Page 220 of Swallow Your Sorries

I shift uncomfortably. “That’s a bit sad, isn’t it?”

“What’s sadder, living with toxic parents, or having your toxic parents rotate around the globe so they can infect other people instead?”

Yes. I’d been relieved when Jarett became an absentee father, and my Mum….well, she’s there.

Or she was.

I meet Bae’s gaze again, but he isn’t looking at me. More importantly, however, I can see that neither is Rin who’s standing just left of us.

Mistress cuts the music and whacks her cane before shouting out instructions to Aria and Gant to start again. She’s such a perfectionist that everyone knows the duet would be run through no less than four more times in a row.At least.So I use the opportunity to grab my water bottle from my gym bag and that’s when I hear the vibrating.

All phone vibrations are the same, right? Then why does it sound so angry this time? Or maybe it’s just the floorboards it’s bouncing against that’s amplifying the sound and causing my anxiety to soar as I fish my phone out.

Another private number rolls across the screen and for a second, I hesitate to answer it. Then, I think of Mum and her partying and her lack of posts and calls. Maybe she’d lost her phone. Maybe she was hurt and borrowing someone else’s phone. Maybe someone else was calling me on her behalf because she couldn’t…

I try to swallow down the negativity but I can’t. It’s like a hard lump in my throat.

I’m being ridiculous.

I swipe the green phone icon across the screen and answer it. “Hello?”

I barely get the last syllable out when the angry, feminine voice of an older woman blasts across the speakers.

“Jaime! I’ve been trying to reach you for two weeks. I know you’ve blocked me on your new number.”

Mum and I had shared my phone for a few weeks after we left town two years ago when she’d lost hers in the chaos of the move. She’d quickly recovered her old mobile number though. It was something she prioritised because how else could her beloved Jarett ever reach her otherwise?

It must be someone we met during that time.

“Umm, who is this?” I ask tentatively but once again I’m blasted.

“Funny. Listen, you have until tomorrow to pay the rental balance—”

Rental balance? Then it hits me. Maisy, the landlord. We’d used my number on the lease, but Mum had updated it a week later. I guess Maisy had kept it just in case. She never did throw anything away if her apartment just beneath ours was any indication.

“-or I’ll have the locks changed and before you start up with that ‘I know the law’ bullshit, so do I. You’ve had a court order for weeks.”

“Weeks? Wait—”

“It’s not my fault you never bothered to open it. It’s still on your step.”

What?

“How long has it been on the steps?” I ask, my stomach freefalling.

“Nearly a month. Maybe you’d have noticed it if you spent more than two hours at home.”

“Wait—” My head’s spinning.

“No more waiting. To be frank, I don’t even want the money. I’m only calling to show the judge a record that we’ve spoken and that I’ve been trying to contact you for weeks. Come to my office with the check by ten a.m. or not at all.”

Beep! Beep! Beep!

I flinch, pulling the phone away from my ear as the call’s disconnected. I didn’t even know modern phones could make that ear-crawling disconnection sound.

Our apartment's filled with damp, and the walls are too thin, and the water never gets hot enough, but it had been our home. Our home after the shelter. Our new home with no memories of Jarett besides the shitty ones that crawled through the windows during a bad dream. It was our new start. It was the ‘start’ of a new relationship between Mum and me.

Now, it’s gone, or it will be by ten a.m. tomorrow.

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