Page 100 of Call You Mine
Patricia sighs loud enough for me to hear over the phone. “Unfortunately, no. Not since she signed the parental rights paperwork. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I figured,” I reply, caught off-guard by how disappointed I am. After this long, I thought my mom couldn’t disappoint me anymore.
After we finish the call, I get back to figuring out the schedule for the next six weeks.
The Hey Honey’s owners, Luke and Annie, are in the process of opening another location, so they aren’t available for the few shifts they usually pick up when we’re low on staff, so I might have to take up some of their friends on their offers to fill in.
I don’t always like asking for their help, especially since I want to get things under control with a larger long-term staff—it’s my job as the manager, the one Luke trusts me to do—but I’ve been trying to make next month's schedule all morning, and I just don’t have enough people.
The owner of the building we rent, Emmett, runs the bar next door. His wife, Drew, as well as our graphic designer, Mia, help out both here and at Lenny’s once in a while, always reminding me when they stop in to give them a call if I need any help.
I don’t want to, but I might not have a choice.
Because I’m fucking exhausted.
This last weekend was a dream, one I keep wishing I didn’t have to wake up from, but that’s all it was. All itcanbe.
It was an apparition of what could’ve been, maybe in another life—one where my marriage wasn’t just paperwork, that kissing Anderson wasn’t just a mistake, that our whole relationship wasn’t just pretend.
Today has been a reminder of why it was nothing more than an alternate reality.
Real life is stressful and exhausting, and it all falls on me.
And me alone.
Especially now, not only with the adoption becoming more of a reality, so real that I feel the heaviness of it settling on my chest, but with the divorce that will inevitably follow.
Along with the positive pregnancy test hidden in my nightstand drawer back at home.
Home.
It’s not my home.
It’s Anderson’s.
Right now, me and Georgie and this bundle of cells in my uterus don’t have a home.
Not a real one.
CHAPTER 35
AVA
Despite the crazinessof the day, my mind quiets when I close the front door of Anderson’s house behind me. Immediately, I hear the warm music from the record player in the living room and smell the savory, smoky aroma from the kitchen, making my mouth water and my stomach growl loudly enough to remind me that all my meals today have consisted of decaf coffee and a protein bar.
I thought that coming into Anderson’s home would have my compulsions and anxiety skyrocketing, but, for some reason, it’s been the opposite.
Ever since the fire last year, my compulsions were loud and constant—intrusive thoughts looping until I lined things up, wiped them down, checked the lock one more time, chased that fleeting “just right” feeling that never actually lasted.
But here, the anxiety doesn’t spike the same way; when my thoughts start to spiral, Anderson’s presence—the sound of him in the next room, the steady rhythm of another person moving through the space, seeing traces of him everywhere I look—interrupts the loop before it tightens, grounding me in the moment.
The urges are still there—they always will be—but they don’t get a chance to grip down as hard, and for the first time in a long time, I remember what it’s like to feel relief that lasts more than three seconds.
Relief that reminds me how to let go, how to focus on what’s in front of me, how to remember that it doesn’t always have to be so hard.
As I hang my bag and jean jacket up on one of the three hooks Anderson hung up by the door when Georgie and I first moved in, I step out of my shoes and put them next to Anderson’s work boots, fixing Georgie’s sneakers that look like she threw off her feet.
“Ava?” Anderson calls from the kitchen, his voice just above the music I can assume Georgie is playing.
