“Look, Kitty, I don’t want to fight.”
I give him a slow blink. Opening my mouth at this point will serve absolutely no purpose.
“I just need you to understand. Life’s…expensive. Kids, pregnancy, I mean, Lily’s going crazy, Kitty. She’s exhausted and hungry and she just yells and then there’s all the shit we’ve got to buy. You’ve got no idea how it feels to?—”
“I’mma stop you there right now. Back up and go away, Clark. Go.”
A car pulls into the lot. A pickup.
“No. No, this restaurant is half mine. The house! The house is half mine. It belongs to my baby. I put in years at the?—”
“Everything okay, Kit?” Jake strolls up, somehow nonchalant and one hundred percent present at the same time. He knows exactly how I feel in this moment. He sees the door cracked, sees the man leaning over me, pointing with that index finger like it’s one of his reproduction medieval swords. God, what a prick. What a stupid fucking prick.
“It’s fine. Clark’s leaving.”
“Leaving? No. No, this is a public place. This is my business, too. This is?—”
“Why don’t you sell the Tesla, Clark? Huh? Sell that.”
“No. No! We need the Tesla. Lily likes to?—”
“Excuse me.” Jake’s voice is so low, the timbre, usually rich and warm, somehow hollow right now, metallic. “This your ex?”
I nod.
Jake looks at him, nodding himself, slowly, like he gets exactly what’s going on.
Not that he can, really. I mean, Clark, the medievalist, whose trips to Europe I financed for years, is just trying to steal another penny from me, but what nobody realizes is that I’d give it to him if it meant I’d never have to see him again. Never have to run into pretty, young Lily at the coffee shop.
I’ve stopped going to the coffee shop now. She’s hugely pregnant, living with the man I thought was my life, my future. I hope never to see her again.
“Let me through,” Jake says.
Clark has to obey. Once he’s in, Jake locks the door. We’re walking to the bar when Clark screams that I’ll be hearing from his lawyer.
“He harassing you?”
I shake my head and then change my mind, because the way I feel, scared out of my wits, is really close to how I’d feel if that were the case.
“He wants half the restaurant.”
“Seriously?” Jake turns to stare out at where Clark’s taking off in his ridiculously expensive car. “What a prick.”
“He is. He is a prick. He wants half the house, too. After everything I financed. He has nothing to do with this place. Nothing.”
Jake stares outside again, looking thoughtful.
I sink onto a bar stool, fold my arms onto the bar, and wonder when this part of my life can be over. “Can we, like, skip forward six months?” I ask. “Or, I don’t know, a year? Can I be officially divorced and, just forget about Clark and his little Lily and his fucking out of wedlock child?”
He doesn’t reply, though I can feel him still standing there.
Slowly, I raise my head.
“Out of wedlock?”
I grimace. “He’s a medievalist.”
“A medievalist?”
