16. Ollie

CHAPTER 16

Ollie

I drove up to the house I’d once lived in with my family and had to fight back the tears that clouded my vision. There was a literal yard sale going on. The masses had clambered to come pick apart our lives and haul off little pieces of what I’d cracked and torn apart.

“You going to help or just sit in your car all day?” I glanced up to see my wife’s brother staring down through the window at me.

I turned the car off, opened the door, and got out. “It’s hard to see everything laid out like this,” I admitted.

Steve continued to stare at me and then offered a slight shrug of one shoulder. “This is what happens when you throw everything away for what you think might be a better life. You get to watch as the shit you left behind is scattered to the wind.” He glanced around. “Or in this case, sold off to scavengers ready to snap up the scraps of the life you didn’t want.”

“I’m here. Let’s get this done.” I had to bite my tongue to keep from snapping at my brother-in-law. He wasn’t wrong. This was the culmination of the shitshow I’d put into play when I’d stupidly agreed to meet up with Jia that night.

“Is she here?”

I watched as Steve’s head swiveled back and forth. “She meant it when she said she never wanted to see the house again or her cell phone.”

That last bit was a dig, because when I tried to return her phone, Steve refused to take it. “She never wanted to see it again.” That was what he’d told me then too. Unfortunately, he had followed that up with “And she doesn’t want you to have her new number either.”

It had been three weeks since Steph had been taken to the hospital and I had not heard her voice or seen her since. The tiny glimpse I’d gotten of her breaking down in the hospital had been the very last time I’d laid eyes on my wife.

“Are you sure she doesn’t want to keep any of this furniture?” I asked as my eyes tracked the strangers who had come out to pick through my life. “How did you even get the community to allow this?”

“They felt bad for my sister and wanted to help her out after everything she’d been through.” Steve turned his back on me. “Seems your little speech about my sister’s innocence and what everyone had put her through finally sank in for people. Then again, it might have something to do with the very public legal battle the school board is fighting for her wrongful termination.”

When Steve moved to walk away from me, I reached out to grab his arm. “I haven’t seen her in weeks.”

“She’s doing just fine.”

“Damnit, my wife is pregnant. She’s five months along now and I don’t even know what she looks like with my baby in her belly.”

Steve turned around in a flash and stared me down with a cold, lethal gaze that would have put me six feet in the ground if he had the power to do so. “It’s your own damn fault! You haven’t seen her because she got to see what you really thought of her. She had that shit shoved in her face. Honest to fucking God, she wishes that baby of hers was fathered by anyone else but you. My sister is still coming to terms with the fact that she will be stuck with you in her life because of that baby for at least the next eighteen years. Since you are the one who caused this mess, you will give her the time she needs to come to grips with that.”

Steve stomped off before I could say a word. He was right, she deserved to have her time, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t painful for me to know exactly what I was missing out on.

“That was harsh.” I turned to see Steve’s friend – my wife’s lawyer – standing beside me. “Deserved, though.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Me? I’m here to make sure that certain unsavory types don’t try to abscond with any of the merchandise or the money from sales.”

I rolled my eyes. “I bet your thrilled to fucking death with this outcome.”

Hutch shook his head. “No, man. I’m really not. I was there the day we found Steph on that floor.” He pointed toward the house. “I would never, in a million years, wish that kind of pain on anyone. Not even my worst enemy. Not even you.”

Hutch walked off as I stood there and let his words sink in. If I could bury myself in that hole my brother-in-law wanted to dig for me, I would. Unfortunately, I didn’t just have an angry, heartbroken wife to think about. I had a son and another child on the way who needed a father.

Despite feeling as though I needed to go drown myself in a shallow, muddy puddle, I stuck it out at the house all day to make sure anything that wasn’t purchased could be hauled away. Steph had managed the impossible, and maybe it was the one thing helped out by our very public situation, because she had been able to sell the house only two weeks into it being listed on the market.

I couldn’t believe our family home would be someone else’s. It felt wrong to be there without Steph and Denmark, but it also didn’t feel like our home anymore. It stopped feeling that way the day I found our family photos trashed all over the place. It really no longer felt that way after all of Steph’s things disappeared from the house. Then, slowly, my son’s things began to disappear too.

She had instructed Steve to leave things for my boy behind so that I would have them, but when I walked in on him boxing shit up, I told him to take it all to wherever Steph was staying. I thought she was with her brother, but I didn’t think he had the space in his condo for all their things.

I didn’t bother asking for details then because I knew he wouldn’t offer up any hint into his sister’s life as she moved on without me. I couldn’t fathom her moving on without me – not completely. She was more than half way through her pregnancy already, and I’d only seen her a few times since I found out. My hands ached to touch her growing belly, to feel him or her kick. I wanted to know if the baby was a girl or a boy. Did she know and just didn’t tell me? There were so many things I missed out on already and I knew that it was my own damn fault, but that didn’t stop my heart from aching every time I wondered if she had cravings and who delivered things to her in the middle of the night.

I thought about the first three months of her pregnancy, when we were still together, but I was never home. Did she get sick in the mornings? How did she find out she was pregnant? What in the hell had I been thinking? I should have just come clean immediately about the one-night stand with Jia, but there was the video and I wasn’t sure when my vile ex had started to record us.

It wasn’t even the sex I’d been worried about. It had been the things that were said before that, the very things that sent my wife into a tailspin when Jia sent her that video. That was why I’d gone along with the blackmail for months, why I’d spent so much time away from my family. It was because I knew exactly what I’d said, and why. I agreed with Jia that night and fed into her bullshit because I knew it would be easier. She didn’t deserve to know that my feelings for my wife had grown to something genuine or that I was sick to my stomach as I spoke about her, and the plan I originally had to keep her at arm’s length.

“Excuse me, is this for sale?” I was drawn out of my thoughts and glanced down at the woman who had spoken to me.

She held a box that I’d never noticed in our house before. I took it from her and looked inside to find all sorts of trinkets and what looked like receipts or something. I shook my head and wandered over to my Land Rover and opened the back door. There, I took a little time to go over each thing inside the box. These were Steph’s memories. Each item, every receipt or note, had been from a date we went on. There were things from family outings, and a few keepsakes that had been given as gifts over the years we had known one another.

Each one tugged at my heart because it was something I might have just tossed aside at the time, but Steph boxed it all away as if it was a sacred memory.

I glanced back up toward the mostly-empty shell of a house that remained. The box had been left there. She might have forgotten about it, but I wouldn’t. One day, I’d have to remind her about who we were as a family. I’d have to prove to her that my feelings were real.