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He wiped his eyes with shaking fingers.
“Hiding, probably. She's not exactly happy with me right now.”
“What else is new?” I hoped the words would get him to smile.
They didn’t.
Dad attempted a smile. “The truth is, she won’t be here much longer. I kicked her out.”
A battering ram may as well have struck me. “You what?”
Dad took my hand and led me to the exorbitant white leather couches covered in leopard-print pillows. He sat, gesturing for me to take the cushion beside him, and stared atour hands.
“I couldn’t stay with her after what she did to you. How could she ever think that was okay? I told her as much.”
“You did? Daddy, I’m so proud of you.”
He beamed at me. The expression took years off of him.
Happiness bloomed within me, too, not just because he, too, was finally standing up to Stina. But because he’d done it out of love for me.
I’d been so bitter about families, about relationships. Having that bitterness melt away now was liberating and cleansing.
“Is she moving out? I asked. “I mean, are you guys divorcing?”
Behind me, the front door crashed open. Stina stumbled through with her arms full of cardboard boxes. The sound of her entrance was clashed by Pris’s hysterical exclamations.
Yikes—I hadn’t missed that.
“Derek, don’t do this. You know I never would have if it hadn’t been my mom’s idea. Derek. No, wait!”
Pris held the phone aloft, staring as though the device had insulted her.
Her gaze drifted from her mother’s scowl first and then to the living room where Dad and I sat.
Stina dropped her cardboard boxes to the floor. She glowered at me, sniffed, and then turned to the decorative wall hanging behind her.
It was a twirling mess of metal and mirrors. Lifting the hanging from the wall, she slammed it into the nearest box. It thudded hard, and from the little clanking sound, a few pieces broke off.
Pris didn’t take such a cold-shoulder approach. She lowered her phone and marched toward me.
“You,” she said through her teeth. Mascara made rivers down her cheeks. “You did this.”
Did what?
“Hi, Pris,” I said.
I rose to my feet. Something told me I’d need my footing.
“Don’thime. First, you stalk me and have me arrested. Then you tell Derek?”
I lifted my hands. “I haven’t talked to Derek in over a year.”
“He ended our engagement!”
With a shriek, she rounded, chucking her phone at the wall and releasing a sob at the same time. “After all I did for him. All that crap I stole to get extra money for him—the risk I put myself into with that stalker—and he didn’t even care.”
That was a bombshell. “You stole those items forDerek?”
