Page 31 of The Right Kind of Wrong

Admittedly, she loved that Monroe was getting as keyed up as she was; it wasn’t a response she often got from people.

“How is that legal?” Monroe leaned forward, the look on her face suggesting she was thinking something through. “That seems, like, really fast for a divorce.”

“You know that country song about friends in low places? Well, Noah and the Duvalls have friends in high places. The court, to be exact. I could barely even find a lawyer to represent me. I swear to god, everyone within fifty miles of town told me that it’d be a conflict of interest to work with me, which was, I’m pretty sure, just code for, ‘We don’t want to bite the hand that feeds us.’ I had to find someone in Austin, and I didn’t have the money to do anything more than accept the original petition.”

“That fucking snake,” Monroe seethed, her blue eyes narrowing to slits.

Blake had missed this. Not even sympathy but . . . camaraderie. Another human to vent to, to make her feel like she wasn’t crazy. Because she’d spent a lot of time, given the reaction of the town, feeling like she was the crazy one. “So that’s why Allison Landry-Haas and most of the women in this town hate me. Or, at the very least, wish that I’d disappear. I think I remind them of how tenuous their own lives are. I’m the example that there’s no such thing as being too agreeable or too obedient or too . . .” Blake waved her hand, the second beer starting to affect her. “Too fucking perfect.”

“Have you thought about leaving? Why do you stay, if they’re intent on making your life hell?”

Blake had thought the exact same thing dozens of times over the months. “I don’t want to give them the satisfaction. This is my town as much as theirs. Stupid Noah didn’t even grow up here. His daddy just opened a distribution center and bought a fancy house. Like hell I’m going to let that flat-assed loser run me out of town.”

The laugh that Monroe let out shook her whole body, and she slapped her hand on her knee, gasping for breath. “Oh my god, I’m gonna choke. ‘Flat-assed loser’ is one for the record books.”

While Monroe laughed, unrestrained, her tank top had dipped lower, putting soft curves on display. Blake tried to tactfully avert her gaze, finding Monroe’s bright, playful eyes instead.

It was easy to mirror the smile that Monroe was wearing, given that a lightness was buoying Blake in a way she hadn’t ever expected to feel again. Under the awning, in this beautiful backyard with a woman who also understood what it was like to have her whole life upended, she was feeling like maybe things weren’t as grim as she had thought.

CHAPTER TEN

Monroe was finishing up the dishes from lunch earlier, having been interrupted by the delivery people who’d finally just left.

She called in the general direction of where she assumed Maisie would be. “We need to leave for dance class in a few minutes. Your snack’s on the kitchen table.”

The words, or the general sentiment, anyway, were ones she’d already uttered dozens of times over the past few weeks.

She didn’t expect that they’d be the harbinger of doom.

But life—or, at least, her sanity—was about to fall out from underneath her.

She shouldn’t have been surprised, really. Things had been going a little too well.

Or maybe that was just her deluding herself, hoping that they could slip into a new way of life without the implosion of her and Maisie’s carefully curated existence. One filled with Barbies and a stable routine and new adventures to help keep her mind off the missing of it all.

Even new friends, primarily in the form of an intriguing next-door neighbor who had way more going on than Monroe had initially thought. Monday had shown her that in spades.

Monroe scrubbed down the pan that she’d used to heat tomato soup to go with their grilled cheeses, a staple in the Lockhart home growing up. She’d thought that she’d find the meal comforting, but all it had done was leave an aching feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She’d ignored it, at the time.

But now, turning off the sink, the house eerily quiet while she wiped her hands on the towel hanging over the oven door, the sensation came back.

The fact that she’d felt like she had things in hand should have been her first sign that they were on the precipice of chaos.

Because even though the superficial parts of Maisie’s life hadn’t changed—daycare, mealtimes, her favorite toys, the bed where she lay down to sleep every night—her source of stability in this world had been there one day and was gone the next.

Monroe knew the feeling.

Coincidentally, that had also been a Thursday. From what Monroe had been able to piece together, Maisie had gone off to daycare like it was any other morning, and when it was time to be picked up, Maisie had waited to go home, like she’d done every night after daycare, as the clock had ticked by the time that Kendra had always picked her up.

But the pickup had never come. Finally, one of the daycare personnel had called social services when they couldn’t reach Kendra. There’s no way they could have known that her cell phone was in a box of her personal effects, labeled for collection when a family member came to get her body, which had died en route to the hospital.

Thinking about it made Monroe sick. The kind of sick that dropped her heart into her stomach and forced her throat closed, making it hurt to breathe.

That bag, just like her mom’s ashes, sat in her bedroom, a constant reminder of the unfairness of life.

They were closing in on three weeks with her as Maisie’s guardian, and sure, there had been some tears from both of them, given the newness of the whole situation, but Monroe had continued pushing forward, insistent that a new normal would be on the horizon as long as she stayed the course.