She picked up her phone. “Aren’t you going to stop me from calling him while I’m drunk?”
“No,” Cara said. “I’m not. Because he isn’t a random man, he was your partner for fifteen years, and he deserves to get yelled at drunkenly.”
Marlowe hit his contact without thinking any deeper about it. Without even going over what she was going to say.
“Marlowe? It’s late.”
His voice sounded husky, and she wondered if he was sleeping in bed next to this other woman. It made her feel like she was being stabbed, slowly. Like she could feel the whole blade of the knife going into her stomach.
Suddenly, she was angry. Suddenly, she didn’t want to just call him to share her feelings. To give herself a chance to speak her side of things. No. She just wanted to yell at him.
“How dare you take the money for the car?”
“Marlowe… I had to move to a new apartment in the city. I needed a deposit, and I needed –”
“Bullshit. You didn’t need the cost of a car. And I still need a car. I came all the way out to Oregon, and you were supposed to come with me. You… You sent me out here, knowing full well that you weren’t going to come with me, and now you’ve left me with a thousand dollars?”
“Aren’t you getting paid for your new job?” he asked, sounding weirdly detached and not like any version of him that she’d ever known.
“Aren’t you? Aren’t you back to being dual-income?”
“I needed the money. And maybe I should’ve talked to you about it, but you have your new job, and I’m still working on finding something. Plus, I was the one pulling all the late nights at the bar.”
Like he’d been doing the most work?
There were certain indignities that Marlowe would never be able to allow. He was sleeping with another woman, andthat was a terrible thing. She could hold her head high, be hurt, but being confident that she had been a good wife, and she hadn’t felt the need to completely excoriate him.
She could take insults to her looks, to her personality. But her work ethic? Especially when she had been the one doing the majority of the organizational efforts at every single job she had ever had with him.
He was gregarious, charismatic, it was true. But she was the one who kept everything organized. She was the one who kept everything running.
Him trying to pullthatbullshit, oh, that was a bridge too far.
“Are you kidding me?” Her voice had gone soft, quiet, and if he were a smart man, then he would know that he better walk it back, because he was in very big trouble.
But he was not a smart man. She already knew that. All of his recent behavior indicated this.
And he continued to be an idiot.
“No. The jobs that we’ve gotten, they were because –”
“If you’re going to say it’s because of your personality, I am going to fly back to New York with my thousand dollars and punch you in the face. I understand that people like you. Hell, I used to like you, Aiden, and never have I gone off another person quite so quickly, the graph of my feelings for you shows one of the steepest declines fromlovetowhat the fuckin the history of mankind. But if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have kept any of those jobs. I’m here doing this one by myself. The work of two people, and I’m going to do it. You know why? Because I’m not going to fail. But you, you’re going to fail without me. The things that you don’t realize that I do… Maybe you’re going to be able to get this woman to do them for you for a while. But I cared about you for most of my life. I’ve loved you for all these years, and so helping you, picking up the slack for you, that was something that I did… Joyfully. Thiswoman is going to expect you to be an adult because she is not a seventeen-year-old girl falling in love with the cutest boy at school. And when that comes home to roost, you’re going to find yourself alone, again, and the one thing you are never going to do is come crawling back to me. Because I’ll slam the door in your face. You get one chance with me, and you used yours. Pay me back half the car money, or I am sending a lawyer after you. You better believe I will. Because I’m now getting the income that was supposed to be for both of us. Because my boss actually isn’t an asshole. Unlike you.”
She hung the phone up and found that she was breathing incredibly hard.
Cara was standing in the corner holding the wine bottle. “More?”
“So much more. I’m obviously crashing on your couch tonight.”
“That’s just fine. You can follow me over to the bakery in the morning.”
The bakery. In the morning.
Where she would see Cody again.
If she still felt this reckless tomorrow morning, God help them both.
Chapter Eight
