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I pull back from his embrace and exhale deeply. “Okay, I’ll be right back,” I say.
While I’m not a fan of confrontation, I firmly believe there’s a time and place for it. The conversation I need to have with Magdalene is long overdue. I’m a damn good nanny and she needs to respect me as the woman raising her son.
I go back and forth in my head several times as I attempt to cover all the bases of the hypothetical argument we could possibly have. There’s nothing worse than being so upset you’re too tongue tied to get your point across and I know that’s inevitable if I don’t prepare myself. One thing I know is that I have several points to get across and I want them to be as clear and concise as possible.
After the elevator ride, I stop the stroller just inches away from the door and start the search for the keys in my purse, but the door flies open before I find them.
Magdalene stands there, her arms crossed over her chest with her face covered in deep scarlet red splotches.
“I saw you,” she says, pointing her finger in my face.
I push the stroller by her, determined to keep my cool, refusing to let her under my skin. “Excuse me?”
She points her perfectly sculpted acrylic-coated nail with its nude polish to the window. “I saw you down there with my ex,” she says. “You two were hugging and kissing right in front of my son.”
My blood starts to boil as the heat rushes to my cheeks. “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, because the man I was just with downstairs is not your ex,” I say, my voice rising with each word. “Obviously, you’ve been hitting the bottle a little too hard today, and your vision is blurred.”
If she wants to play dirty, then we can do that. I know exactly how to fight fire with fire, and I refuse to hold my tongue any longer.
Magdalene folds her arms back over her narrow chest as she smiles confidently. “The only thing that’s obvious is how stupid you are. Asher Jordan is my ex-fiancé. You can even ask him yourself if you don’t believe me. While you’re at it, ask him his real reason for getting close to you, because I know for a fact he tried to be with you so he could get close to Jacob. He’s been hounding me about us getting back together to be a family, and this is probably the only way he thought he could do it. I talked to him recently,” she says, holding up her phone’s call log to my face.
Sure enough, Asher’s number is right there in her phone.
“He wants to prove he’s Jacob’s father so we can get back together. He’s pathetic to think that screwing my nanny would make a woman like me jealous.”
The blood that was boiling in my veins suddenly turns ice cold. I heard exactly what Magdalene said, but I’m having a hard time digesting it. Is this what he wants to talk to me about? Thinking back, I wonder if she was indeed his real target.
Maybe she’s who he was looking for the first day I spotted him with the telescopes, but I just conveniently inserted myself in the way.
Magdalene laughs and pushes her hair behind her ears. “It’s all starting to come together for you, isn’t it? He used you to get to me, but it didn’t work. I told you, men like him use women like us as pawns. You came in here night after night, probably thinking you really meant something to him. Now you know the truth.”
I stumble backwards a little and struggle to catch my breath. My lungs fill slowly as a huge weight sits on my chest, making each inhale a painful but necessary labor.
This must be what he wanted to talk about. There are too many coincidences floating around for this all to be an accident. How do you “accidentally” move into the building next door to your ex?
My heart and stomach both sink to the floor as the room begins to spin. My vision blurs with tears and I take off for my room.
I have to get the hell out of here.
Luckily, I don’t have much to pack, and even if I did, I would leave it all behind because one thing I know for sure is that I’m not staying here a second longer under these circumstances. The one time I let my guard down and allow someone into my heart, he viciously rips it and stomps on it.
I just had my arms around this man, crying into his chest while pouring my heart out to him. I can still smell his cologne clinging to my skin as I rush to make my exit. I’ve experienced heartache before, but this is a new low. This time, not only do I feel failure, but I also feel dirty and used.
