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Chapter Five
“That was quite the car,”Aiden Young is saying as he turns the blue Hyundai onto Hood Road.
“A little plain,” his wife says. “Except for the doors.”
“Those doors are something else.”
“I still like a Corvette,” Heidi says. Before they got married, almost a year ago, Aiden had promised her a Corvette. But Aiden’s mother, Lisa, was adamant that a sports car was both too expensive and too impractical, and since it was her money that was paying for the car’s lease—to be fair, it was her money that was paying for almost everything, including the down payment and mortgage on their house—Aiden had gone along with her choice. Which wasn’t unusual. To Heidi’s great and continuing dismay, Aiden went along with almost all his mother’s decisions.
She was the one exception.
Heidi smiles, lowering her visor and checking her reflection in the small mirror, pleased with what she sees: big brown eyes, model-high cheekbones, shoulder-length amber-colored curls that miraculously don’t frizz up in the humidity, full, bow-shaped lips.
Everyone’s always saying that she and Aiden make such a cute couple, a regular Ken and Barbie come to life. And the comparison is true—as far as it goes. Her husband is indeed tall and lean and muscular. But there’s more to him than his blandly handsome exterior would suggest, something deep, even mysterious, going on behind those dark blue eyes.
A thirty-year-old former soldier who served two tours in Afghanistan, her husband has the swagger Heidi has always found appealing in a man. But he’s surprisingly sweet, too, which is what she finds most attractive about him. That sweetness is the main reason she said yes to his proposal, despite the red flags she saw waving on the horizon.
At twenty-seven, Heidi had been dreaming of a home and family of her own ever since she was eight years old and her mother succumbed to the cancer that had left her bedridden for much of Heidi’s childhood. Her father had quickly remarried, to a woman with three children of her own and no desire to look after a fourth.
Heidi knew that Aiden’s mother considered her “poor white trash,” but she’d hoped—perhaps naïvely—that she could change her mind, that when Lisa had the chance to really get to know her, she would love her.
She was wrong.
Even after it became glaringly obvious that Lisa would never accept her, Heidi had been hopeful—again, perhaps naïvely—that when it came to a showdown between the woman who gave Aiden life and the woman who gave him blow jobs, she would emerge victorious.
Something else she’d been wrong about.
“What’re you thinking about?” Aiden asks now.
Heidi shrugs and says nothing, glancing at the tiny sliver of a diamond in the center of her engagement ring. The stone is so small, she can’t even be sure it’s real. Could just be glass, for all she knows. The fact is that nothing is what she assumed it would be. “You had another one of those nightmares last night, didn’t you?” she says as Aiden turns onto PGA Boulevard, heading east toward the Gardens Mall.
“Did I?”
“You were moaning and groaning and pulling at the covers.”
“Really? Don’t remember.” His grip on the steering wheel tightens.
Heidi watches his knuckles turn white and knows he’s lying. She reaches over to give his fingers a reassuring pat, wondering if his nightmares will ever disappear. He’s been out of the army for five years, and seeing a psychiatrist for the last three, weekly sessions paid for by his mother.
Heidi can deal with her husband’s PTSD. It’s his mother she can’t handle.
Aiden puts on his signal when they reach the second of the multiple exits leading into the huge, upscale mall and waits until the arrow indicates his turn to go. He proceeds slowly.Veryslowly.As if he’s driving through a minefield,Heidi thinks, pushing down on the invisible accelerator at her feet. The snail’s pace continues into the parking lot that surrounds the two-story indoor plaza. Aiden parks where he always does, by the entrance to Saks, which is where he works.
At least for the time being.
Aiden has had several jobs since they got married. He has trouble concentrating and, combined with a general problem with authority, it’s made holding down a job difficult. Currently, he’s working in the jewelry department at Saks, and it seems to be going reasonably well. Heidi also works in the mall, at the nearby Lola’s Lingerie, which is where they met.
He’d come in to buy a birthday gift.
“For your wife? Your girlfriend?” she asked, fishing.
“My mother,” he replied, sheepishly.
I should have run right then and there,she thinks now. Instead, she’d found his honesty charming, his awkwardness even more so. “What did you have in mind?” she asked.
“I was thinking maybe a nightgown or a robe.”
Heidi picked out ones she thought most suitable, and Aiden left with both a nightgown and a matching robe, then came back two days later. With his mother. To return them.
