Erin shut out the threats and bad names. She’d grown up with a mom who suffered from severe mood swings, so Erin had plenty of experience withstanding tirades. The trick was to stay level, reasonable and get out of the conversation as fast as possible. Except what if this woman wasn’t a stalker at all? She did have Patrick’s phone.
Her stomach dropped to her toes as she grappled to make sense of this.
“Look, you may have picked up the wrong phone somewhere. My boyfriend is single?—”
“Single?” A harsh laugh punctuated the word. “Is thatwhat Pat told you? He haskids—two sons, eight and six years old—you slut. I’m hauling them to baseball games and birthday parties on my own every weekend so he can jet around the country as if he never made vows tome? As if a fancy diamond necklace would make me forget he’s a cheating bastard who can’t stay home with his family?”
The jewelry store.
He hadn’t been buying Erin a ring. He’d been buying a gift for his wife. Something shifted inside her. Her knees wobbled and she slapped one hand on the window for support.
This woman did not have the wrong phone. They were not talking about different men.
The arguing in the background of the call became more heated. Still muffled, but there was a noticeable increase in fervency and volume. Every now and then, she could hear the man’s voice more clearly. Patrick’s voice.
Erin noted it in a marginal way, her main focus on the fact that her whole sense of self had just shattered into a million pieces. The fragments lay at her feet on the industrial gray carpet of the Northern Kentucky airport.
So much for traditional values.
“You want me to put the kids on the phone so you’ll believe me?” the furious woman demanded suddenly. “Would you like to hear what Pat’s children think of the woman destroying our lives?—”
Erin’s hands shook as she stabbed the disconnect button and missed. She pressed two more times before her finger made contact with the button and ended the call.
The sudden quiet hum of normal conversations around her felt jarring. Her ears still rang from the accusations and anger. When her phone rang again, her fingerswere steadier as she turned the device off. She would never use that phone or that number again.
“Miss?” an older gentleman approached her, a kindly smile on his weathered face, a newspaper tucked under one arm of his corduroy jacket. “Don’t forget your bag.”
He pointed to her suitcase in the waiting area and she vaguely recalled he’d been seated near her earlier. They’d talked about the weather and the local baseball team. It seemed like a million years ago.
“Thank you.” She nodded. Swallowed. Forced herself to put one foot in front of the other, her whole body numb with shock. “I’ll go get it.”
Patrick wasmarried. The man she thought she loved hadchildren.
Grabbing the smooth tortoiseshell handle of the suitcase—a suitcase she’d packed so carefully and hopefully—Erin strode up the concourse and away from the flight that would have taken her home. Away from the Finley family, who expected her to show up with Mr. Right just in time for dinner.
She should be embarrassed about being so stupid and blind that she hadn’t known the love of her life had been lying to her every second they’d been together. He’d lied in the worst and most clichéd manner possible. He was married. She should feel ashamed to be an unknowing “other woman” in an era where most of her friends performed Google searches on any guy they dated.
But Erin wasn’t ready to acknowledge any of those things just yet because most of all, she felt deeply sorry that she’d wounded an unsuspecting woman—a mother, no less—whose world must be falling apart faster and harder than Erin’s today.
Focusing on the pain she’d inflictedhelped keep some of her own fury at bay—at least until she arrived at her car. She dropped her bag in the trunk, then slid into the driver’s seat. Once the doors were safely locked and the windows rolled up, she succumbed to the urge to pound her fist on the steering wheel and scream. She was done with Patrick. Done with men who had complicated lives and too many secrets. Life at high speed didn’t suit her. Time to slow down. Regroup. And hope the day would come when she didn’t feel the need to scrub her skin with disinfectant to get rid of the memory of Patrick’s touch.
She needed to pack her rental place and get far away from the adulterous ass who’d done nothing but lie to her. Any other day it might have made her smile to think that what she really needed was to get back to Heartache.
Chapter One
Six months later
Erin handed hersister an airline ticket, her phone charger and her suitcase.
“I’ve got this, Heather. Go have fun.” She nodded toward the door of their jointly owned boutique, Last Chance Vintage, figuring her organized younger sister would never get under way without a hard shove and possibly a crowbar. “You’ve been babysitting me too long. Time to let me do my own thing.”
Erin and Heather were expanding the tiny shop on Heartache’s main thoroughfare, taking over an ancient cobbler’s storefront to make way for the new design. They’d done a lot of the labor themselves to save money, their DIY skills reasonably strong since their father had owned a construction business and their older brother still ran the family’s building-supply store. Erin had finished sanding the hardwood floors in the new space two days ago. Even now, the pungent scent of a fresh coat of stain permeated the heavy plastic divider that sectioned off the workspace behind the front counter. Heather had tried to maskthe scent with lavender chips in an electric warmer, but so far, the wood stain was winning out.
“Babysitting?” Heather dropped the bright teal suitcase on the rag rug, beside a display of necklaces artfully draped on the spokes of an old bicycle wheel. “As if. Last Chance is my store, too, you know. I can’t help if it I want to oversee the redesign.”
The freckles across Heather’s nose aligned when she scrunched her face into a mad expression, a quirky characteristic no one but a sibling would notice. Heather and Erin had looked a lot alike growing up, so the freckle pattern was familiar from Erin’s own reflection in the mirror. Her hair had been as red as Heather’s once upon a time, too, but Erin had been dying it different colors since she was old enough to buy Clairol at the local drugstore without Mrs. Bartlett threatening to tell her mother.
Erin was almost done with the Goth-girl black on her lopped-off curls, knowing she looked way too much like a caricature of a pissed-off woman. But the inky shade sure did suit her mood lately. The store expansion had been her brainchild, prompted by a sudden desire to wield a sledgehammer.
