Page 19 of The Love Destroyers

For a second, I felt an awful ache of guilt. But then he wrote back—

Just fucking with you, Emma.

Gasping in indignation, I responded—

The only way you ever will.

Truthfully, I’d been seconds away from inviting him upstairs on New Year’s Day. I would have, if he’d said anything but what he said to me.

No one needs to know.

No one had known about Jeffrey and me. In the beginning, I’d liked that—because I didn’t want my mother getting on my case or my brother giving me disapproving looks. But Jeffrey had weaponized that secrecy to make me look like an insane stalker.

Even thinking about it, about him, made me so angry that my fists tightened to white knuckles around my phone.

Seamus’s response rolled through—

Give me time.

How’s your revenge plan working out?

He knew very well that my revenge plan was to seek out peace by retrofitting my mother’s home, so I didn’t respond.

I didn’t respond all night, and all the next day, until finally, at two in the morning, I wrote back a lie:

I don’t want revenge.

He started typing immediately, and then his response bubbled into being on my phone:

I took you for a lot of things, but never a liar. Not a coward either.

Says the man who ran from a scrawny woman with pink hair.

I never said I wasn’t a coward.

Besides, Nicole and I have come to an understanding.

I wish I could say the same were true for me, but she keeps trying to insinuate herself into my business. She came to poker the other night and kept calling my bluffs, which pissed me off before I reminded myself that I wanted to lose.

I tapped the screen of my phone before writing—

Is the understanding that you’re going to hide so she can’t get at you?

You’re changing the subject.

Canny of you to notice.

You’re not a coward. As an outside observer who has zero stake in this game, I think you should stop acting like one. Why wait for your court date? You’re giving him time to prepare.

Like I said, you’re the one who ran from Nicole like she was the big bad wolf.

He’d done it in the middle of the night, too. When Rosie shared the news of his abrupt defection, she’d shrugged and said,“Seamus can be flaky.”

Not flaky as a correspondent, though, because his reply came in quickly:

Nicole is fucking scary.

I googled your ex, by the way. He does NOT look young for fifty-two. You were fooling yourself, sweetheart.

---