Wait! What the hell was Paul doing in her bed? Joy sat bolt upright and clutched the covers around her as if the man hadn’t seen every inch of her in every conceivable fashion. She glanced down at the slender form, intending to kick him out of her bed, her home, and her life, but then she blinked and realized the person wasn’t Paul at all.
No, Paul’s doppelgänger had somehow found her way into Joy’s bed. “Britt?” she said to her twenty-four-year-old daughter. “What are you doing here?”
Britt pushed her short blond hair from her forehead and stared up at her mother with red, sleepy eyes. “Hi,” she said simply.
“Hi.” Joy smiled down at her. “When did you get here?”
“About three a.m.” She sat up and tugged at her old One Direction T-shirt. Britt had been a huge fan of the band as a young teenager and had gotten the shirt at the concert the pair of them had attended. “I tried to wake you up, but you were completely out. You even mumbled something about leaving you alone and not coming back for five years.”
“I did?” Joy asked with a laugh. “It’s been a rough few days with very little sleep.” Joy peered at her, noting the mascara smudged under her eyes along with the dark circles, and concluded she wasn’t the only one who’d been missing sleep lately. She reached out and took her daughter’s hand. “What’s wrong, sweetheart?”
Tears filled Britt’s eyes, but she shook her head as she sucked in a shaky breath.
Joy gave her a soft smile. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but I’m here for whatever you need.”
Britt leaned into her mother, resting her head on her shoulder.
They were silent for a long time as Britt cried and Joy rubbed her back and soothed her hair.
When Britt’s tears finally dried, she said, “Can I move home?”
“Of course you can, but what about Dave?” Joy’s heart ached for her daughter. She’d been with her boyfriend since they were seniors in high school, had stayed together through college, and then had moved to a town thirty miles away where they’d both gotten jobs in their chosen fields of study. Dave was in marketing, and Britt was an accountant like her father. “Is he coming with you?”
She shook her head.
“All right. Kyle’s taken his old room. You’ll need to take Hunter’s since yours has been turned into a home gym,” Joy said.
“I see how it is; the boys’ rooms remain, but mine was the first to be remodeled. I always knew you couldn’t wait to get your hands on my French doors,” Britt teased, though her eyes were still sad.
Joy chuckled. Britt’s room had beautiful French doors that led out to a deck with the hot tub she’d thought might spark some life back into her and Paul’s love life. Too bad that hadn’t worked. Paul never wanted to soak in it and in the end, Kyle had ended up using it more often than anyone else. “It does make a good exercise room.” She hugged her daughter tighter. “But I’d have given up the equipment and the French doors if it meant you’d have stayed forever.”
“Good, because I think this move might be permanent.” She let out a choked sob and buried her face in Joy’s chest, her entire body shaking as she succumbed to the pain she was feeling.
Joy held on, murmuring soothing words of love and support as her heart broke for her daughter. She didn’t have a clue as to why Britt had left Dave, but her baby girl was hurting, and Joy would’ve done just about anything to bear that pain for her.
Finally, when Britt’s sobs quieted, she pulled back and looked around for the tissue box Joy usually left by her bedside. Joy didn’t want to tell her she’d used them all up when Paul had left, so she slipped out of the bed and grabbed a fresh box from the linen closet in her bathroom.
“Here.” Joy handed the box to her daughter and then wrapped herself in her terrycloth robe. As Britt cleaned herself up, Joy sat on the edge of the bed and waited.
Britt balled the tissues up and stared at the mess in front of her.
Joy knew her girl. She wanted to talk. All Joy had to do was wait her out.
When Britt finally found the courage to speak, she looked Joy in the eye and asked, “Mom, why did you and dad break up?”
Joy stared at her daughter, more than a little surprised. “That was not at all what I thought you were going to say.”
Britt gave her a sad smile. “You do realize that none of us know what happened, right?”
“Yeah. I do.” There was a good reason for that. Joy herself didn’t even really know what had happened. She and Paul had been growing apart, but Joy hadn’t thought it was so bad that it couldn’t be put back together. Then she’d come home one night to find Paul had packed a bag and said he didn’t want to be married anymore. Now her daughter wanted answers, and Joy couldn’t blame her. She cleared her throat. “Your dad and I just weren’t moving on the same path anymore, I guess.”
“That’s not a real answer, Mom,” Britt said, reaching out and slipping her hand in Joy’s.
“I know, honey. The problem is that I don’t really know what happened. Your dad just decided he didn’t want to be married to me anymore, and he left.”
“That’s it? That’s not a reason,” she insisted. Her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed with indignation. “You didn’t even ask him to go to counseling?”
Joy couldn’t help it. She let out a bark of humorless laughter. “Oh, honey. Of course I did. I’d been asking him for months to go to counseling. I knew we weren’t connecting anymore and wanted to change that. But he didn’t. And there’s really nothing I can do to change how he feels or force him to stay with me. Besides, I don’t want to be married to a man who doesn’t want me.” Emotionally or physically. But she didn’t say that part. There were some things her children didn’t need to know.
“He just gave up on our family,” Britt said, her indignation turning to outright anger as her face flushed pink. “What the hell is his problem?”
“Britt, he didn’t give up on you or your brothers, did he? Doesn’t he call you all the time and take you to lunch every couple of weeks?”
She nodded slowly. “Yeah. He took me out last week. But it’s not the same as it used to be. He’s quiet and never talks about his life. He just asks me about work and Dave and when we’re going to tie the knot.” She turned a pale shade of green at the mention of marriage, and Joy was convinced she was going to lose the contents of her stomach. But then she rallied. “I guess he isn’t a fan of his little girl living in sin.”
“Living in sin? What is this, 1958?” Joy chuckled. “Trust me, he doesn’t care about that. He’s probably just flailing around for something to talk about.”
“Really?”
“Really. He wasn’t even sure we should get married. I’m convinced he would’ve been happy to just live together forever if I hadn’t insisted.”
Britt’s eyes widened. “What? I never knew that. So you’re saying he never wanted to be married in the first place? Is that why he left?”
Joy took a moment to think about her daughter’s question. Then she shrugged. “I don’t really think so. But maybe? We were living together and the next thing I knew, I was pregnant with your brother. And then I insisted we get married. We were starting a family, and I wanted it to be legal.”