Page 34 of Accidentally Marrying the Prisoner
“No,” she says, turning to unlock her door.
Double fucking ouch.
I can hear Wyatt’s growl from across the street, and I find him trying to pierce a hole in my chest with his glare alone. Since I don’t feel like getting into a fight, liable to piss Mirabeth off further, I step away, but only to jog around to the passenger side of the Beetle, tugging on the door handle. I give Wyatt awe’re fine, everything’s finekind of wave, and he drives off when Mirabeth gives him a chin nod. He stares murderously at me through his side mirror until I’m too far out of his sight. Yeesh.
Mirabeth shifts on her feet. “I thought you wanted to get changed first.”
And risk her driving off while I’m in the apartment? No. “Changed my mind.” I give the handle another tug, and she finally relents, climbing into the car and reaching across to unlock my door. Dropping into my seat, I ask, “Where to, princess?”
Since our town is too small to have a Walmart of our own, Mirabeth drives forty minutes to the one closest in a larger town nearby. Talk about an icy silence, where I question if I’m doing more harm than good by tagging along. Mirabeth says not one word to me until we arrive, and it’s only to send me off on my own.
Having walked each aisle of the grocery section three times already, I flag down a young employee shopping a curbside order and ask him, “Where would I find the goosepenny tipples?”
“Do you mean gooseberries? If we have them, they’re in the produce section,” he says in aduhvoice, giving me a blank stare as he points down the main aisle toward the front of the store.
“No, my wife specifically asked for the goosepenny tipples. She repeated it several times.”
“You sure?”
“Can you just look it up?” I’d do it myself, but the internet is shit and won’t load inside the store.
“Don’t have it,” he says, showing me his handheld device with zero search results.
I square my jaw and pull my phone from my back pocket, tapping on Mirabeth’s contact. The call goes unanswered, as does the second. When the third does so as well, I begin to panicthat she’s left me, and I jog around the store, drawing attention as I look for the woman who sent me on a wild goose chase.
“There you are,” I say with relief, finding her in the feminine hygiene section with a cart full of toiletries. “There’s no such thing as goosepenny tipples.”
“Oh. My bad. Must have gotten the name wrong.” She sniffles and turns the cart away, pushing it toward self-checkout.
I grit my teeth throughout checkout and all the way across the massive parking lot to the car, where the hot wind whips a few empty grocery sacks across the cracked pavement. As I load Mirabeth’s purchases into the trunk, sweat rolls down my back, mixing with the sawdust I wasn’t able to yet shower off, making my skin itch like the devil.
Still, I keep my lips shut, impatiently waiting until we get inside the apartment to ask, “Can we please talk now?”
“I need to use the restroom,” Mirabeth says, clutching her purse and her grocery sacks of toiletries.
“Fine, but afterward…” I walk circles around the apartment, steeling myself for what’s ahead. “We’re having this conversation, whether she wants to or not,” I tell Merlin, who’s licking a paw as he lounges on the bed.
He’s still fat and grumpy as he ever was, despite my putting him on a strict diet. I’m pretty sure Mirabeth has been sneaking him treats behind my back.
“This silent treatment gets resolved tonight. I want my screechy, argumentative, chaotic wife back,” I tell him.
Merlin stretches, then jumps from the bed onto Mirabeth’s drafting table, skidding across the smooth surface, accidentally knocking her laptop off. I dive and catch it in time before it hits the carpet, and the computer wakes up, the screen brightening. And what I find on it, finally able to make sense of the little symbols marking each day, thanks to the legend at the top, has my heart slamming against my ribs.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
MIRABETH
If there was ever a moment in my life when I needed my mom, it’s now. This past week in particular has been one of the most stressful of my life as I’ve double-checked what is possibly every calendar in existence, and I’ve never felt more alone.
“Please, Mom, pick up.” I sniffle into the phone while sitting on the closed toilet lid with the positive pregnancy test in my hand. I’m no longer angry at her for what she’s done. I simply need her now that I can no longer hope or wish that I’d hallucinated everything, and I’m facing a reality in which my dreams are coming true, but in the worst possible way.
I’ve never shoplifted before, and I thought I was going to pass out from the anxiety of being caught—either by an employee or Conrad—when I slipped the pregnancy test box into my purse. I hadn’t wanted to, but I couldn’t let Conrad see it before I was sure what the test would say, since I hadn’t been quick enough to check out without him hovering over my shoulder. Neither did I want him to know that I stopped taking my birth control as soon as I missed my period. At least that was one thing I could hide from my nosy liar of a husband.
When Conrad suddenly bursts into the bathroom, having silently picked the lock, I rear back with a scream. Both the pregnancy test and my phone go flying in the air.
“You’re pregnant?!” he shouts, wearing a brilliant smile that makes me want to lift and hurl the whole toilet and sink at him. I don’t know how he already knows that, since the test has landed face down in the tub.
