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Moving to where she stood, I said, “Where’s your phone? I’m not going to ask again.”
She responded to my forceful tone and pulled her phone from her back pocket. “What are you going to say to him?”
I took the phone. “What’s your password?”
“I asked you a question.”
Another deep breath. “Your password, Tenille?”
She rattled off four digits, which I keyed into her phone. I then scrolled through her contact list to find Craig’s number, all the while, ignoring her tirade about what an asshole I could be.
Craig answered on the fourth ring. “Where the fuck are you, Tenille?”
I saw red.
“This isn’t Tenille.” If a voice could commit murder, Craig would be dead.
“What do you want?” he spat back.
I squeezed the phone. “I want you to know that I know what you did. And I want you to also know that in my world, a man doesn’t hit his wife and get away with it.”
“So, what? I should watch my back or some shit? You’re gonna come get me?”
“I don’t come get people, Craig, but I do take care of them,” I said far more quietly than I was feeling. A hurricane of violent thoughts raged inside me. In my mind, I’d already hurt him a million different ways. Some of them, the kinds of ways a person didn’t survive.
Silence for a beat. And then—“Put my wife on the fucking phone, asshole.”
“If memory serves me correctly, I never divorced Tenille. And I sure as fuck didn’t die. Which makes her still my wife.”
Silence again. “Fuck you!”
The phone went dead, and my eyes met Tenille’s. Confusion lay there. “Oh God.” Her hand flew to her mouth. “This is a fucking mess, Aiden.”
I nodded. “Yeah. But if you want to leave Craig, there’s your answer.”
“That’s not an answer! It doesn’t matter if we aren’t technically married, we were together for a long time, and we have a lot of shit to work out.”
Why did women have to make everything so damn hard? In my mind, it was a no-brainer. She wasn’t happy. She wanted to leave Craig. They were never legally married. Fuck up solved.
“So what’s the plan now?”
She stared at me with a broken expression. “I don’t know.”
“Stay here for a bit. Figure shit out.” I refrained from telling her to never go back to Craig, but God help him if she did. I’d never take my eyes off him again.
“Yeah, maybe.” She seemed anything but certain, but this was still fresh. Tomorrow things might be a little clearer.
“And Tee?” At her questioning look, I softened my voice a little and said, “I’m sorry about coming home like that.”
She nodded. “I shouldn’t have lost it with you.”
It killed me that she had to navigate this new relationship with me. That I’d brought this on us. But there was no way back, only forward.
Changing the subject, I said, “Have you and Charlie figured stuff out?”
“Yeah, we had a good talk. But if I’m gonna be staying here for a bit, you need to be prepared for lots of arguments between us.”
I could only imagine. Charlie had inherited her parents’ temper. “I’ll deal.”
