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“Why do you care?” she asked. “You don’t even like me.”
Donna grabbed her arm—not hard like Tanner had done—but when she flinched, Donna dropped it and sighed.
“I’m sorry. I should have stepped in sooner, but you’re good at hiding things. Just not good enough. I do like you, Liz. I’d had hopes that Tanner would settle down when he met you...but it didn’t happen.”
She wasn’t going to ask if this had happened before with another woman. It didn’t matter at this point.
All that mattered was that she had money and the means to get the hell out and she was doing it.
“What are you going to tell Tanner?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Donna said. “I’m going to act shocked. He won’t come after you. Trust me. He’ll blame it all on you and say good riddance.”
Liz didn’t care. “I don’t know where to go,” she said.
“Go home,” Donna said. “It’s time you do. Your father will understand.”
“I don’t think I have much of a choice,” she said.
She kicked it into overdrive packing her car to the brim with everything that was hers. She wouldn’t take one thing that wasn’t.
Everything was in Tanner’s name anyway.
Once she was in her car, she called work, talked to the one person she trusted and said she had to leave town and wasn’t coming back.
Her supervisor told her to be safe and when she got to her destination to reach out so they could make sure she got all the money coming to her.
It was as if everyone knew and she felt like such an idiot.
No more. She was going home whether she liked it or not.
1
Make It My Own
One Year Later
“I thinkyou’re in over your head,” Trevor Sherman said to her.
Her father was trying to be nice. Liz knew it, but she had to do this for herself whether she was in over her head or not.
She was no longer taking orders from anyone.
It’d taken her a long time to move on from her divorce.
Donna was right—Tanner not only didn’t come after her, he didn’t contest anything.
Why would he? He kept it all. It was more like she didn’t contest anything.
“It’s the first home I’ve ever owned myself,” she said. “I can’t wait to make it my own.”
“It’s huge,” her father said. “And old. It needs a ton of work you can’t possibly do. You know I’ll help you, but I feel like this is a money trap for you.”
“It was a great deal,” she said of the Tudor house that was fifty years old.
Yeah, she was stupid to do this, but after living at home with her father since she came back to Colonie and putting her money away. Not to mention the money from Donna no one knew about. She was able to have a nice deposit on this house and money for some rehab.
“The only thing that is great about it,” her father said shaking his head, “is the fact that the roof, windows and furnace are less than five years old.”
