63. Renee

It’s been three days. At least twenty or thirty times since the night of the fight, I’ve been about to cave, to go over and apologize—but then, like the pain in the ass she is, my mother calls and I remember why I shouldn’t be in a hurry to make up with him.

He doesn’t get it.

He never will.

He has a mom and a sister who love him. He doesn’t know what it’s like to be raised in a pit of vipers. He doesn’t know how it feels to have their poison seep inside of you with every breath until it’s killing you from the inside out.

He doesn’t know you can drown in venom.

But I’ll drown in my own tears if I don’t get out of the apartment. So when Danni asks what I’m doing for lunch, I reluctantly agree to join her and Michelle at a nearby bistro.

Danni takes one look at me when I walk in and frowns. “Uh-oh. Trouble in paradise?”

I drape my purse over the back of my chair and collapse into the seat. I keep from crying, but mostly just because I’ve drained my full tank of tears in the last few days. “Yeah. Something like that.”

“How long has it been?” Michelle asks.

“A few days.”

“Not talking at all?” Danni slides a martini over to me and leans closer so I can hear her talk. The place is packed and busy and loud. “How do you manage that if you’re living next door to him?”

“We don’t have the same elevator schedule, I guess.” Or maybe I’ve been very careful to make sure I don’t have the schedule as him.

It could be a coincidence.

(It isn’t.)

“I won’t press you for details if you don’t wanna share,” warns Danni. “But maybe if you just talk to him…?”

“He thinks my problems are his problems. But his life is none of my business.” I give them a quick, bare bones rundown of what happened.

“So long story short, he answered your phone.” Danni cocks an eyebrow.

“Yeah. While I was in the shower.”

“Without him?”

“A waiter spilled drinks on me.”

They exchange a look. “Do we need to call Legal? Did Weston kill the poor guy?”

I can’t help but chuckle miserably. “No. I just wanted to shower the mess off. So I left him on the sofa and he answered my phone by accident. It was my mother.” There’s wide-eyed confusion at the table, so I explain. “My mother and I are… estranged. I’m actually estranged from my entire family.”

“Oh.”

“And she tried to enlist Weston’s help to bring you all back together?” Danni is being sympathetic, but they still aren’t getting it. How could they? Same as Weston—they don’t know what it’s like because they haven’t lived it.

“Not exactly, but they had a… a conversation.”

“Did they say mean shit about you?” Danni shakes her head. “I hate when guys do that.”

“No. Nothing mean.”

“She tell him stories about your childhood? The embarrassing poop in the bathtub one?” Michelle gives me the sympathy nod. “My mom did that to me when I started dating this guy in high school.”

“No. No embarrassing stories. No mean talk. They just talked until I walked in.” I can see the disbelief in their eyes and I’m increasingly aware of how ridiculous I sound. “Look, he shouldn’t have answered my phone. Things with my family are bad, and I’d just… I’d prefer if they stayed out of sight, out of mind. Is that so much to ask?” I take a huge glug of the martini and start shoveling in the chili cheese fries that Michelle ordered as an appetizer. “I mean, I would never answer his phone. Even if the screen said Satan’s Mistress and she’d called ten times in twenty minutes.”

“‘Satan’s Mistress’?” Danni asks at the same time Michelle raises her eyebrows and asks, “Persistent, isn’t she?”

“I don’t call it persistence; I call it stalking. My mom isn’t a good person, and I don’t need him trying to butt into what is a very personal family matter.”

“Absolutely. Of course not.”

We change the subject—or rather, they do. I scarf down the fries while I tune in and out of the conversation. On the way to my post-lunch gynecological appointment, I can’t stop thinking about all of this. It can’t be a coincidence, after all this time of my parents not bothering me, that as soon as I meet Weston and a single photo of me ends up in a tabloid, my father has a sudden interest in hockey and shows up at the children’s hospital charity event and my mom doubles down on harassing me.

I’m going to have to figure out a way to keep them away from him and to keep him from finding out that my parents are dirty money.

I don’t quite know yet how I’m going to manage that. But when it comes to my family, I’m more determined than ever to make sure he isn’t touched by their evil.

As mad as I am at Weston, he deserves better than that.

When I get to the gyno, the whole place is awash in chaos.

From what I can make out of the infuriated patients and the frantic front desk staff running around like chickens with their heads cut off, the technology system has taken a crap. Either that or the sky is falling. Maybe both.

I manage to finagle my way into an exam room via a byzantine system of paper, pen, and clipboards being passed around from hand to hand. Once I’m situated in the back, things calm down a little bit. The silence in here is weird after the mayhem in the waiting room.

A nurse bustles in, draws blood, and disappears again without communicating in anything more vocal than a grunt. Again, I’m not worried—today is just a routine visit. A check-up for my birth control because, since I’ve been taking it, my cycle has been haywire.

The first month, I had three periods. This month, I’ve had none.

The door swings open and again and the doctor comes in. Dr. Hayes is either a medical prodigy or has the best skin on the planet, because she doesn’t look a day over twenty-one.

“So you think that your birth control is causing some disruption in your cycles?” she asks. I nod and she hums. “I’ve seen that happen. Could be a fluke reaction.” She pulls a prescription pad from the pocket of her pink scrubs. “We’re going to run some blood tests, check your iron, and make sure you’re not pregnant before we put another chemical on top of the last. There are any number of reasons that a birth control pill will make you feel a little wonky.”

“Sounds good.”

“We’ll give you a call in a couple days and I’ll prescribe you a different set of pills based on the result. We have a lot of options, so don’t get discouraged.”

“Should I keep taking what I have now? I still have a month left. And if they’re not hurting anything, I wouldn’t want to quit taking them.”

I don’t add, Just in case I have a reason to need to be back on them. Say, for example, that I might decide to talk my neighbor into resuming our more-than-friends-with-benefits arrangement.

Dr. Hayes shakes her head firmly. “Definitely discontinue. If you’re sexually active, you’ll need to use condoms up until and also one month after we get the new pills into your system.” She stands and shuts my file folder closed.

“Roger that.”

“Go ahead and get dressed and let’s meet back here in a couple months just to check in on how things are going. If you have any problems or issues before then, obviously give us a call and we’ll get you in for a chat.”

I thank her and she leaves briskly. I redress with a relieved sigh, then head home.

It’s weird how easy it’s become to call it “home,” actually. Now, thinking about living somewhere else is the weird part. I’ve spent the last couple of days doing exactly that, playing Zillow Detective, but it always leaves me with a nervous, jittery feeling in my gut.

It’s not that I don’t love Sutton’s place or that she would ever ask me to leave, but she will be back soon and I don’t want to cramp her style. Not that she’d ever tell me even if I was.

Also, Zillow Detective has been going kinda poorly. Most of the options are crack houses or crack-house-adjacent. The ones that aren’t are about three hours’ worth of 405 traffic away.

So, I’m saving every dollar I make until I can snag something suitable. I’ve given up buying my morning caramel latte and my designer perfume. No more delivery food apps; I can hike my happy ass down the street and pick up dinners myself.

I’m putting the next chapter of my life on layaway, one penny at a time. Soon, I’ll have enough to move on.

Until then, though, I’m going to make the best of living with the glitz and the glam and the grump next door.

I text Sutton as I ride the elevator up. Doc prescribing new BC pills so no surprise babies pop up. Everything else is normal.

She doesn’t answer right away, which usually just means she’s deep in a REM cycle. I’m not worried; she’ll text back when she has time. I exit the elevator and unlock the apartment door with the electric keypad.

As soon as it closes behind me, though, the power goes out, plunging me into total and complete darkness.