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She exhaled, looking up at the popcorn ceiling above them, tears sliding down her neck and collecting at the collar of her T-shirt. Calvin released his grip, then tapped a knuckle to her elbow. She looked down at the pink napkin in his hand. She mumbled a thank-you and took it, then wiped her face.
“Go home. Thank you for your help,” he said. “I’ll see you back at the cottage.”
She crumpled up the napkin and tossed it to the trash. “You should consider training Rory to make cakes. If she’s around she can be another set of hands. She should be doing them anyway, being an artist and all that.”
“Can you come in and train her for me?”
Jess agreed, setting a date that worked, then grabbed her bag and left.
Jess pulled into the driveway at the Balls’ cottage. A familiar black Lexus was parked on the street. She ripped off the seat belt and stumbled out of the car, locking eyes with a pair of blue irises.
Charlie bolted out of the plastic chair on the porch, making his way down the creaky wooden steps and over to her.
She slammed the car door and stormed up to him. “What in the hell are you doing here?”
“Jessie, please,” he begged, reaching a hand out to grab her.
Jess stumbled away from his grasp, squeezing an arm around her stomach. “How’d you know I was living here?”
He dropped his head, staring at his loafers. “Our phones still track each other. I’ve been watching—”
“That’s so fucking creepy,” she spat, stepping around him. She seized her phone in her bag and opened the app, deleting him as she made her way to the house.
He followed. “You were in Vermont? New York?”
“Again, really fucking creepy.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry—” He bounded up the steps and reached for her again, his hand firm on her arm as he pulled her closer. “Please, can we talk about this?”
“No.”
His expression crumbled. “Why not? What did I do to make you upset and leave me?”
“It’s what you didn’t do, Charlie!”
Charlie froze, his eyes wide. “What do you mean?”
She wormed her way out of his grasp, stepping beyond his reach. “You didn’t really try. You never fought for me when it came to your family. You saw me struggling with money all the time and didn’t try to meet me halfway unless I begged. You watched me wither away into this shell of myself and didn’t give me the opportunity to live.”
“I thought we had a good life.”
“Did you really? For fuck’s sake, Charlie, be honest with me. Did you really think I was happy?”
He didn’t respond.
“Going to Vermont or New York or anywhere besides maybe the Cape once a year would have never been an option,” she continued. “Spending your own money was never an option. You relied so much on your father and you were so deeply tangled up in his toxic web to see that I was getting smaller and smaller. I forgot who I was—”
And he helped me remember.
The thought came to her so easily. A memory of Kevin flashed in her mind, the way his hazel eyes sparkled as he made notes on that scrap piece of paper, creating a list of things to do together that would make her happy.
We’re doing this, he’d told her. You deserve this.
She gazed at her past standing in front of her, realizing he would have never done those things for her. Maybe surprise Chinese takeout, or burnt pancakes in the morning, but it was never really about her. With Charlie, it was about his needs. With Kevin, she rarely ever considered his needs. And she’d compared them, as if they were one and the same. When, in reality, Kevin was the opposite. A spark of golden sunshine on a bleak, cloudy day.
“This will never happen again, Charlie,” she explained to him, keeping the tone of her voice calm and collected. “We tried, probably giving this more years than we should have. But it’s not going to work. We aren’t compatible.”
Thunder boomed in the distance as Jess swung open the screen door, quickly latching it closed. Honey jumped off the couch where she sat in Gram’s lap and ran after her, jumping on her back feet as she pawed at Jess’s knees.
