Page 1 of From the Embers
EASON
“Hey,” I breathed, catching Jessica’s arm as she tiptoed out of the nursery.
“Stop, Eason. I’m not in the mood.”
She was never in the mood. And not the kind of mood that happened in the bedroom. Though, coincidentally, she was never up for that, either.
I gave her arm a warm squeeze. “Come on. You have to talk to me.”
“No, I don’t!” she yelled, spinning around to face me.
Bracing for war—and defeat—I silently shut the door to our daughter’s bedroom. “Quiet or you’ll wake her.”
“You don’t have to remind me of that. I was the one who got her to sleep in the first place while you were out in the garage, pretending to be Billy Joel on that fucking piano.”
Yep. She was absolutely right. Though, I was actually trying to be Eason Maxwell and force lyrical blood from my fingertips in order to string together a damn chorus that would allow me to keep our home out of foreclosure.
“There is no winning here, Jess. If I spend all day trying to create even the biggest pile-of-shit song that I can sell to keep us afloat for another few months, you hate me for working all the time. If I stop everything to help you with the baby, we lose the house and you hate me. What am I supposed to do?”
Her eyes flashed wide, her dark eyebrows jumping up her forehead. After three years of marriage, I had enough experience to know whatever was about to come out of her mouth was going to be the God’s honest truth as she saw it. I also knew it was going to hurt like hell.
“You’re supposed to be able to support your family!”
Yep. TKO.
Willing my temper into check, I closed my eyes and focused on the sounds of her heaving breaths—broken and rasping just like our marriage. “I’m trying.”
“At what point is trying not good enough anymore?”
My eyes popped open as I read between the lines. That wasn’t just a stab at my career. That blow was as much about our marriage as my employment status.
Gritting my teeth, I warned, “Don’t say something you can’t take back.”
We’d vowed never to use divorce as a threat, and for the most part, we’d done a pretty damn good job. But in the six months since Luna had been born, the big D-word had hung on her lips almost daily. It gutted me each and every time, but I’d been walking on eggshells around her for so long I didn’t know how to do anything else.
Tears sparkled in her blue eyes. “You promised me, Eason. You swore to me the day we saw those two little pink lines on the pregnancy test. You know how I grew up and you vowed to me our baby wouldn’t have to do the same.”
All of this was true.
But while I’d been struggling to give her all the things I’d dreamed about when she’d walked down the aisle with a lace vail covering a huge smile, the life we currently had was a far cry from the dilapidated farmhouse she’d grown up in.
“That’s not fair.” I pointedly swung my incredulous gaze around our three-bedroom, two-bath, two-thousand-square-foot home we’d dubbed Maxwell Manor. It was farther away from Atlanta’s city limits than Jessica had originally wanted, but it was one of the few places we could afford with a basement to accommodate a studio. A studio that we’d never built because…well, life had happened.
More accurately, Luna Jade Maxwell had happened.
We hadn’t been planning on kids yet. Jessica and I had a lot of living to do before we wanted to start a family. What was the saying about best laid plans? The ink on my recording contract wasn’t even dry when I’d found Jessica on her hands and knees in our bathroom, tears streaming down her cheeks, and clutching a positive pregnancy test.
Was the timing ideal? Absolutely fucking not. Especially when, a few months later, my label scrapped my album and then dropped me completely.
Was Luna, with all her thick, brown hair and a set of honey-colored eyes that were so uniquely hers it was as if she defined the color, the most spectacular thing that had ever happened to me? Unquestionably.
My shoulders sagged and I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Look, can we put a pin in this for a while? I need to take a shower and start making appetizers, and as soon as Luna wakes up, I’ll run her over to Rob and Bree’s.”
“Oh right, because we can’t afford a babysitter, so we have to lean on my best friend in order to hang out with them.”
I let out a groan. Jesus, she never missed an opportunity to take a hunk of my flesh. She acted like I was the only adult who lived in the house. She’d wanted to be a stay-at-home mom like Bree. I’d wanted that for her too. But when things got tough and my savings dwindled to nothing, Jessica never once stepped up to ask what she could do or how she could help our family. And yes, I was bitter about it, but you didn’t see me taking that shit out on her.
