Chelsea put a hand on her hip and flicked her hair back, narrowing her eyes. “I live here, Meg. So I’ll ask you again, Two-Back, what are you doing at my house?”
Her house.
Her house.
No freaking way.
“Does Adam even know you’re here, you psycho?” I seethed, thinking about pushing my way into the house.
Chelsea laughed, an obnoxiously pretty sound. God, I hated her. “Of course he does, you idiot. He’s in the kitchen making our favorite Chicken Marsala.” She leaned in toward me as if sharing a confidence. “It was the meal we had on our honeymoon in Rome.”
This couldn’t be happening. Adam wanted nothing to do with Chelsea.
“Let me speak to Adam. Now,” I barked, getting in Chelsea’s face.
She took a step back, clearly shocked by my aggression. But then she looked over her shoulder and called out, “Adam, there’s someone here to see you.”
And I heard his voice filtering down the hallway, muffled but clear. “What?”
He was there. He was actually there. And Chelsea was with him.
Chelsea, obviously seeing the devastation on my face, had to twist the knife a little bit more. “We’re going to counseling. We’re going to give our marriage another try.” She gave me a simpering smile. “That’s what you do when you love someone. You don’t give up on them. Adam knows we belong together. We always have.” She gave me a once over, her lip curling in disgust. “You can get off my porch now.”
Then she shut the door in my face.
I was left standing there with my two bottles of champagne, feeling like the world’s dumbest person. Slightly crazed, I pulled a piece of paper and a pen out of my bag and quickly wrote a note, then attached it to the two bottles of champagne and left them by the door.
Then I ran back to my car just as the first tears began to fall.
**
I was thankful Mom was out with Adam’s mother when I got home. I didn’t want to have to explain why I was near an emotional breakdown. I slammed the front door behind me and fell against it, sagging to the floor. I brought my knees up to my chest, buried my face in my hands, and sobbed like I hadn’t done since Dad died.
And over a stupid man too.
I felt like the worst kind of pathetic, the kind that wanted to curl into a ball and die because the guy I had pinned my dreams on had turned out to be exactly what I always thought he was.
A grade-A asshole.
I couldn’t get the image of Chelsea’s perfect, slender body in her skimpy lingerie that fit her like a goddamn glove. Then I started imagining Adam taking off that lingerie and putting his mouth on her—
“Arghhh!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, letting it all out.
Whitney appeared in the living room doorway, a pair of earbuds dangling around her neck, seeming perplexed. “What in the actual hell, Meg?” Then she looked closer at my face. Without a word, she took my hands and hauled me to my feet.“Don’t let him do this to you. Don’t ever give a man that kind of power.” She gave me a little shake, her face thunderous.
My lips quivered, and I tried not to sob. God, I hated weakness in any form, and I wanted to slap myself in the face. “I let my guard down, Whit. I let myself love him again. I should have known better.”
Then I was crying, when I swore I wouldn’t cry.
Whitney steered me into the kitchen and sat me down at the kitchen table before filling the kettle and putting it on the stovetop. She got out two mugs and a box of tea with a green and brown label.
“I’m making you some of my relaxation tea. Don’t be weird about it. Just drink it and trust me,” Whitney said, dumping tea bags into the boiling kettle to steep.
A pungent, musky odor filled the room. “What kind of tea is this?” I asked after she put down a steaming mug in front of me.
“Drink,” she ordered. I did as she said, tentatively taking a sip.
I looked up at my sister in amusement. “You know there’s weed in this, right?”
Whitney gave me a “well duh” look. “That’s what makes it so relaxing. And it’s purely medicinal, so don’t go getting judgy. Now drink up and then tell me what’s going on.”
“I wouldn’t judge you for drinking weed tea. Other stuff, sure, but not that,” I joked. I drank half of the hot drink before I started to feel nicely mellow, my head slightly fuzzy. It felt as if I were wrapped in cotton. It took the edge off my extreme rage.
“I hate him,” I stated firmly. “I hate him so much.” I took another drink. “Adam Ducate is an asshole.”
Another drink.
Whitney refilled my mug. “What happened? You can tell me, you know.”
I gave her a disbelieving look. “Why? Because we’ve been so close the last few years? What do you even know about heartbreak? You’re only serious relationship is with your stupid job.”
Whitney blew across the top of her tea before sipping. “I know more about heartbreak than you think, sis,” she said softly. So softly I wasn’t sure I heard her.
I snorted. “Yeah, okay. I think I would have heard about some epic break up from Mom.”
Whitney shook her head. “It wasn’t a breakup. Not really. It was...something else.”
Even in my slightly drugged state, I sensed the heaviness that weighed on my sister. That the story she had inside her was painful in a way that I couldn’t understand.
I put my mug down and gave Whitney my attention, feeling glad to focus on something, on someone who wasn’t Adam. “What happened?” I asked, fully expecting her to shut me down. She had done it enough times over the years I wouldn’t have been surprised.
To my astonishment, she began to speak.
“I know I haven’t been the easiest person for the last few years—”
“Understatement of the year, Whit. You’ve completely bitched out,” I jumped in.
Whitney winced but didn’t deny it. “Sometimes things change you, Meg. They change who you are down to the cellular level. I learned that if I wanted to get through each day, I couldn't be Whitney Galloway the way I used to be. I had to be someone hard. Someone that couldn’t be hurt. Because if I let myself feel, then I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be sitting with you right now.”
I sat back in my seat, completely taken aback. “What in the hell happened, Whitney? This doesn’t have to do with Kyle Webber staying with you in LA, does it?”
Meg looked startled. “Who told you about that?”
“What happened?” I asked again, ignoring her question.
“It has nothing to do with Kyle. Kyle was—is—wonderful. He definitely deserved better than what I gave him,” she said sadly.
There was a lot to that story that I wanted to hear about; I knew now wasn’t the time, but I’d get it out of her later one way or another.
“Shit happens, Meg. Bad stuff. And you learn to deal with it, and you move on. That’s what I did.”
I was pretty sure she hadn’t moved on. She had perhaps suppressed it. She’d pushed it way down where she thought it couldn’t hurt her anymore. But if I had learned anything from my own tragically melodramatic history, it was that nothing ever stayed hidden. It came back to haunt you in one way or another. And just when you thought you were entering into a shiny, new healthy place in your life, those bottled up emotions rose out of the ashes like a pissed off phoenix.