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“I am not one of your soldiers. This is my life, mine! And you are no longer welcome in it. You or Mom. I am blocking you both. I won’t see your calls. I will not open any letters you send. If you show up here, I will call the police. You feel me now, Major General?”
My hand covers my mouth, my eyes go wide. I can’t believe I just said that to him, I don’t know where it came from. I didn’t know I had it in me. I am so grateful he can’t see me because I am shaking like a leaf, despite the gangster words my lying mouth spews forward.
“Emily!”
I say nothing, and he shouts my name again.
“Goodbye, Dad.”
I disconnect the call, and I block him.
I block my mother.
I don’t block Cole.
My traitorous fingers won’t physically push the buttons, and I hate myself that I can’t do it. My fingers grip the cell phone until I think I might crack the screen, and then I scream and spike it into the carpet.
Cole may have been able to flex his shoulders and take a deep breath after twenty-four hours of wallowing, shrug it all off at the final hour.
But for me? Hour twenty-five brings only rage, anger, and an unbridled sense of betrayal.
Twenty Seven
Suzuka Circuit, Japan
Cole
“I can’t tell you how glad I am to have you back, man,” I clap Edmund on the back and take a seat on the outdoor loveseat atop our motorhome in Japan. Liam and Dante are both here, too, welcoming Edmund back to his first race since he took leave.
“Well, after Singapore, it was clear I’m still needed here,” he laughs.
He’s lost a bit of weight and looks tired, his complexion is pale, but we’re all beyond thrilled that he had a nasty case of walking pneumonia and not lung cancer.
It’s taking the sting off, just a smidgen, from the fact that Emily isn’t in the garage this weekend. I expected as much, she’s a runner, as much as she wants to believe that I’m the one who does the leaving.
Every argument or fight we had in the past, she’d run. And if she didn’t run, she’d retreat back inside of herself, which was just as bad. I think she figured if she ran away from the situation, she couldn’t possibly be bad at something or fail at it.
I feel Edmund staring at me while I gaze off into the distance. He purses his lips, “I didn’t tell her, but she knows how she got the job. HR told her when she put in for leave.”
I nod. “I know,” I tell him while Dante and Liam sit silent, pretending this isn’t awkward as hell. I’ve dragged them all into our mess, begrudgingly.
Dante showed up unannounced at my apartment, like he’s prone to doing, and saw the state I was in. If I wasn’t drunk out of my mind, I don’t know if I would have ever told him.
But I did, he knows everything.
We’ve been roommates, we’ve grown up from gangly teenagers to men together. We were ignorant jackasses racing karts when we met, and now we’re both accomplished in F1. But it took this for me to spill my guts. The things I kept secret all that time poured out of me that night over bottles of bourbon.
I’m not sure how I feel about it, but I don’t feel ashamed like I thought I would. Maybe Emily broke the seal. I figured, if she didn’t judge me, others wouldn’t, either.
But beyond that, if Emily can accept me for all the baggage I come with, I don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks. As long as I have her, as long as she can love me, to hell with the opinions of others.
I am not Stan, I am not my mother. I am not the byproduct of the two of them, or their combined dysfunctions, crimes, or sins. I know it, and, as angry as I am over the shit Emily said to me, she knows it, too.
She’s hurt.
Horrible words come out of everyone’s mouths from time to time, it doesn’t mean we believe them. Like stubbing your toe against the bedpost late at night, pain lace expletives come out of all our mouths when we’re hurting.
Liam knows less. He figured out something was very wrong when I asked him to resume delivering prepped meals for me. I thought about asking him to take some to Cambridge too, knowing Emily won’t eat when she’s upset, but I didn’t want to land him in jail.
