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I buried my face in my hands at the memory of Daniel Oliver. He’d differed from any other man that I’d ever been attracted to. He was the assistant bank manager where my grandparents had done their banking. A suit, as some of my friends had called him. The girls I’d hung around with had warned me about him, yet I hadn’t been able to see anything wrong with him.
“His name was Daniel Oliver.”
“No offense but he already sounds like some stuck-up asshole.” Connor chuckled.
I smiled. He’d hit that right, and yet he’d never even seen him. I nodded. “Yeah, you pegged him, and you’ve never met him.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, I met him one afternoon when I’d stopped at the local bank to do some banking for my grandparents. I had to be granted permissions on their accounts and I had to meet with him. Of course, he was charming, good looking, and by the end of the appointment he’d asked me out.”
“That’s ballsy,” Connor said, taking another bite of the pie.
“Yeah, it was, but I was young and naïve,” I said, swiping some of the pumpkin filling with my fork.
“Uh-oh. This doesn’t sound good,” Connor replied, watching as I sucked the filling off my fork.
“Oh, well, it started out fine. I mean, we dated. He seemed to get along well with my grandparents at first. Then Grandpa took ill. Of course, my focus had to change, so my attention couldn’t be on him every single second. I spent a lot of my time at the farm and with him at the hospital. Daniel really didn’t like that. After Grandpa passed, and my attention turned back to him, he seemed okay again. We’d double date with my friend Olivia and her boyfriend, and things seemed to go really well. Then Grams came down with dementia.”
“Let me guess, he got all bent again?”
“Yes, he’d want to do these things, but I couldn’t just leave Grams alone. She’d just lost Gramps, and she’d been forgetting a lot of things. Some days she was fine, others not so much, and I worried about her constantly when I wasn’t home. Daniel would make me feel bad about not being able to go out with him.”
“You were taking care of family. He shouldn’t get like that.”
“True, but then a real man would understand that. Anyway, once I got some help from a couple of neighbours and could have some sort of life again, he was fine. Things went back to normal, and he’d be more forgiving if I wasn’t able to come out. However, one evening Grams got violent with the ladies who were staying with her, and I had to rush away to head back home. That was when things turned worse. Daniel and I began fighting nonstop. One afternoon, Olivia called me while Grams was at a medical appointment. She said she’d seen Daniel out with someone else for lunch, a woman, and they appeared to be more than just colleagues or friends.”
“He was cheating on you?”
“Yeah. At this point Grams was bad, and I just couldn’t deal with any more of his nonsense. I knew where my focus needed to be, and it wasn’t on a man who was behaving like a two-year-old and sleeping with someone else. So, a week later, when one of the home care nurses was at the house to see Grams, I ran to the grocery store. While I was gone, I figured I’d slip into the bank, have a word with Daniel, and be done with it all.”
“Good, he deserved to be told. So what happened?”
“Oh, let’s just say hell froze when I got to his office door.”
Connor looked at me, concern lining his face. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that I found out who the woman Olivia warned me about was.”
“Let me guess, it was the neighbour chick who had been helping you with watching your grams.”
I laughed. “Somehow, that would have been easier, but no. It was Olivia. My best friend.”
Connor’s shocked look made me giggle. “What? You mean she ratted on herself to you? That doesn’t make sense.”
“Yep, I opened the door to find Olivia plastered against the wall. My best friend with this…this suit, as she called him. Daniel was a very busy man at that moment with his hands full of her boobs. Right there, in the bank.”
“Oh my…”
“Yeah, so the pair of them got told. Daniel begged me not to leave him…and Olivia, well, soon after I found them together, she found him with another woman in the same position. Daniel soon got fired from the bank, and Olivia still calls me every now and again. I think the guilt of what she did got to her.”
“So you’ve heard from her since you moved back here?”
“Not yet, but she called right before I left. She even had the nerve to attend my grandmother’s funeral. To be honest, I wasn’t angry at her. I didn’t even care because of the timing of it all, but I certainly wouldn’t be friends with her again. Not when she consciously went after Daniel. I could never trust her again.”
Connor grew quiet. “Is that why you and Ella went your separate ways?”
I avoided Connor’s eyes. “No. We just grew apart,” I lied, knowing full well seeing her accept a kiss from him, when she knew full well I’d planned to make a move on him, had nearly killed me when we’d been in our teens. “Plus, after I moved, it was harder to keep up with the day-to-day. Our lives just went in different directions.”
