve that way too. "I’m so sorry."
He shifted, accidentally kicking a plastic bin of onions. "You have been drinking."
"I wanted you to be the lid to my pot, but Steve, you’re not. You were lots of things, good things, like stable, and I know you love Missy. But for me--"
He straightened, his elbow touching a rash of raw bacon he was better off not knowing about. "I’m not coming back to you, Gwen."
He was quitting before he got fired, and she owed him that. "Right." She smiled, hugged him quickly before either of them could think about it. "And you’ll be just fine, won’t you?"
He handed her the mug. "Of course."
People could marry and live out two decades then get divorced, all the way divorced, with fairness and if not affection, then a kind of healthy understanding. It made a person feel good about humanity. "About the money…"
He held up his hands, tried to ease by her toward the cooler door. "It’s not me. It’s Frame Incorporated, Gwen. You saw the green files, remember, after the blue ones?"
She reached for the block of cheddar as Missy came in, and it only took the girl a second to assess the situation, based on how quickly Gwen had the cheese taken from her.
Missy held onto it. "I draw the line at being an orphan."
Deb followed Missy in, and Gwen could hear her from the doorway, "What’s going on in here? For Christ sake you’re in a cook-off. I have money on this, and Nicola is not going to--"
"Disqualifié." Nicola pushed her way in and joined the single file column of bodies. They all crunched back further and the only thing blocking Gwen from the end wall was Steve, horrified by having his body up against a stack of tater tot bags.
Deb refused to turn around even though Gwen could see Nicola popping over her shoulder like an angry ferret. But Deb could fight even with her back to the enemy. "You’d like that wouldn’t you, Nicola? But I think you’re the dishonest one here."
Gwen didn’t want to rat the French rat out, but she was literally up against the wall. "I know why her family kicked her to Belmar." She tried to spread her hands out, but they wouldn’t clear a shelf on one side. "It’s pretty big too."
Nicola’s eyelids lowered, a Gallic bluff, "You know nothing."
Deb tried to crank her neck to see behind her but only an owl’s could rotate that much. "You’ve been using us to make a cookbook, haven't you?"
"Oh," Gwen snorted, "it’s more than that."
Nicola’s eyes opened wide. "How did you--"
Deb sucked in a breath. "Stolen recipes?"
Gwen watched surprise register on Nicola’s face, quickly followed by anger. "My grand-mère left much to my brothers. She would not sèst opposè my borrowing of her recipes."
It was worse than Gwen thought, and she’d thought some pretty bad things about the woman. "Your family turfed you because you took recipes from your..." Gwen could only whisper, "dead grandmother?"
She heard Steve suck in a breath. "Shame on you."
She turned to him, eyebrows drawn. It was okay for him to take her equity in the house, but a few stolen lamb recipes and his ethics kicked in?
He backed further into the tater tots. "You’re not my grandmother. A grandma!"