But because I need to picture the faces of all of the people who’ve pissed me off.
For once, Xavier’s or Colt’s or Felice’s isn’t the first face I see.
The first face I see is a man I’ve only seen once in my life.
Margot’s father.
The triplets’ biological sperm donor.
The man who’s upended too many fucking lives to count.
That’s who I see when I’m swinging the maul with everything inside me, to the point that I split the chopping block too.
I growl with frustration and turn to throw the maul, and that’s when I spot Decker.
No, not Decker.
That’s Lucky leaning against the side of the cabin, wearing clothes just similar enough to Decker’s usual outfit that he threw me off, watching me.
“Knocked,” he says. “No one answered.”
He doesn’t look mad.
Just tired.
“She’s gone,” I grunt.
He swallows and looks down. “Yeah. Got that text.”
I want to demand to know what it said. Exactly what it said. Every letter. The spacing. The punctuation.
Instead, I eye him. “Your dad okay?”
He sighs. “Okay as he can be.”
I don’t ask for more details.
Not my fucking business.
“They almost split up,” he says. “Before we were born. They’d been trying to get pregnant for a few years, nothing was working, fertility treatments and all of it—just so much stress. So they decided they were going to split. Just couldn’t—couldn’t keep doing it. Mom had a fling with some guy who charmed her in a hotel bar while she was staying there, deciding what she wanted to do next, and a few weeks later, bam. Positive pregnancy test. She didn’t know if we were Dad’s or the other guy’s—more details than I wanted there—but when she started thinkingabout raising us alone, even before she knew there were three of us, and then thought about all the work they’d put into getting pregnant and depriving Dad of that?—”
He cuts himself off and shakes his head.
“She loves you,” I say.
“Yeah. She does. Loves him too. Can’t not. He’s—he’s the best.”
“Fucking lucky you have both of them.”
“I know.”
He toes the ground, hands in his pockets, still looking down.
I curl my fingers into fists.
Not because I want to hit him, but because I want to hitsomething.
Anything to keep the raging fury in my wounded soul from consuming me and destroying my battered heart forever.
