Page 5 of The Right Kind of Wrong

And maybe walking around a garage filled with blue-collar guys while wearing minimal clothing wasn’t her smartest idea, but she’d given up months ago on caring what anyone else thought of her. Her life—her name and her reputation—had been thoroughly dragged through the mud, and then once she was covered in it like a camouflage, it was like she became invisible in this town.

She tried to temper the heat that threaded through her veins. If she got any warmer, she’d melt all over the scuffed, linoleum floors.

The grocery store only had about ten aisles, but at least the air-conditioning was humming steadily when she walked inside. She took a lap down the left-hand side of the building, just to get a little extra cold from the dairy section. Texas in late June wasn’t for the faint of heart, and they hadn’t even gotten close to the hottest parts of the year yet. Add in the lack of rain, and it was like everything was covered in a thin layer of dust, herself included.

She couldn’t wait to get home and slog off the grime of the day. Sometimes, if she stayed under the spray for long enough, her eyes closed, she could pretend like this year hadn’t happened.

But eventually, like she always did, she’d open them and realize that she was no longer in her gorgeous, custom-designed bathroom with the rain shower and ambient lighting that made everything soft and hazy in the best way.

No longer in a house that had never really been hers. She sighed when she remembered the last part, inevitably, where the story in her brain always wandered when she thought about the past.

At the end of the aisle, she grabbed a carton of the single brand of oat milk that they stocked. Noah had always called it “animal food” whenever she’d kept it in their fridge. Like anything plant-based was an affront to his manhood, and he couldn’t stand the idea of not commenting on it.

Rich, coming from a guy who wore snakeskin cowboy boots.

She almost smirked to herself at the classic contradiction that was Noah Duvall, until she remembered that his need for public perception over everything else was what had landed her in this situation—doing mental math to make sure that she could afford a few days’ worth of groceries until she got paid—and the smile quickly faded.

No, the only true affront to his manhood was her, apparently, and what she could never give him.

Before she hit the next aisle, she grabbed one of the baskets sitting near an end cap. For as much as she’d love to get lost in the bottom of a bottle, she’d confirmed that she could at least get a few basic staples to outfit her new home.

As she added things to her basket, she mentally calculated the cost, again, to make sure that her meager bank account balance could cover everything. Flour. Sugar. A few other baking supplies. Some dried pasta. A couple of cans of soup.

She stared down at the plastic basket, surveying her haul. Gone were the days of organic vegetables, farm-raised beef, and anything that qualified as an impulse buy. Her best friends now were anything dried that could be kept on hand for longer than she’d have ever needed to stretch a budget before.

Luckily, the grocery store was fairly empty of other shoppers. On a Friday in the summer, most kids and a lot of the adults would still be out at the creek or hanging out somewhere cooler. Or, if you were part of her old group of friends, at one of their houses up in the hills, all of which were outfitted with pools. The moms would lounge around watching the kids and drinking margaritas, gossiping about the comings and goings of Cypress Falls.

Who had had work done, even though they never ever acknowledged or called it out when it was one of them.

What accomplishments Braxlyn or Braxton or Grayson or Mason or—her favorite line of names—Gunner or Colt or Maverick or Axel had accomplished in the twenty-four hours since they’d all seen one another.

It had all seemed so . . . normal.

And now? She couldn’t imagine sitting in one of those chairs, pretending that they were anything other than catty, merciless bullies.

It didn’t feel great that it had taken her being on the receiving end of that treatment to realize it, though. The embarrassment twinged through her even as she tried to focus on picking out a loaf of bread.

She wondered if, now that she no longer lived in her house, they still rotated there one of the days of the week during the summer.

Had Alexis simply slid in and taken that over, too?

Twenty-eight felt sort of young to be traded in for a newer model, but there were extenuating circumstances, she supposed.

She looked down, realizing that the bag of bread in her hands was disfigured from the frustrated push of her fingers. Letting go, she tried to smooth it out as best she could before placing it in her basket and heading to the next aisle.

“Oh!” a surprised, slightly terse voice called as Blake rounded the corner and nearly collided with one of the small carts. The woman looked at her, then past her, realizing there was no way to pretend like they hadn’t seen one another. “Blake.”

It was the perfunctory tone that rankled her the most. Like they hadn’t been friends for fifteen years, before they’d even met their husbands. Vacationed together. Shared one another’s secrets. Cried to one another when their husbands had done something especially boneheaded.

And even today, Blake taught her daughter at the dance studio. Not that she was ever acknowledged there as more than the help either.

Overnight, Blake’s entire life had shifted into something she was standing on the outside of, looking in at a world that she both longed for and desperately wanted to get as far away from as possible.

“Stephanie,” Blake finally said. She didn’t move, mostly because she knew that Stephanie wanted her to move. Her former best friend hated real confrontation, and Blake didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of making things easy.

Stephanie had crawled away from their friendship with the backbone of a worm, which stung more than almost anything else that had happened this last year.

The song “Stand By Your Man,” started playing over the crackling sound system, and Blake wondered if some sort of cruel joke was being played on her.