My eyes flashed open and I glanced at my friend. She looked like she'd seen a ghost. Her face was white as a sheet. When I looked past her, I could see a man and woman walking toward us on the sidewalk. “Who is it?” I said in a low voice. Both of our windows were down. I didn’t want him to hear me.
“My ex,” she hissed without ever moving her eyes from where they were fixed ahead of her, not looking at her ex and his new woman or at me, just focused on trying to ignore the whole situation. “He left me forher.”
It hit me. That was Roger? I’d seen pictures, yeah, but the guy had aged more than I imagined. I tried to picture him from their vacation photos over the years, and guessed I could see the resemblance.
“Beth?” The man, admittedly handsome if one liked adad-bod, bent over and peered into the car. His blue eyes twinkled as though he found something altogether too funny, and he flashed a car salesman smile at her. “Is that you?”
“Yeah.” Beth’s hands fluttered in her lap. “It’s me.” Her voice was high but quiet, as though she was struggling to get the words out as she stared down at her hands without ever making eye contact with him.
I leaned over, making sure to give him my best unimpressed look, and peered up at the woman. Theotherwoman.
Holy shit. She looked like a younger version of Beth, which was insulting in more ways than I could count.
“Of all the bullshit!” I hissed.
No. Absolutely not.
Throwing open my car door, I lurched out of the car and slammed it shut. Fury burned through my veins like lava. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, asshole!”
Her ex, Roger, straightened from where he'd still been leaning over Beth and looked at me all startled and hoity-toity. “Excuse me. Who the hell are you?”
A pang of guilt swept through me that we'd never really met. Sure, I'd seen photos, but they’d gotten together shortly after Deva’s wedding twenty years ago, so I hadn’t met him when I’d come into town for the event. And Rick hadn’t wanted to go back after that, so we hadn’t. Something I regretted with every fiber of my being. He'd controlled so much of my life without me even realizing it. I wasn't going to let this jerkwad make Beth feel bad about herself the way Rick did to me.
I stalked around the hood of the car until I was less than a couple feet from the two of them. “You heard me. You don’t get to speak to her! You cheated, with this…” I waved my hands at the other woman. “Creepy version of Beth. Baby version of Beth. Is that the problem? You wanted Beth but you like ‘em young?”
His face turned dark red and a fury that made me think he may be hiding an even darker side passed through his eyes. “Now hold on—”
“No,youhold on! Karma is going to get you. And you!” I pointed first at her ex then at the woman, girl, whatever. "I'd bet money you knew he was in a long-term, committed relationship, with a woman he’d been promising to marry for almost twenty years, when you started fooling around, didn't you? Didn't you? But you didn't give a crap about hispartnerand how she felt. You just wanted to get yours. Well, I've got news for you little girl: he's going to dump you faster than a hot potato when he gets bored. Look forward to that."
“No, he’s not, because I’m the woman he always needed. And I don’t look like her,” the woman suddenly sneered, as if the dummy had just now realized we were talking about her.
But she really did. “Yeah, you do. The same hair, the same eyes. Holy crap. Tiffany?”
Hell. Beth’s parents had accidentally gotten pregnant again when Beth was seventeen. Tiffany had been a toddler when I’d left. But there was no way.No wayher sister could actually…
She tilted her head up, and I realized that she had a pig-shaped nose that she’d tried to sculpt with a pound of makeup to look more like Beth’s. “Yeah? So what?”
It felt like the floor dropped out from under me. I knew he’d been cheating on her with someone younger, but why hadn’t Beth told me? I knew the answer immediately. Because it would’ve killed her to even say the words aloud. Husbands cheating happened all too often, but leaving their wife for her younger sister? Disgusting.
“Beth practically raised you,” I said in disbelief.
It was one of the reasons Beth had decided to go to the local community college for her business degree instead of away with me. But then she’d had to drop out after her associate’s degree, because her parents started having serious health issues and needed her to help. Sometimes when we talked late at night, she’d sound so wistful when I talked about college. I’d try to change the topic, but she said she loved to live through me, since we’d both been business majors.
“I didn’t need her to raise me,” the woman said, tossing her blonde hair.
“Yeah, you did.” A cold feeling rushed through me. “And it’s heartbreaking that you could do this to her. But I want you to know something: Beth doesn’t need you, because we’re her family now.”
I was shaking, and that cold feeling inside of me kept growing. A person needed to have a frozen heart to steal a man from her own sister. Not that he was some prize to steal. But if Tiffany wasn’t a trash human being, she would’ve helped Beth realize that Roger was a bad guy, rather than take him for herself.
“You--” I struggled for the words to express just how angry I was at them.
“Emma,” Beth interrupted in an amused voice as she got out of the car. Her door slammed shut behind her as she came up to me and quietly said, “You’re glowing.”
I looked down at myself to find I was, indeed, glowing. Like a lightning bug. My skin was luminous and not in the way all those night eye creams talked about either.
When I glanced back up, Beth’s ex and his child-girlfriend were hurrying down the street, him with his arm around her protectively. “She needs your protection because she’s done one of the worst things a woman can do to another woman!” I screamed after them.
Beth blew out a laugh, bending over at the waist and hee-hawing a deep gut laugh. At one point, I swear she squeaked like a bike horn. “Emma,” she wheezed. “That was amazing! What did you do to them?”
