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“I dropped him at Jude’s to play for a bit,” I said. “I need to figure out what to do for childcare.Again.”
“My mom’s watching the kids,” Jude explained. “I told him we could come here and talk it out.”
Dylan pulled his baseball cap off to scrub his hand over the back of his head then put it on backward. “Okay, what’s the plan?”
“I told him he needs to get Kennedy back.” Nate shrugged as if I could snap my fingers and get her back. “He said Finn’s been asking about her a lot.”
“She left me,” I said through clenched teeth, hating to repeat myself again. “She quit through a text.”
“Yeah, but you did say she called you,” Jude noted, always trying to find the bright side.
As far as I was concerned, there was no bright side.
“She called you?” Nate inclined his head, his hands on the bar. “You didn’t tell me that detail.”
I lifted my glasses up to rub at my eyes. “Because I don’t want to keep rehashing it.”
“Start from the beginning,” Jude said. “Let us all hear it, and then we can go from there.”
With a breath, I set my glasses back on my nose and dragged my hands through my hair. It needed a trim. I hated the thought of anyone else touching my hair besides Kennedy.
I inhaled in a rough breath before I started in on the story. “Everything was going great. I took her up to see my family. They all loved her, she loved them, everything was perfect. And then she posted a video on my birthday that stirred up more of the viral BS.”
Dylan picked up his phone, mostly likely to search for the video because he liked to give me shit about it, but I whacked his forearm. “She deleted the video, but it’d gotten around a bit before that. Made its way to some of the students at the university.”
Nate sucked air through his teeth as Jude winced. “They’re pissed?”
“The provost is pissed. He’s an asshole, but he’s the final say on if I get tenure or not, so even though I didn’t technically do anything wrong, he’s got it out for me.”
“When do you find out if you get it or not?” Jude asked.
“The board review’s in less than three weeks, which is why…this whole thing could not have come at a worse time.”
Dylan drew a line on the bar top. “Well, how’d we go from the video to her leaving?”
“The other day, Finn fell and busted his head open on the coffee table in the living room. I got out of class and had, like, ten missed calls from her. He was bleeding pretty bad, and I met her at urgent care. They put six staples in his head.” I scraped my index finger on my scalp at the same place Finn had had cut his open. “He’s fine, but Kennedy… I don’t know. She freaked out and disappeared. I turned around to talk to her, and she was gone. She didn’t pick up when I called her, wasn’t answering my texts, and when I got home, she wasn’t there. I thought…” I winced, remembering the fear that had clutched my heart at the thought of Kennedy hurt. It was as bad as the idea of Finn being hurt. “She’s got epilepsy, and all I kept thinking of was her in a car accident or having fallen down the stairs because of a seizure. Every worst-case scenario raced through my head.”
Silently, Jude gripped my shoulder, squeezing it. He understood because he had experienced a worst-case scenario with his wife, Mira.
“She was fine, but she’d run away to her sister’s place. She texted to tell me she quit.”
“She quit?” Dylan repeated.
I nodded.
“I still don’t understand why,” Jude said.
I shook my head. “I don’t either.”
“Whatexactlydid she say?” Nate asked.
“Nothing, really. She kept apologizing and saying she never meant to hurt Finn. Which is ridiculous. I always told her she had to stop thinking she needed to apologize for everything. She constantly feels like she owes people.” I held both of my hands up at different levels. “Like she’s down here and everybody else is up here, and she doesn’t deserve whatever people deign to give her.” I curled my fingers into fists and crossed my arms. “I hated it, that she felt like she was below anyone. Because she’s fucking perfect, and, if anything, everyone else oweshersomething.”
We all sat quietly for a moment until Jude said, “But then she called you yesterday, right? What happened?”
I closed my eyes and heaved out a breath. “I was an asshole, and I unloaded on her. But I’m mad, you know? She left me for no reason. She left Finn. How could she do that?”
“Uh…” Dylan cleared his throat, briefly met my eyes, then stared down at his beer. “I, uh, can understand. Whatever’s happened in her past, if she thinks she doesn’t deserve love, I get that.” He lifted his shoulder and cleared his throat again, looking at each of us in turn. “It’s hard to learn to accept anything good when you think you’re going to fuck it up. So, you run away instead because it’s easier than facing the truth…that youwillmess up. But it’s a matter of knowing you can fix it that changes things.”
