Page 59 of Single Dad Problems
"Luke-" Her voice was raw.
"No." And then my cork blew, everything I'd held together since my divorce. "We were ready to give you the world. Do you understand that? All three of us, in a truck, with a bear. A literal fucking bear, Callie. We were coming here to tell you that we're done pretending this is casual, that we want you, that you don't have to choose, that whatever you want we will figure out and you're standing here with this man. How could you do this? We love you. All three of us. And you just… You're just out here taking another test drive like we meant nothing."
"Luke, wait." She stepped forward, hands up. "Please, just listen!"
"I have been listening. I have been so careful. I did everything right this time and it didn't matter, it never matters, there's always-" I couldn't finish it. The sentence went somewhere I didn't want to follow, then my stomach went hard. "None of this was real Callie. I was a fool to think I could be in a relationship with a woman like you."
She was trying to speak but her sobs were overwhelming her and the tall giant beside her looked like he was about to eat us.
Cole spoke from my left. "I trusted you with my kid," he said dangerously. "I told you things I haven't told another living soul. And now I'm standing in your driveway watching you with another man and trying to figure out what the hell about us wasn't enough." He shook his head. "I can't stand here and watch this, Callie. I let myself believe in a fucking fantasy. That's on me."
"Wow. Okay." Ben's voice came out shaky, all the easy gone out of it. "Okay. Wow." He looked at the giant, then at her, then back at the giant. "I had a fucking speech. I had a whole fucking speech, Cupcake. I was going to walk up here and callyou the love of my life, and you'd laugh, and I'd laugh, and we'd-" His voice cracked. "Clearly the fucking joke's on me this time. Because everything we had was a joke."
The big man had been still through all of it, watching, his eyes moving between us and Callie. Now he came off the step and his voice dropped to something I felt in my molars. "I don't know who you three think you are, but nobody talks to her like that. Not today. Not any day. You need to get the fuck off this property right now before I lose what's left of my patience."
He was moving toward us, all of him, and I was not in a state to do the math on that.
"Wwwait." Callie's hand came up and the giant stopped. She was shaking. She was still shaking and sobbing and could barely breathe, and the part of me that wasn't demolished noticed that and didn't know what to do with it.
"Do you want them to leave?" the man asked her.
Callie looked at us like she was sick with guilt. Her eyes were slowing down their crying and turned at us with a look from her I have never seen. She wasangry.Her eyes were now flat and furious and some distant part of me might have realized that guilty women don't look at you like that.
She nodded.
"Message received," Ben said. "Loud and clear, Cupcake."
I don't remember getting in the truck. I remember the door closing and seeing the bear abandoned in a pile of roses that looked like a murder scene in the driveway and Cole's hands on the wheel not moving for a long moment, and the big man watching us go with an expression that, if I'd had a single working brain cell left, looked a hell of a lot less like a man who'd stolen Callie from us and a whole lot more like a man trying to figure out how to explain a car crash.
Nobody spoke for a long time.
"She didn't even care," Ben finally said, quiet, to the window. "Callie cares about everything and everyone. She just turned on us."
Nobody helped him finish his sentence. We had already gotten our answer.
46
Callie
I lay there in the gray morning light of Tessa's guesthouse, barely able to move, my lower back screaming protest chants in three different languages after a night on the pull-out couch. I was staring at a stucco ceiling that wasn't mine, in a living room that wasn't mine, listening to the small careful sounds of my son being awake in the bedroom that was his now because I had given it to him because Oliver needs some semblance of structure not to feel like his life is spiraling out of control again due to the actions of his highly unpredictable mother.
Six days. It had been six full days since my whole life imploded in a single morning, and the part that I'd been turning over and over like a smooth stone in my pocket wasn't the firing. It wasn't even Darren's smug puckered little face. It was three grown men in my driveway who'd seen me at my actual best for two months. Who had been inside my house and my body and my kid's life. Who had told me, more than once, that they had me. And who, when push came to shove, had taken one single look at a giantfriendly bearded man giving me a hug and immediately decided I was a slut.
I rolled onto my side and felt the couch spring give me a stern personal warning.
I had spent the last six days trying to be furious about it and I just kept landing on hurt. I wanted to hate them, but I hated myself more because I missed them. I couldn't believe it. The bastards didn't even ask. They didn't even ask. They had spent two months getting to know me, and the second they had to choose between trusting what they knew and trusting their own worst instincts, they had picked the worst instincts and never even paused.
I pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw little floating zigzags and did the inventory again, because apparently that was just my new morning routine, like a sun salutation but for emotional damage.
The yellow house was on the market. I'd had to call my realtor on Monday morning and she'd been very kind, which somehow made me cry harder than if she'd been brisk and businesslike. The house I had paid off in July. The house I had thrown every spare dollar at for three years because I wanted Oliver to grow up knowing that no man, no judge, no boss, no act of God could take a roof off his head. I had killed that mortgage. I had stood on the porch and cried about it like a maniac. Three months later I had no job, no savings, and a beautiful little yellow house that did not pay for groceries. Which, as it turns out, you still need.
I had been so smart. I had been so careful. I had been a woman with a plan. And my own plan had turned around and chewed off my fingers.
The other inventory item was that I was homeschooling Oliver now, because nothing in this world was going to make me put my eight-year-old back under Darren Beauford's roof. We had been working through second grade math at the guesthousekitchen table all week, and my brain was about to implode from all the fractions.
The final inventory item, which I would not be thinking about this morning thank you very much, was that I was probably pregnant. I had not taken a test because taking a test would make it real, and I had used up all my real for the month.
The bedroom door clicked open. Oliver appeared in the doorway in his blue dinosaur pajamas, hair sticking up in five directions, holding his book.
