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“Good. I don’t usually behave like that.”
“Tim and I are going out again, so you can rest assured I’m not going to spend my days pining for you.”
“Excellent. In that case, I’ll leave you to your evening. And Melissa, thank you again.”
“For the kiss or shopping?” I shouldn’t have said that but I’m that mad.
“The shopping, obviously.”You self-righteous prig.
“Oh, will you look at that?” I say. “My boyfriend is on the other line.” Then I hang up.
How dare he call me and assume superiority over me? He doesn’t get to make me feel that way. I’m more determined than ever to make a go of it with Tim. If for no other reason than to knock Jamie down a peg or twelve.
CHAPTERTWENTY-ONE
JAMIE
Sammy doesn’t stop talking about the day until she crawls into bed and closes her eyes for the night. I love how excited she is about everything—the house, her new clothes, Melissa. Elk Lake is turning into the ideal move for her, and I couldn’t be more pleased.
Although, that’s not strictly true. I’d be happier if Melissa and I had never kissed. Every time I looked at her today, I had intense flashbacks that caused a raw desire to swarm my insides like a hive of killer bees. I got so worked up over it, I wrote out a list of talking points and called her to make sure we were on the same page. It did not go as well as I had planned it out in my mind. She might possibly hate me now. That’s not a complication I need in my life.She’snot a complication I need.
There are weightier issues on my mind. The most pressing being Beth’s return to the US. Grabbing my laptop, I take it out onto the deck and open it. I never closed out the article, so that’s the image that pops up.
Beth looks like herself, but not herself. Not only is she older and more refined looking, but her features have taken on a sharp and determined edge. Her mouth is pursed in such a way as to warn people she’s not a woman to be messed with. I scroll down the page and read:
Uber Corps Vice President Elizabeth Albus is returning to her roots.
Albus recently accepted the position of top dog at the Chicago branch of the world-renowned advertising agency Slogan. According to Albus, thirty-nine, she was born and raised in Chicago and is excited to return home.
When asked what she’s most enthused about, her eyes narrow thoughtfully. “The pizza,” she decides. “No matter where I’ve gone in this world, and that includes Sicily, nobody does pizza like Chicago.”
Albus’s husband Karl and stepson Fritz will be joining her …
That’s where I stopped reading before, and I can’t seem to go past it now. Beth has a stepson. A stepson she’s apparently been raising if he’s moving across the world with her. A seed of rage grows inside of me. How in God’s name can she make time in her life to raise another person’s child when she can’t even make the time to see her own? And how canPIZZAbe what she misses most about Chicago when her own daughter was there for twelve years? The woman is unbelievable.
I don’t know Beth’s phone number anymore. It changed when she moved to Germany, and she never bothered to send me her new one. Not that I would have used it. Although, I certainly would have thought about it.
I yearned to share every funny thing our daughter ever said, every tooth lost, every heartache she had to endure. I wanted her to know when Sammy got her appendix out or when she broke her leg roller skating. I wanted to reach out every time she got straight A’s or won an award at school. I ached for the knowledge that Beth loved Sammy and wanted to be a mother to her. Yet she never called. She never so much as sent a birthday card.
And now she’s returning home with a stepson.
I didn’t tell Sammy about that part because it would have destroyed her. She’s been through enough this last year without my making her life more difficult.
Moving the cursor to a search engine, I type in Beth’s name and company name. Her email address doesn’t pop up, but others do, and their formats are all the same.
Opening my email, I type in what I assume is her address.
Beth,
It’s been a long time. Too long.
Our daughter is twelve years old now and has just come through a very harrowing year. Her health is fine, but her heart has taken quite a hit. So much so that we recently left Chicago and moved to a small town in Wisconsin for a fresh start.
Sammy and I are both guilty of looking you up online over the years. She is full of questions. We are both full of heartache.
I honestly thought that after we talked in London all those years ago, you would have eventually found your way home to us. I now realize that was wishful thinking. As such, I’d managed to make myself believe you weren’t cut out for family life, that motherhood was a reality so foreign to you, you couldn’t assimilate it into your brain.
But then I read an article that you’re returning to Chicago with your husband and stepson. What in the actual hell, Beth? How can you raise someone else’s child and have no interest in your own? How can you be the woman I loved for so many years when it seems I hardly even knew you?
