16. Cecile

CECILE

Idon’t understand why we can’t find this girl. I’ve staked out her family’s house more than once, been by her job countless times, and there’s no sign of her. It’s like she made herself disappear completely off the face of the earth just to be vindictive.

I even tried hiring someone, but he just took my money and disappeared. I’m so desperate I even contemplated taking out a police report because my poor son is suffering, but they weren’t much help when I asked questions about how to go about doing something like that. Apparently, it was perfectly legal for an adult to pick up stakes and leave to hell and back if they wanted to.

I can’t stand seeing my boy living like this like he was halfway to the grave every single day.

Ever since that day a few months ago when we had that blowout, he’s been getting worse. He took a leave of absence from his job and has been holed up in his house ever since, drinking and pigging out on fast food.

The last time I saw him, I couldn’t hardly recognize him; how could a body gain that much weight in just a matter of months? It’s not possible. Not only that, but he smelt foul and rancid, and his house was filthy. It took me three days to clean up the mess, and that scent still lingered.

At least I was able to get him to let Deidre and the baby back in the house with him, but now she’s threatening to take off for parts unknown with the baby if he doesn’t get his act together.

I wished I’d have let her stay here where she was; at least that way, I’d get to see my grandson, but I thought if Dan gave in and let her come back, then whatever argument they’d had couldn’t be all that bad and he’d give in at some point to getting married.

Instead, he’s been ignoring her, but at least he takes good care of his son when he’s not passed out drunk on the couch. Apparently, he’d burnt their bed by the time she moved back in, and I had to go pick out one for them, but he still refused to sleep in it with her.

None of this is turning out the way I imagined, and it’s all that Amanda’s fault. I’ll never understand how anyone could be that selfish. She claims to have loved my boy, and yet she left him without a backward glance.

Not only that, but he’s also broke and won’t go to work, and if this keeps up, he’ll lose everything he’d worked for. I didn’t know until after the divorce that she was the one who kept their lives running as smoothly as they did.

Now people are whispering about how he’d fallen apart without her and how she was the best thing to happen to him and our family. Everyone pretty much put two and two together and figured out that Deidre and the baby were the reason for the divorce, something I was trying to avoid.

My plan was to eventually get Deidre to give up her rights, and that way, we could claim that she was a surrogate because Amanda couldn’t have children. But now that’s all out the window, and my son is being made to feel the pain and humiliation of having cheated on his wife with someone that everyone seems to think isn’t worth the ground Amanda spits on.

It’s driving me crazy that because of that stuck-up bitch my family is suffering. My husband, once he found out the truth about the divorce and my part in it, had the nerve to side with Amanda and call me names. How he could side with her against his own son still baffles me.

Then again, I always knew he liked her; that’s why I never did. He thought she was oh so smart and was always singing her praises while looking down on our own kids. He used to claim that she’d be good for Dan, but look at what had happened.

She’d up and left him when he needed her most. I didn’t expect much better from my husband anyway; of course, he’d like her; she was young and pretty and always with that stupid smile on her face. I’ll never understand what the men in my family saw in that bitch, anyway. Even my daughters, when they used to come around, seemed to like her more than me.

I pulled up across from her family’s house and sat and watched for any sign of movement. I spend my days and nights running between here and her job. There’s nothing on her social media, and the rest of her family has my family blocked and has taken their pages private as well, so there’s no way to get any useful information.

I just want to see her once, talk some sense into her, and make her come back home where she belongs. Now that I’ve seen certain things, I don’t think I want that Deidre person raising my precious grandson. I do have to admit that of the two of them, Amanda would be the better choice. I bet her mother was the one who had talked her into leaving my boy. Amanda always used to listen to my advice; that was the only reason I could stomach her because she knew how to mind her elders and stay in her place.

I used to comfort myself each time she pissed me off with the fact that she was going to have to take care of me when I got old. My daughters had already said they weren’t going to do it; I can’t even get them to give me a glass of water ever since they started that therapy shit and decided I was the devil.

But I knew my son wouldn’t desert me, that he would always take care of me and his father when the time came. Now, he was the one who needed help, and I felt so helpless.

* * *

THUNDER

* * *

I feltthe first rays of the early sunlight across my face and squinted myself awake. My woman likes to sleep with the curtains opened to get a view of the mountains first thing as soon as she wakes up. For someone who’d given me so much shit, she’d fit in here perfectly.

She and Joy are like two peas in a pod to the point she even got my lazy ass sister to work at her bakery on the weekends. That little girl loves those damn cupcakes and cookies. But I now realize she’d been hungry for female companionship, and I hadn’t even noticed.

Amanda stepped into the role without question, and now more often than not, I have to pry my woman away from my sister, who seems to think I brought her home to be her play date or some shit.

I had Amanda’s parents and her siblings over to the house a couple of weeks ago after talking to them on the phone. They were good people, but I figured I could put their minds more at ease if they saw how she was living.

When I met her parents, especially her dad, for the first few seconds, I felt like that misfit from my youth, but it didn’t last long. He told me what he would do to me if I hurt his daughter, and since I agreed with him, I told him he’d have the right, but he’d never get the chance.

I guess after a couple of times coming to the house, they started to relax when they realized that she was the one running shit in my little kingdom. Fuck is she bossy and has a bagful of insecurities.

I understand where that shit is coming from, though, so I let her have her way. I turned location on on my phone and added some apps to hers so she knows where I am at all times. There’s no time she calls me, no matter what I’m doing, that she can’t reach me.

I have her shit on lock, only she doesn’t know. I still take her to work in the morning even though I could get my boys to do it, but since she needs to run errands every once in a while during the day, I got her a vehicle for her catering shit, a damn tank, or at least that’s what my boys call it.

That way, the truck stays there, and I get to pick her up and drop her off because that’s what I’m most comfortable with. She bitched and moaned about being an adult, argued that she had been opening the bakery for weeks before we got together, and nothing ever happened.

That shit went in one ear and out the other, which seemed to give her the impression that I was caving into her bullshit. She knew the answer to that the next morning when I drove her ass to work like usual.

I know she bitched to her girls about me because that asshole Garston laughed at my ass the next time I beat him on the golf course. Apparently, I’m overprotective and paranoid. Whatever. His wife has a personal driver running her ass around. I’m sure we’ll get there one day, but for now, I prefer to do that shit myself.

I don’t know why; nothing is off-kilter here as far as I can see, but something in my gut won’t rest. Maybe it’s because she has nightmares about that shit, and when she told me the whole story from her side, I can see why.

I’ve been tempted, so tempted to hunt down her asshole ex and put my foot up his ass, but when you think about it, I should be thanking him for being such a fucking skell. Had he been the perfect guy, she wouldn’t be here in my bed with me right now, and that would be the real nightmare.

The last few months have been amazing, better even than my wildest imagination. I always knew deep down that if I should win this woman that it would be life’s way of making up for all the shit I suffered as a kid who didn’t do shit to deserve it.

Now I know that I would endure it all again if I knew that she was mine at the end of it. For someone like me who came from where I did, I would never imagine that this perfect gem could ever be mine.

All the money I have can’t wipe away the stigma of my birth, so I’m thankful every day that she belongs to me. So there are times, like now, when I watch her sleep and try to remember what my life was like before her because some days it’s hard to remember a time before her.

She’s brought light to all the dark corners of my soul, and every day, there’s something new about her that just rocks me off my feet. She’s the real deal, everything my investigators had reported and so much more. Her heart, how could that asshole hurt her the way he did?

I look at her and can’t imagine not wanting the best of everything for her. That alone makes me want to end his existence; the things he had done to her shouldn’t be done to a damn dog. If she knew what I was thinking, though, I’m sure she’d tell me to let it be, but there are days, moments, when I replay her story in my head, and my manhood begs me to do something.

She scrunched up her nose when the sunlight finally reached her side of the bed, and before she could come fully awake, I was on her, in her. Our morning tussles are the best. Especially if I’d had her the night before and she was still wet and dewy with my seed.

She always gives me this little smile with her eyes closed and wraps her legs and arms around me, locking me down just the way I like. I marked her for the day, came, and rolled over to go about my day when a wave of nausea hit me out of nowhere. This is the third morning in a row. I think I need to go see my guy.