“And I can’t figure out how getting you to fall in love with him factored in.”
Lainey clattered the tin closed. “I wasn’t in love with him.”
Gran raised her eyebrow. “Please. You can lie to yourself, but don’t lie to me.”
“Maybe he wanted to lull me into a false sense of security and rip the rug out from under me when I least suspected it.”
“But the longer you were married, the greater the risk that you’d find out. So that doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe he’s bad at grifting and you should rescind your earlier compliment,” Lainey huffed.
“Is it possible that he’s telling the truth? That he put it in there because he was scared, and he never had any plans to use it at all?”
Lainey wanted so badly for that to be true. “He didn’t trust me, Gran. From the very start.”
Gran snorted. “That’s rich, coming from you.”
“What does that mean?”
“When have you ever trusted anyone from the very start? You certainly didn’t when you were an angry seven-year-old girl whose mother had just left. For days, you refused to sleep, in protest of bedtime. I still don’t know how you did it. And when I would try to hold you, you would just scream and scream.”
Lainey frowned. “I don’t remember any of that.”
“You needed to see that I wasn’t going anywhere. That you couldn’t scare me or push me away. For some people, trust comes easy, but it sounds like for Elliot, trust takes time. He needs to see it to believe it. Perhaps you might relate.”
Lainey gave her grandmother a watery smile. She had used so much energy not allowing herself to want things she wasn’t sure she could keep.
“I just want you to imagine a world in which you are someone worth caring for. Fighting for, even. That you are a woman a man might be so scared to lose he’d do something…very stupid.”
Lainey sighed and reopened the tin. “Now I kind of want the cigarette.”
“No, your skin is too bouncy to be messing around with that. Here, do you want a vintage Rolex? I’ve won half a dozen of them at Ernie’s.” She lifted up a large gold men’s watch that was much too big for her grandmother’s dainty wrists. “I wouldn’t pawn it yet—the man I won it from was quite testy about it—but I think it has a certain je ne sais quoi. You never know when you might need a gift for someone special.”
Lainey handed her grandmother the tin of cigarettes and pretended not to hear the thing about the Rolex as she let the Home Shopping Network send her into a deep sleep.
Chapter 24
I Have a Baby on My Spine
66 Days until the End of Busy Season (or 66 Days until Lainey Will No Longer Be Able to Find Work and Will Be Forced to Reconsider All of Her Life Choices)
Fourth of Julyin Timber Creek was not for the faint of heart. It was the busiest weekend of the summer, and one of Lainey’s most lucrative as a servant to the gig economy. But this year, she would not be driving all over town for a quick buck, because her car was on life support in the middle of a VW dealership parking lot.
“It’s cooked,” Isaac’s dad announced with the steady, somber voice of a surgeon calling the time of death.
Isaac had texted her out of the blue, suggesting that his dad take a look. He said it was the least he could do considering the number of times she’d jumped his car. Lainey wondered if a certain husband of hers had suggested something to this effect, but she wasn’t going to argue. Still, she brought an exceedingly pregnant Bree along to serve as her representative should the negotiation over repairs turn to haggling. Bree was an Olympic-level haggler.
“No. She can’t be dead.” Lainey refused to believe that her car was too far gone. “Not her. Not Daphne.”
Bree frowned at her. “You named your car Daphne?”
“I never had the opportunity to name her, but I would’ve if we’d had even a little more time together.”
“You know this is a very old car.” Isaac’s dad, Carlos, seemed confused, either over her grief or the notion of time cut short with a car that saw a majority of the first Reagan administration.
“I need this car. This car is how I make money, and due to a small error in judgment, it will soon be my home.”
“You’re not living in your car,” Bree interjected.
