Things We Didn't Say - By Kristina Riggle Page 0,70

it stands open, his room light still on, casting shadows over the emptiness. I flick off the light to save electricity, plunging the upper story into darkness, except where the moon slips in through Dylan’s open curtains.

The moon. That means the clouds have parted. The storm has stopped.

I pick my way carefully down the stairs, feeling my nap clinging to me, slowing me down.

I find Mallory downstairs in the living room, watching TV.

“The girls are asleep,” she says.

I resist the urge to ask her if she made sure Jewel brushed and flossed. It doesn’t matter now, anyway.

I sit on the opposite edge of the couch, wishing I’d stayed asleep. If the kids are asleep, there’s no reason for me to be up. The few hours’ rest has made me feel off-balance and foggy-headed. Worse than when I’d been awake on the adrenaline of the sleepless.

“I don’t bite,” Mallory says, smirking at a cop show rerun. Some CSI team is standing around a corpse, frowning at it.

I notice that I’m plastered into the far corner, feet tucked up like I’m afraid of her. I shift a little to the middle.

“You hungry? I made you a plate.”

I jerk my head away from the TV in surprise. She walks out to the kitchen, and I hear the microwave beep a few times. In a couple of minutes she emerges with a steaming plate of spaghetti and sets it down on the coffee table in front of me.

“Go for it,” she says.

My sleep-deprived brain briefly entertains the notion that she’s poisoned me. This makes me chuckle before I dive in. I realize I’m starving.

“What’s funny?” she asks.

I shake my head, not daring to tell her.

I polish off the plate of spaghetti, and before I even get up, she takes it from my hand. “Here, I’ll put it away.”

She’s being too nice. Maybe cyanide really is coursing through my veins. Doesn’t that smell like almonds? Did I smell almonds?

She flops down on the couch again.

“Don’t look at me like that. Seriously, what do you think I’m gonna do?”

I’m glad she can’t see me blush at this.

“I’m going to have to tolerate you, I guess,” she says with a heavy sigh, stretching her arms over her head.

“What happened to ‘You will never raise my children’?”

She waves her hand at me. “I thought Michael would have explained by now not to take anything I say seriously. I get sort of worked up, if you hadn’t noticed. I would like to play a more active role. Maybe I can work my way up to shared custody.”

I hold my breath, not knowing how Michael would want me to answer.

“Would that be so bad?” she says, turning her smile on me. “More time for just you and Mike? Newlyweds?”

Michael has talked about her smile during one of the conversations we had early on when he was trying to explain her to me, before I told him to stop trying. He said her smile was magnetic and powerful. I thought he was full of it, just trying to rationalize his lust for a foxy coed, but I never said so.

It is a charming smile, but that’s all. She doesn’t have magic powers.

She has turned back to the TV. “I know. You don’t want to say anything. I get it.” She seizes the remote and jabs it at the TV. “God, this is boring. I’m bored. Aren’t you bored?”

I nod. Seems safe enough to agree.

“I’ll make some popcorn and put on some music. If it’s quiet, it shouldn’t wake the girls. Maybe we can talk, you know?”

I’m wary, but also pleased. I can see Michael now, smiling and relieved that he doesn’t have to worry about us in the same room anymore, in awe, in fact, that I made friends with his crazy ex.

He will be so proud of me.

For several minutes we just snack on popcorn, and then I start to feel stupid for thinking I could talk to her.

“So, how did you meet Mike?” she finally says.

“You never heard?”

She snorts. She has turned on her end of the couch to face me, sitting cross-legged. “Yeah, we’ve never much discussed his current love life.”

So I tell her the story about meeting at the med center when Jewel was sick.

She sniffles a little, wipes her eyes. I’m not sure I get it, it’s not that romantic.

Then she answers my unspoken confusion. “I should have been home to take her to the doctor.”

Normally I would snap at this, something to the effect that