I unfold the paper, reading the words that are imprinted on my soul.
I’m not the man you need me to be.
I’m sorry things aren’t different, New York City.
S x
I cradle the carving, rubbing my thumb over its smooth surface. He never creates two things the same. But the small open oyster shell is almost an exact replica of the one I admired in his workshop. Except for two things. This one doesn’t have a carved pearl inside it. It has a real one. One that gleams with all the magic of the ocean in its rounded surface, reminding me of the hours we spent by it. Talking. Touching. Tumbling head over heels into thisthingbetween us, despite pretending we weren’t.
It also isn’t engraved with the letter E for Elaina—the woman he lost. Killed, if I’m to believe what he claims.
It's engraved with a J.
For me.
For the woman who loved him, before he forced her away.
The symbolism of it guts me, and my tears fall hard and fast.
I stuff both the note and carving back inside the T-shirt, bundling it up and stalking to my drawers, where I shove it deep inside at the back before slamming it shut.
“I’m sorry things aren’t different.”His final words spin around inside my head as I sag against the drawers.
“Me too, Cowboy,” I whisper. “Me too.”
27
JUDE
I stareat the jigsaw on my parents’ kitchen table as I try to find a piece to fit in.
Mel and I have been back for over a week, and as much as I’ve tried to return to normal—been to work, out for drinks with colleagues, dinner with friends, visits to my parents—everything feels different now.
It’s all just… less.
“Dr. Glassberg’s daughter is going with her fiancé,” my father says, his emphasis on ‘fiancé’.
“Lovely,” I mutter.
My mother looks up, meeting my eyes as my father walks across the room, his attention fixed on the pile of mail he’s sorting through.
“Callum’s looking forward to it. It’ll be good for his career. I want to introduce him to Dr. Henton who’s heading up the cardiothoracic research in Sweden. Ground-breaking, it really is,” he says.
“I’m sure Jude has more fun things to do with her time than come to another medical awards ceremony with her parents,Roy,” my mother says, blowing the steam off her coffee in her seat opposite me.
Thank you, I mouth to her.
She’s been the only one out of the two of them who’s been supportive since I came home and told them Callum had been unfaithful. I didn’t expect hugs and condolences from my to-the-point father, but I was hoping for a little sympathy. Maybe I should have been more graphic in my depiction of Callum’s pre-marital activities, because my father seemed happy to brush it off as a ‘bit of harmless flirting’.
Yeah, because flirting involves having your dick buried inside another woman.
Callum seems happy to keep my father’s knowledge of the entire incident capped, due to their close working relationship. A better man would have owned up to his actions, surely? Taken the punishment for the crime and dealt with it.
I twist my lips as Slade barrages his way to the front of my brain, like he does multiple times a day.
He got dealt a different punishment. One that involved being outcast from his family and forced to live in the shadows. But knowing him, like I think I did, he’d have rather gone to jail.
I still don’t believe what he told me was true. Ican’tbelieve it.
