Chapter Thirty-Four

Iwas being followed.

I could tell I was being followed when I looked through my rearview mirror and noticed the same incognito black sedan zipping out of Boston, gliding onto the highway, staying the same four-car gap from me no matter how many lanes I switched.

Not knowing who it was—Frank? Louisa? Devon’s Mom? The devil himself?—I decided to escape it.

Today seemed like a bad day to die and get buried in the woods.

I lane-hopped for a while, feeling sweat coating my forehead as I tried to think of a game plan. How was I getting rid of this strange car?

And then it hit me.

I popped my blinker to make a right into one of the small towns bracketing greater Boston and waited patiently in a line of cars. My stalker did the same. When the light turned green, I made a terrible (and I do mean freaking awful) traffic offense and continued straight ahead, not taking the right, and speeding into a busy intersection. Cars slammed their brakes, horns blared at me angrily, but when I looked back, I saw that the black sedan was way behind, trapped inside a sea of vehicles in a traffic jam from hell.

I drove and drove and drove some more, not sure where I’d end up.

And somehow, already knowing where I was going to go.

All at the same time.

For the first time since I’d turned eighteen, I was living with my parents again.

I couldn’t kid myself anymore. Staying in Boston at this point was a death wish. Might as well stick an I’m With Stupid sign on my forehead pointing at my brain.

Several people wanted me dead. And I just signed my soul away to the devil in stilettos.

It was time to lay low until I came up with a game plan.

My parents lived in the place where sex appeal went to die, also known as Wellesley, Massachusetts.

A few years ago, my parents announced excitedly that they’d saved up enough money to fulfill their long-time dream of becoming boring retirees, moved from Southie and bought a sage green colonial house with a matching roof, a swinging chair on the front porch, and red shutters.

Persy and I called it the Gingerbread House, but only one of us was excited to come here each Christmas and play the happy family charade.

“Oh, Belly-Belle, I’m so happy you’re with us again, even if the circumstances are less than ideal.” Mom poked her head through the backyard’s double doors, offering me an apologetic smile.

Perched on the lip of the pool they were so proud of, I dipped my feet in the water, wiggling my toes.

“Already told you, Mom, everything’s fine.”

“Nothing’s fine if you can’t afford your apartment anymore.”

She walked out to the patio carrying a bowl of watermelon peppered with fresh feta cheese and mint.

Placing it on the edge of the pool beside me, she ran her hand over the yellow Lycra of my bathing suit, her fingers halting at my swollen belly.

“I moved in because I need a change of pace, not because I can’t afford rent.” I selected a beautifully cut piece of watermelon—square and sharp angled—and popped it into my mouth. It was ice cold. “Everyone I know and their mother begged me to step away from Madame Mayhem. They think working on my feet all day is bad for the baby.”

Mom didn’t know that there were people after me.

She didn’t know about the letters.

She didn’t know I’d lived the last few weeks with Devon.

She didn’t know anything.

I did this to protect her.

Making her worry was futile, almost cruel.

And something else lurked behind my decision to share with her the bare minimum of my pregnancy circumstances. I suspected she wouldn’t understand.

Honestly, I wasn’t entirely sure I understood everything that’d happened to me recently.

“Are you sure everything’s okay?” She began untangling my golden locks from my earring, like she used to do when I was a kid. “You’ve been here for a couple days now and still haven’t told us why exactly.”

“Can’t a girl just chill with her folks?”

“I don’t remember a time when you didn’t go out at night since you were sixteen.”

Well, Mom, I did a lot to try and distract myself from my reality at that age.

But then, I was a clubber six months ago too. I’d distracted myself for fourteen years before Devon stepped into my life and forced me to stay still and take a good look at what my life had become.

I pushed another watermelon chunk between my lips, watching her black-eyed Susans across the pool, their stems like necks craning to look up at the sun, the petals glinting under the sun’s rays.

“Come with me to the farmer’s market. You’ll meet all my new bridge friends,” Mom suggested.

“Holy shit, Mom, you’re really selling this to me,” I deadpanned, hands tucked under my butt.

“Come on, Belly-Belle. I can see something’s on your mind.”

“You can?” I frowned at my toes. “How?”

“A mother can always tell.”

Was I going to know when my baby felt something once they were born without any telltale signs? Would my gut scream at me that something was wrong? Could I pick up on the vibes, like fumes from fire, before the earth beneath her feet scorched?

“Yes,” my mother said as if reading my mind. She rested her hand on my back. I wanted to fold into a fetal position and cry in her lap. The last few months caught up with me all at once, and now I was exhausted.

More than I was afraid of those who were after me, and more than I was angry at myself for taking Louisa’s deal, I missed Devon.

Missed him so much I couldn’t bring myself to turn on my phone for the past couple days and check if I had any messages from him.

I missed his gruff, elegant laugh and the way his dark blond eyebrows moved animatedly when he talked.

I missed his kisses and the crinkles around his eyes when he grinned mischievously and the way he called the guy who worked at the convenience store under his apartment the newsagent, like he was a BBC anchor and not a dudebro who sold overpriced milk and cigarettes.

In short, I missed him.

Too much to trust myself to go back to Boston.

Too much to breathe.

Mom reached and gathered me to her chest, dropping a kiss on my head. “Yes, you will know when something is eating at your child, and I hope they will tell you what it is that’s eating them so maybe you can help. As it happens, I raised two fiercely independent girls. You, more than your sister. You were always such a spitfire. You helped Persephone before I could get to her—with school, with homework, with her social life. You’ve already been a parent in some ways. You’re going to be a wonderful mother, Belly-Belle, and you are going to realize the most depressing secret of all.”

“Hmm?” I asked, nuzzling into her shirt.

“You’re only as happy as your least happy child.”

She dropped another kiss on my head.

“Confide in me, Belle.”

“I can handle it, Mom.”

She pulled away from me, holding my shoulders, her eyes boring into mine.

“Then do, honey. Don’t run from whatever it is. Face it head-on. Because whatever happens, it’s not just you who you have to think about now.”

I pressed my hand against my stomach.

Baby Whitehall kicked in response.

I got you, girl.

Twenty minutes after my mother went to the farmer’s market to meet with her bridge friends (my youth shriveled into itself just thinking about it), I picked up the empty watermelon bowl and pushed the screen door open, slipping back inside. The house was blistering hot since the air conditioner died a few days before and had yet to be repaired. There was a gaping, sewer-sized hole at the back of the house, waiting to be fixed.

The place felt strange to me still. Even though it was not chronologically new, it seemed that way. It had yet to shape itself around its occupants and was bare of memories, nostalgia, and those home scents that transported you back to your childhood.

I rinsed the bowl, thinking about what Mom had said. Dealing with my problems.

The last couple days brought me clarity.

I didn’t want a million dollars. I wanted Devon.

And I was tired of running away from whoever was after me. I needed Devon to help me with that.

Yes, I finally realized I needed help. I couldn’t do this on my own. And strangely enough, it didn’t feel too terrible admitting that to myself. Maybe I was growing up from the girl Mr. Locken had left to bleed out all those years ago.

The front door opened and shut, and the house filled with my dad’s whistles.

John Penrose could whistle any song that came out between 1967 and 2000 from start to finish. He was good at it too. When Persy and I were young, we’d play name that tune. Sometimes I let her win. But not often.

“Honeys, I’m home!”

He appeared in the kitchen, tall and broad and still kind of handsome—in a more wrinkled less defined Harrison Ford kind of way. He dropped canvas bags full of lemons on the counter next to me, grinning at me ear to ear.

“Hello, sunshine.”

He pressed a kiss to my forehead, hiked his belt up what was beginning to look like a dad bod more than a father figure belly, and swung the fridge door open, on the hunt for his evening beer. “Where’s your momma?”

“Out.” I leaned against the counter, drying my hands with a towel. I didn’t tell him where she went. To this day, I withheld information about my mother from my father, trying to make her appear more mysterious and alluring. There was little point to this exercise. She was an open book to him—always honest, straightforward, and available.

She was all the things I didn’t want to be. He never questioned her love for him.

Dad closed the fridge, popping open his Bud Light, settling against the opposite counter.

“What’s up, kiddo? How’s that baby growing?” He took a pull of his beer.

Fix it, Mom’s voice urged in my head.

Here went nothing and its best friend nada.

“You cheated on Mom.”

The words came out so mundane, so plain, I’d laugh at how easy it was to say them. The smile on my father’s face remained intact.

“’xcuse me?”

“You cheated on Mom,” I repeated, suddenly feeling my pulse everywhere. My neck, my wrists, behind my eyelids, in my toes. “Don’t try to deny it. I saw you.”

“You saw me?” Dad put his beer down on the counter, folding his arms across his chest, ankles crossed. “When and where, if I may ask? We don’t exactly hang in the same circles.”

He sounded amused more than he was worried, but there was no trace of aggression in his voice.

“In yours and Mom’s bed. A lady with dark red hair. I mean, I say a lady, but what I really mean is a skank. Back in Southie.”

And just like that, the blood drained from his face.

He looked pale. Grave. Scared.

“Emmabelle,” he breathed. “That was …”

“Fifteen years ago,” I finished for him. “Yeah.”

“How …?”

“Came home early from school and walked in on you. I didn’t tell you because I was scared. But I saw her on top of you. I heard you whisper her name. And I never forgot. So tell me, Dad, how’s Sophia doing these days?”

Sophia.

The woman I was sure I saw in supermarkets and parks and on the escalators at Target. The harlot who ruined my parents’ marriage without my mom even knowing about it. Some nights, as I’d lain awake in my bed, I thought I could murder her. Other nights I wondered what made her the way she was. What made her seek pleasure with an unavailable man.

“I …” He looked around him now, seeming lost all of a sudden, like we’d just been transported back to the room where it happened. “I don’t know. I haven’t been in touch with her in years. Years.”

He reached behind him to grab the counter and knocked his beer down on the floor. The glass bottle broke, yellow-white liquid running like a golden river between us.

“How many years?” I asked.

“Fifteen!”

“Don’t lie to me, John.”

“Ten.” He closed his eyes, swallowing hard. “I haven’t seen her in ten years.”

He’d been with her until I was twenty-one.

This wasn’t a fling. It was an affair. Of course it was. He wouldn’t have brought his fling over to his house.

“Why?” I asked.

I wanted to know what was missing in his life. Mom was gorgeous, loyal, and sweet. Persy and I were good kids. Sure, we had stuff, everyone had stuff—money issues, Mom losing her sister to cancer, those sorts of things. Life things. Things we went through together.

“Why did I cheat on your mother?” He looked perplexed.

“Yes. I want to know.”

Neither of us made a move to clean up the mess on the floor.

He rubbed the back of his neck, pushing off the counter and starting to pace back and forth. I followed him with my gaze.

“Look, it wasn’t so easy back then, okay? From the moment your momma quit her job to take care of you two and your Aunt Tilda, may she rest in peace, I wasn’t just the breadwinner—I was the sole provider of the family. And there were medical bills and a fridge to fill, mouths to feed, insurance and a mortgage to pay. Persy had ballet classes, and you had track. Things added up, and I just …” He stopped, flinging his arms helplessly in the air. “I was sinking. Going under. Deep. Your mother didn’t want to touch me. I felt too guilty to even ask. She was watching her sister disappear, little by little. I felt like an employee of the household more than the man of it. And then came Sophia.”

“I’m guessing there’s a pun there,” I muttered sarcastically.

He ignored my barb. “Sophia and I worked in the same office building. At first we took lunches together. It was innocent.”

“I’m sure.” I smiled, surprised to find out I was as bitter as I’d be if it’d happened to me. If it were Devon.

Devon is not yours. Devon is getting married to another woman, probably in the next few months. Apologize profusely and tear the check into tiny pieces or move on with your life.

“She was going through a messy divorce,” Dad explained.

“Cordial divorces are hard to come by,” I quipped. “And the fact you did it in Mom’s bed. Ballsy. There’s a pun there too, by the way.”

“Emmabelle,” he chided softly. “Believe it or not, I did it there because a part of me wanted to get caught. Give me a chance to speak.”

Begrudgingly, I pursed my lips, allowing him to go on.

“I was there for her, and she was there for me. She was a mess. I was falling apart. Throughout all this, your mother and I had drifted apart, until I could no longer remember what it felt like to be her partner, her lover. But it was complicated. I still loved your mom. I wanted to believe I’d get her back, eventually. Our love was just on hold.”

What in the ever-loving fuck was this man talking about? Love wasn’t something you could put a pin in and get back to later. It wasn’t a goddamn follow-up email you could schedule in advance.

“The timeline suggests otherwise.” I attempted a sardonic smile. Auntie Tilda died in my early teens. Dad broke up with Sophia when I was twenty.

“Life has a way of setting the pace,” he admitted. Bending to pick up the large pieces of glass from the floor, he looked at them like he wanted to stab his own neck.

“I wish I were so forgiving to myself about my actions,” I mumbled.

“I’m not forgiving to myself. I’ve hated myself for a long time. I tried to break up with Sophia numerous times after your aunt passed away. And sometimes, I even succeeded. But she always came back. And sometimes I let her in, whenever your mother and I had issues.”

“You’re a sack of shit.” The words coming out of my mouth stunned me. Not because they didn’t make guest appearances every now and then (profanity and I were close friends) but because they’d never been directed at a family member before. Family was something sacred. Until now.

“I was,” he agreed. “But finally, nine years into the affair, I managed to escape her. I quit my job. I changed the locks on our house. I told her if she got anywhere near your mother or tried to tell her, I’d make her life miserable.”

“Nice.”

He threw the glass into the trash can under the sink, poking at the rest of it with his boot.

“If you knew all this time, why didn’t you tell your mother?”

“What makes you think I didn’t?”

“She’d have killed me.” Dad popped his upper body into the pantry and returned with a mop to clean up the beer, his eyes clinging to my face the entire time. “Then left me. Not in that order.”

I let out a huff. “As if.”

“What do you mean?” He started mopping.

“Mom never would have left you. That’s why I didn’t tell her,” I bit out, my voice carried by emotions like they were the wind. Gaining altitude, becoming a storm.

The reason I didn’t tell her all these years wasn’t altruistic. It’s not because I wanted to protect her.

I was worried she’d stay, and I wouldn’t be able to look her in the eye.

That I would be so deeply disappointed in her, so upset with her decision, it would affect our relationship.

By not trusting her decision, I robbed her of the ability to make one.

“Yes, she would.” Dad stopped mopping, pressing his forehead to the tip of the mop stick. He closed his eyes. “She would have walked away. She was tempted to do it regardless of my infidelity.”

His head sloped forward, his shoulders sagging, and then … then he started crying.

Lowering himself on the floor in front of me.

His knees sank into the golden river of beer.

My dad never cried.

Not when my aunt died, or when my grandparents passed away, or even when he watched Persephone walk down the aisle, ushered by the brother of the groom, because Dad had had leg surgery and couldn’t walk.

He wasn’t a crier. We weren’t criers. Yet here he was weeping.

“I’m sorry, Belly-Belle. I’m so sorry. I’ve never been sorrier for a thing in my life. I cannot even imagine what it felt like for you to find out that way.”

“It was terrible.”

But, oddly, maybe not as terrible as seeing him like this.

I mean, a part of me still hated him for the distorted picture of partnership he’d ingrained in me, but he was also the person who took care of us.

Who bought me everything I wanted—within his ability—and helped pay off my student debt.

He was one of my investors when I opened Madame Mayhem, and he once punched a man in the face for propositioning me while we were all vacationing on the Cape.

He never locked me in dumbwaiters or was abusive or neglectful.

He fucked up, but he never intended to fuck me up.

“If it makes you feel any better, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t even function for a very long time after Sophia and I ended things. And, after a couple of years, I told your mother.”

“Wait, Mom knows?” I grabbed the hem of his plaid shirt and hoisted him up so we were at eye level. His eyes were puffy with tears, bloodshot. “But you said she’d have left you if I told her.”

“She did leave me.”

“She never told me.”

“Do you tell her everything?” He caught my gaze meaningfully, arching an eyebrow.

Fair point.

He rubbed his knuckles against his cheek. “She kicked me out of the house shortly after you graduated college. By then, you and Persy were out of the house. I think she waited until you both left because she didn’t want to traumatize you. I rented an apartment two blocks down for eight months, trying to win her back.”

“Go Mom,” I mumbled. “I hope she got some.”

“She had a two-month affair with a yoga instructor at the local YMCA. After we got back together, I got so mad just driving past the YMCA, I vowed to move us away from that entire zip code to escape that memory.”

“This is why you moved to the ’burbs?”

He nodded.

“Why’d she take you back?” I realized I was still holding his shirt, but that did not deter me from clutching harder.

“Something very inconvenient happened to her.”

“What?”

“She remembered she was in love with me, and by being away from me, she was punishing not only me but herself too.”

I let go of his shirt, staggering back.

My yearning for Devon welled inside me. Wasn’t that what I was doing? Punishing both of us because I couldn’t handle the prospect of being in love? Of putting my trust in someone else?

My parents’ relationship was far from perfect. It was littered with disloyalties, bad years, and other people.

But. It. Still. Worked.

“I hope that in time, you’ll forgive me,” Dad said. “But just in case you don’t, let me assure you, Belly-Belle—I will never forgive myself.”

I needed time to think.

“Thanks for the talk. I’m going to go ahead now and scream into my pillow for a while,” I announced, grabbing a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels from the pantry on my way up to the guestroom.

I was still wearing my canary-yellow swimsuit.

I stopped by the stairway, holding the railings for dear life as I twisted my head back to look at him. He was still standing in the same spot in the open-plan kitchen.

“One more question.” I cleared my throat.

“Yes?”

“What was so wrong with Sophia?” I bit out. “Why was she so fucked up?”

“She couldn’t have any children,” he said gravely. “That was what was wrong with her. That’s why her husband left her. He married another woman three months later and went and fathered three sons.”

Poor Sophia gave up on love too.

And in the end, she lost.

Maybe that’s what losing was, giving up on love.