AllFreeNovel
Share Us
How could he make a mistake, then bring me into said mistake, and then expect me to thrive in that kind of environment?
Newsflash, I couldn’t.
In fact, I was floundering, barely able to keep my head above water.
“I don’t know what to say,” he finally admitted.
I snorted, dropping my arms. “How about ‘goodbye?’”
He blinked. “You want me to leave?”
“I don’t want you here because you feel obligated over something that my stepmother asked you to do. I want you here because you want to spend time with me, which, apparently, isn’t why you’re here,” I replied bluntly.
He grimaced.
My dad was a doer. A go-getter. A man that liked action.
What he was not was a comforter.
He would leave without a fight.
He’d make up for it, or try to make up for it, in other ways.
But right now… he wasn’t going to stay.
I could see it in the set of his shoulders.
“What do I do about the mon—” Dad started, but it was Etienne who interrupted him.
“I think that it’s time for you to go,” Etienne said. “Before you upset her even more.”
Dad sighed and ran his hands through his hair. “That’s not the only reason I came. I was really worried about you. Especially when I couldn’t find you at home.”
“The time for worry was before I moved out,” I explained. “In all honesty, you should’ve worried about me ten years ago when I was struggling to find reasons to live. I’m fine now. I have a job that I love, a practice that I owe my best friend half for, and… and…”
Okay, so I didn’t have much else.
But, that was enough.
Right?
“And me,” Etienne said. “You’ll always have me.”
That was the sweetest thing I’d ever heard.
I felt hope and excitement churn inside my chest.
“I’ll see you out,” Etienne jerked his head toward the door.
My dad left with him, both of them walking out onto the porch without a backward glance.
Dad kept walking down the porch steps, and farther down the walk, but stopped when Etienne said something to him I couldn’t hear.
I watched the set of my father’s shoulders slump, as if whatever Etienne had said had wrecked him.
Good.
• • •
ETIENNE
“You know, when our babies are born, you’re not going to get to come around and see them because you’ve never put her first,” I called to her dad.
“Babies?” Ladd asked.
“Not quite yet,” I said. “But when I get her to see what she has in front of her face? Yeah, we’ll have ’em. Lots of ’em.”
Ladd’s shoulders slumped. “I didn’t realize…”
“You did realize,” I corrected him. “You just didn’t want to do anything about it to rock the boat even more. Two wrongs don’t make a right here. Two wrongs are two wrongs. And you’re making one of those wrongs worse and worse every single day.”
Ladd’s head dropped, and I didn’t even feel bad.
I felt like Ladd deserved to feel like a pile of shit.
That woman in there had felt like she was second-rate goods for way too long.
Not anymore. Not on my watch.
I may not be the best man, or the best human being, but I’d always put her first.
From now on, that was my first priority.
“Come back when you want to spend time with her,” I called to him. “She’ll welcome you any time.”
I had no doubt about that.
People could shit on her, again and again, and she’d always have a second chance for them.
Her earlier words, though.
You should’ve worried about me ten years ago when I was struggling to find reasons to live.
God, had she really felt like that?
That sort of, kind of, maybe a lot, made me hate the man that was walking away.
For anyone to feel like that was a tragedy.
For her to feel like that…
It made me enraged.
Only when he was in his truck and leaving did I pull my phone out of my pocket and call Folsom.
“Hey,” I said the moment she answered, a screaming child could be heard in the background. “You did it!”
“Oh, it pissed me off,” Folsom replied. “They’d been taking her money for years, and purposefully overdrawing her account most of those times. It was clear how much money she had in there, and they’d purposefully take more. I’m not even sure how they got away with that, but they did. Likely, there’s a connection to a bank manager or something.”
“Assholes,” I grumbled. “You got it all back for her?”
“I got that and more,” she explained. “I got her account pulled away as her own. She’s not even in the same last name anymore as she was. She’s under yours if she ever has trouble finding it. I didn’t want the bank manager the woman has under her thumb to find it and reverse everything before I could get him fired.”
“You got him fired?” I questioned.
“He was doing some shady shit,” she explained. “Not just with your girl. He’s under review right now. They have a lot of information on him—courtesy of yours truly. They’ll fire him today, I’m betting. In the meantime, I made sure to pull what I couldn’t out of the parents out of his, because he’d been lining his pockets with Matilda’s cash for years. Your honey pie is a millionaire.”
