21
JULES
“Dad called. He’ll be in town next week…” Carol was talking, but the words were floating past me. I sat on a kitchen stool, elbow on the counter, fork frozen mid-air over a plate I barely touched. My brain? Fully checked out.
“Okay…” It was the best I could manage.
“Okay?” Her voice sharpened a little. I think she was doing dishes. Until she wasn’t. The water stopped. “Hey.” She waved her hand in front of my face, snapping me back into my body. I blinked twice, trying to reconnect what my eyes were seeing with what my brain could process.
“What?” I asked, sharper than I meant. Lack of sleep will do that to you. A solid night’s rest hadn’t been a part of my life for more than eight years, but the last few weeks were especially brutal. Not that I was about to let myself wonder why.
“I said Dad is coming.” She repeated.
“Oh, fuck. When?” I said, and she looked at me. That look that said:Bitch, really?I blinked back at her, genuinely lost.
“Next week.” She said slowly.
“Next week?” I dropped my fork onto the barely touched plate and grabbed my phone. Opened my calendar. Shit. Busy week at work. There was no chance I could pull off a last-minute ticket to Florida and fake a convention. “I can’t meet him. I’ve got a full week at work.”
Carol shook her head, disappointed. No surprises there. I didn’t flinch. We had the same parents—technically—but not really. She got the financially stable, mature version of Mom and Dad who loved to spoil their little baby. I got the emotionally immature mom who parentified me starting at age six, and a father who was mostly a ghost with a job. And at the end, I was the one who managed Mom’s appointments, therapies, meds… Yeah, not exactly the same childhood.
“Maybe you could stop being such a child and talk to your father…”
Oof. Rude. Fair. But still stung.
“No thanks,” I said calmly. “I didn’t get to be a child for most of my childhood, so excuse me if I’m going to be one now.” Still holding my phone, pretending to scroll, I got up and circled the counter to drop my plate off at the sink. Carol didn’t move, so I stood there, holding the plate, staring at her as she crossed her arms and pouted like a toddler. “What?”
“I would usually be way meaner about this, with no regrets at all, but you’ve been moping around about the fucking actor for almost a month now. So just… help me out here, would you?”
“This is younotbeing mean?” I raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said, softening her tone. “And I’m sorry. I know you were excited about him. But you don’t have to cut everyone out of your life, you know?”
“I’m hardly cutting out dad. We didn’t talk before Mom,we didn’t talk after, and we don’t talk now. Nothing’s changed.”
“I’m not just talking about Dad.” She replied. I rolled my eyes. I did not have the energy for this conversation. I dropped the plate onto the counter a little harder than I meant and walked away toward the stairs. I hoped it would end there. Of course, it didn’t. “You are cutting me out.Me. Why won’t you talk to me about him?” I kept walking. Maybe if I made it to the bedroom, I could shut the door and pretend this didn’t exist.
“JULES!”
I stopped. Spun around. “WHAT?”
Carol sucked in a breath. Thank God, because I had nothing left in me for de-escalation.
“What happened?” she asked gently. I hesitated, but she wasn’t going to drop it. She’d been circling this for weeks, asking questions I refused to answer. And that was suspicious. I usually told her all the details, especially about men. She was the first one I called when I first thought about divorcing George. And by then she knew exactly why because… I told her everything about… everything.
But not this.
I hadn’t told her because I couldn’t. Not without sounding insane. Not when Chris had floated into my life like a ghost and vanished as fast. No reason. No warning. No explanation.
“He just…” I swallowed, the words catching in my throat. I looked around, making sure the kids weren’t around. “He fucked me and disappeared.”
Carol froze, and her eyes went wide.
“No groundbreaking story,” I added, voice flat. “He won’t answer my texts anymore.” I held my posture because I wasn’t about to break in front of my little sister. “Okay?”
Please let that be the end of it.
She blinked, let it sink in, and then: “What a littlebitch.”
