Page 79 of The Anchor Holds

“I did,” I ground my molars. I’d hoped she’d leave it at that. Fiona was the one most likely to do that, except for Tina who didn’t ask questions about any of the love lives of anyone in the group and grumbled about ‘soap opera bullshit’ whenever she did find herself caught in such a conversation.

Fiona was a little more down for girl talk but tended to wait until the other person was ready.

Not this time, it seemed.

“You sneaky bitch.” She whacked my arm with surprising force given her small frame.

I rubbed at it, scowling at her, but she was too busy to receive said scowl since she was taking a box of matches out of June’s paws.

“When did this start happening?” She opened the fridge, rifling to find a container of strawberries, ripping off the top and handing it to June.

I bit my tongue instead of saying how most of the strawberry juice would end up on my furniture instead of in June’s mouth. Who gave a shit?

Happy with her instrument of destruction, June tore off again, leaving me with her mother’s full attention. Well, not herfullattention. I was around enough mothers to know that they never stopped watching or thinking about their child.

Men, on the other hand… I’d seen them let their child fall into an open basket of laundry and flail about with their legs in the air for minutes before they noticed.

“I don’t know, a month ago?” I was going for nonchalance, as if I didn’t know exactly when things started.

Fiona’s eyes widened. “A month?”

“Inside voice, Momma!” June screeched from the living room.

“Sorry, baby. Your mother just found out her best friend has been screwing an attractive fisherman for over a month and hadn’t told me.” She spoke to her baby without the baby talk that she’d told me she found ‘offensive.’

“Squewing,” June parroted before continuing to smush a strawberry into the sofa.

“I’ll pay your cleaning bill for the sofa.” Leaning on the counter, Fiona waved her hand in the direction of her daughter. “Now, tell me how the fuck this happened and what the sex is like. Well, I don’t need to know what the sex is like since I saw the kiss on the beach…” She fanned herself. “Actually, I do need to know, since the sex must be fucking excellent for you to be brave enough to make it public.”

“I wasn’t brave enough to make it public. Yourfucking husbanddid that,” I reminded her. Through the joy of Henry’s arrival, Kip had missed my wrath and intense questioning as to why the fuck he’d invited Elliot. He’d been mysteriously missing when I’d gone to pick up Mabel the day after. Coward.

Fiona pursed her lips. “That he did,” she replied over the chatter of June throwing things off the sofa, which she’d somehow managed to climb on top of.

She glanced at her daughter without concern. Fiona was not a helicopter mother and was as laid back as it got. It was her easygoing husband who followed his daredevil daughter around, wringing his hands while broaching a serious case for her to wear a helmet all day.

“You like him,” Fiona deduced.

I considered lying. “Yes. I do.”

It felt like an admission of weakness. A defeat. A cracking down the very center of who I was.

Fiona smiled.

“That doesn’t mean I’m a part of this club.” I pointed at her. “This loved-up Jupiter club with the husbands and babies. There is no ride off into the sunset here. It’ll end. Messily, likely. If I don’t end it soon.” I chewed my lip.

Fiona stared at me. She was shrewd, not some romantic asshole who was ignorant to all the horrors of the world. She knew about the horrors of the world. Intimately. She knew about loss, pain and real terror. Fuck, her ex-husband had tried to kill her when she was pregnant with June.

“Falling for someone isn’t a shortcoming,” she told me softly. “And it doesn’t make you any less badass.”

“I know,” I scoffed. “I’m badass no matter what. And I’m not falling for him.”

“Okay,” she nodded, her tone telling me she didn’t believe me. “I figured you’d be a lot of things in the face of something real, Calliope, but a coward wasn’t one of them.”

I gaped at her, shocked by the unadorned insult of her words. Though she didn’t mean it to hurt. She was a no bullshit kind of person. She called it as she saw it.

And she saw a coward, apparently. It hurt a lot more than I’d expected it too. Likely because it was true.

“I’m not a coward because I know it’s smarter to end it before anyone gets hurt,” I argued sharply.

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