ALEX
As I pulledup to Nick’s house and parked beside his Range Rover, I spotted Maddox’s motorcycle. I was sure both men were going to have a lot to say about Sadie coming with me to the event last night.
I’d spent the morning down at the beach. After last night, I’d needed to go there.
When Ash and AJ died, I didn’t bury them. From the time we were teenagers Ash had always said if anything happened to her, she didn’t want to be buried. She’d made it clear she wanted to have her ashes scattered in the Bay, and I wanted AJ with her. So that’s what I’d done.
People tried to talk me out of it because they said I needed to have somewhere to go to visit them. But I did. It was “our tree” at Crissy Field.
Under that tree Ash and I had our first kiss. It was also where I’d proposed on her eighteenth birthday with a $199 ring from JCPenney. I had to put the ring on layaway and make payments of twenty dollars every two weeks for six months. During our marriage, I’d upgraded her ring, twice, with rings that cost twenty times more than the first, but Ash loved the first ring and she never stopped wearing it. So, we’d always return her new rings and she’d keep wearing her simple half-carat solitaire ring I’d bought on layaway. Ash and I had carved our initials in the trunk when we were sixteen and after AJ was born, we added his.
It was the tree we’d taken family pictures under and had AJ’s first birthday at. It was the first tree he’d learned to climb, and the first one he’d fallen out of and gotten his first broken arm.
That tree was where I went whenever I needed to feel close to Ash or AJ.
When I woke up in bed next to Sadie, it felt so wrong because it didn’t feel wrong at all. It felt right. Natural. All I’d wanted to do was pull her closer to me and kiss her all over again. And that scared me. So instead of giving into what I’d wanted to do, I’d slid out of bed. Took a shower. Left a note and coffee and got the hell out of there.
When I found myself behind the wheel of my car, I’d planned on just driving around to clear my head. But soon I found myself pulling into the parking lot at Crissy Field beach.
I’d prepared myself for the onslaught of guilt I was sure was coming as I made my way to our tree. Instead, all I’d felt was peace. I’d spent a few hours sitting beneath the shady covering that the oak provided.
After about an hour of sitting there quietly, I started talking. I’d gotten a few odd looks from joggers and dog walkers, but I didn’t care. I told Ash everything. Well, noteverythingbut I told her about Sadie. I told her about how good she was with Lexi. I told her about Mrs. G having a stroke and Sadie’s bakery and apartment burning down. I told her about Mia bailing on me and Sadie stepping in to help. And I told her that I’d kissed her.
My head was all sorts of fucked up.
Last night had been amazing. And it never should have happened.
I wasn’t lying when I’d told Sadie that she deserved more. She did. Even knowing that, I still hadn’t been able to stop myself from taking what I wanted. Maybe it was just because it had been so long since I’d been with anyone. That was a possibility, but I didn’t think that was actually the case. From the first time I’d seen her there’d been something palpable between us.
Last night had been a moment of weakness. One that I did not plan on repeating.
After spending the morning at Crissy Field, I’d gone to the hospital to visit Mrs. G. She was going stir crazy, but her doctor wasn’t happy with her blood pressure and kept telling her that he would reevaluate her release tomorrow. Those tomorrows were starting to add up. I’d been looking into a rehab facility and found that there was a world renowned, state of the art, facility right there in San Francisco. It mainly catered to professional athletes, but it was the best of the best, and that is where Mrs. G would be going after she was released from the hospital.
Mia was making arrangements for the transfer. She had an in with one of the founding physicians there who she knew through spin class. Mrs. G was not going to be happy when she found out she was not coming home when she was released. I might have to handcuff her to the bed to keep her at the rehab facility, but that was a battle for another day.
I took a deep breath and got out of my car. As I walked up the steps to Nick’s house, I prepared myself for the onslaught of shit talking I was about to walk into. I was sure that Nick and Maddox had seen the photos from the event online. There were hundreds of them.
Why so many sites were reporting on who I brought to the dinner was beyond me. I couldn’t wrap my head around the attention we were getting when there wereactualcelebrities in attendance. Actors, athletes, and social media influencers. People that had millions of followers online and actual fans. Yet, somehow, me bringing Sadie was the story getting all the buzz.
Before I made it up the steps, the door opened, and Nick stood with a smile a mile wide on his face.
“There he is! The belle of the ball!” Nick lifted his bottle of whatever IPA was the current trend in the air.
Nick was always on the cutting edge of whatever the trends were. Maddox and I couldn’t give two shits about what was popular.
“Where’s Lexi?” I asked as he pulled me into a one-armed man hug.
“The girls are watching Harry Potter. We’re out back, we’ve got burgers on the grill.”
Part of me wanted to grab Lexi and get the fuck out of there before I faced the interrogation I knew was coming. But I knew that even if I escaped now, this conversation wouldn’t go away. I figured I might as well get it over with.
I followed behind Nick and walked out onto his deck which overlooked the city and the bay. Maddox was standing next to the fire pit on the phone. The views from his backyard were truly breathtaking.
Every time I was here, I felt myself imagining what it would be like if Lexi and I had a house. A backyard for her to play in. The penthouse had been Ash’s dream, and I’d kept my promise to her. But the older Lexi got, the more I wondered if Ash would have really wanted that for her daughter’s childhood.
We’d only been twelve at the time I’d made her the promise about the penthouse in Bay Towers. She’d talked about it when we’d lived in our first studio in the Mission District, where we’d brought AJ home from the hospital to and lived until he was two years old. She’d put it on a “vision board” and stuck it on the fridge when we moved from there to our one-bedroom in the Castro District. But after we moved into our two-bedroom first floor walk-up in Chinatown she’d stopped bringing it up. She loved the place in Chinatown. We’d lived there, raised AJ there and had planned to bring Lexi home from the hospital there.
Well, that had been Ash’s plan because she hadn’t known that I’d already bought the penthouse and had planned on surprising Ash after she had the baby. I was going to drive us home from the hospital and bring her there, to our fully furnished love palace in the sky.
