Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 72196 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 361(@200wpm)___ 289(@250wpm)___ 241(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 72196 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 361(@200wpm)___ 289(@250wpm)___ 241(@300wpm)
An hour after I put TJ to bed, Hannah stopped by the couch with an armful of laundry and asked me what I knew she would ask me.
“How did your night with Alex go?”
I looked up from the paperwork that I was filling out at the coffee table and saw her beautiful eyes on me.
God, it was like a shot straight to the heart.
“She said she hated me no less than a hundred times. Screamed that I was hurting her while we were out having pizza, and told some lady that I’d kidnapped her.”
Hannah’s mouth fell open in shock.
“You’re joking.”
I closed my eyes, dropped my pen, and let the remembrance of the hellish night sweep through me.
“No, not kidding at all,” I moaned into my hands. “I guess I’m just lucky that the police department is still under construction.”
Two months ago, corruption had been discovered in our local police department, and it’d been shut down pending further investigation. A month ago, the choice to reopen, but hold an election for the chief of police, had been decided. They’d also concluded that everyone in the department was being terminated, even the ones that weren’t convicted of any wrongdoing. They’d sat idly by and let whatever happened, happen.
The next Chief of Police would be the one to choose his staff.
The election had been a week ago, and the new chief was building his department. It took time, though, and thank God for that.
“What happened?”
Hannah dropped the clothes on the back of the couch and circled it, stopping beside the chair that was at an angle to the couch, and planted herself in it.
I tried not to watch the way her shorts rode up her thighs, or the way her breasts that were full of milk for our child practically spilled out of her shirt.
She wasn’t wearing a bra, either.
I swallowed and looked back down at the coffee table.
All the numbers that I was crunching were blurring together.
“The lady at the counter that had checked us out knew me. Knew that Alex was my child.” I sighed. “Since she’s the owner, everyone was a whole lot more forgiving. Plus, you know how Tanny is. She’s so freakin’ grandmotherly that nobody would dare challenge her word.”
Hannah’s mouth twitched, but just as quickly, that humor fled.
“You need to do something here, Travis.”
I knew it.
She knew it.
We all fucking knew it.
I just didn’t know what to do.
“I don’t know how to fix this,” I admitted. “I’m literally hanging on, doing everything I can, but it’s never enough.”
She didn’t come to me. Didn’t put her hands on me. Didn’t even twitch.
God, I wanted that so badly.
But Allegra had already proven that she would do just about anything to keep me exactly how she wanted me.
If there was an award for most awful ex-wife, Allegra would win it twice.
She didn’t want me. She divorced me a year after Alex was born, and that was a shocker.
I’d thought that everything was going great. Sure, I was a distracted man at times since I was helping grow a business with Dante, but I was still home every night by five, home on the weekends. She had a nice house, good clothes covering her back, and a cleaning lady that came in once a week to make sure Allegra didn’t have to stress herself.
Then, one day out of the blue, she’d decided to leave.
There’d been no convincing her to stay, and I’d been left feeling incredibly confused.
Alex had been, too.
And for her, I’d decided that the best thing to do was not to fight it. To get our lives back to normal—or as normal as two adults and a child could be when they were no longer a family—and make sure that Alex never wanted for anything. But she did that staying with her mother.
We’d worked out a visitation schedule without lawyers. We’d split as amicably as a man could when he didn’t want to leave his wife, and things had become our new normal.
Only Allegra was a bitch. This I found out over the next seven years as I started to get out in the world. To be happy again.
The moment that I slept with my first woman after Allegra, Alex missed her first Wednesday visitation with me. Because Allegra, supposedly, ‘forgot.’
It only got worse after that.
Chapter 2
I’m skipping the gym today because I already have a six-pack. At home. In the fridge.
-Things you probably shouldn’t say to your personal trainer
Travis
I woke up the next morning, my eyes heavy with sleep.
TJ hadn’t had a good night, and since Hannah had to go back to work tomorrow, I volunteered to help.
The problem was that the only thing I could really help with at this point was going to get him, changing his diaper, and handing him over.
Yesterday, she’d started pumping for him to have his meals at daycare. But I couldn’t feed him those in the middle of the night, otherwise he wouldn’t have any to eat while Hannah was gone during the day.