Total pages in book: 74
Estimated words: 73398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 294(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 294(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Finally, if those first two things weren’t enough, then there was the matter of his ex-wife. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be subjected to her, even loosely through Coke and Frankie, for the rest of my life.
I wasn’t sure that I could handle her.
Coke still had a lot to do with her and her family.
He may not be married to her anymore, but he still had plenty of dealings with Beatrice’s father, if not Beatrice herself.
And I didn’t think that Beatrice would be serving much time for kidnapping me. Nobody had been hurt in the process, and she had a shark of a lawyer who my father had warned me would pull no punches.
Did I want her lawyer to pull things out of his hat that could potentially hurt me? I’d be subjected to his verbal assault…and I didn’t want to be skewered alive in front of anybody, let alone an entire courtroom of people. I also knew that, despite Coke and my father’s assurances, they couldn’t protect me from this.
My final thought was that I was going to drop the charges against Beatrice.
I had a lot more to lose here than she did, but I knew that this couldn’t be dropped since she’d committed a felony. I was having some serious doubts about testifying against her.
I had my stepping stone to my dream job. My employer had a morals clause included in my contract since this was a children’s production company. I’m not sure what would be considered immoral on my part, but I didn’t really want to push it.
And what I had going on was, quite possibly, a scandal.
So no, I would not be opening the door.
I would stay in my house and keep my ass right where it was.
I would not, under any circumstances, go to his house.
I. Would. Not.
Chapter 21
Some of you need to go to church because I don’t want you in hell with me.
-Coke’s secret thoughts
Coke
I slammed the door shut and walked into the kitchen to find my daughter staring at me expectantly.
“She wouldn’t come back?” she asked.
I shook my head. “No.”
“Did she answer the door this time?” she continued, munching on one of the oranges that her mother had knocked on the floor earlier.
The rest of the fruit was resting on the counter, while the bowl my mother had made with her own two hands lay broken into four jagged pieces.
I absently picked up the orange peel, hating the way that it just lay on the counter instead of being immediately discarded into the trash, and froze when I saw the bowl sitting on the very top.
Beatrice hadn’t been stupid.
She knew what she was doing.
Beatrice had hated that I used paper plates. Hated. It.
Beatrice was more of a fine dining kind of woman. Placemats, two forks, linen napkins.
She was literally everything that I wasn’t.
She’d also hated that I had kept some “crap” from my parents.
The bowl that she had broken had been the bane of her existence. That bowl followed me everywhere and had since I’d moved out of my mother’s house and into her father’s at the age of eighteen. It’d gone with me out of state when I’d gone to basic training in Missouri. To three duty stations, one in Germany, and the other in Japan before settling back into Missouri. Then had come back home with me once I’d been injured.
She hated the bowl. She’d accused me of loving that bowl more than her so many times that I’d lost count.
The funny thing was that she was right. I loved the bowl.
My mother had made it for me for Christmas the year that I turned seventeen. She’d gone to a pottery class at the local YMCA. She’d made one for all of her sons. It was lopsided since mine was her first attempt, and it was painted a putrid gray that really wasn’t all that attractive.
But it’d been the most special thing I’d ever gotten from my mother.
She’d spent quite a bit of money on that class, and we never really had money to spare.
The bowl was big, ugly and one of the only things I’d ever gotten from her that hadn’t been well used or something that all of us brothers had to share.
And Beatrice had fucking broken it.
“Dad, are you okay?” Frankie asked, taking a bite of her orange.
I nodded, throwing the peels on top of the trash.
“Yeah,” I croaked. “I’m going to go work on the truck. You’ll be okay?”
Frankie looked at me like I’d grown a second head.
“Yeah, Dad. I’ll be okay. Plus…I don’t think Mom will be back any time soon. Not with what you said to her.”
What I said to her wasn’t anything she hadn’t heard before. However, I think that this was the first time that she actually believed me.
“I haven’t loved you in a very long time, Beatrice. You lied, connived, and then I was forced to marry you. The only reason I showed you even a modicum of kindness was because you first had my kid growing inside of you. Then, because my kid needed a mother. You refused to move with me and tried to force me to choose between our family and the career I needed to support it.”