Page 47 of If This is Love

Mia wanted that flower bed. I’d bought this house and renovated it myself for the family we were supposed to have together, and my wife asked for a flower bed, so I gave her a perfect flower bed.

I gave her a perfecthome. Out of any project I’d ever worked on, I took more meticulous care to buildthis homebecause it was for her andus. I’d vowed to give her my whole life long before we were married, and I worked myself empty and hollow giving her exactly what she wanted. And it wasn’t enough. None of it. Ever.

I approached the front steps and sat on the top one while I snuffed out the cigarette and lit up another. Everything was pointless today.

Gunner slumped down and sprawled out on the porch next to me, and I dragged and puffed while I stared at a pale, pink-vein petunia poking out onto the path. That was Mia’s favorite garden flower. That’s why I chose it. But even though it was her favorite, she still didn’t even care about it.

* * *

Six Years Ago

“There’s reallynothing to say, so we don’t need to do this.” Mia was standing about an arm’s length in front of me, slender arms crossed over her chest while her suitcase sat on the porch next to her. I was staring at it. I thought about dousing it with gasoline and torching it, but that wouldn’t fix what was wrong here. That wouldn’t make her stay. That wouldn’t make her love me. “Just try to take care of yourself, Gabe. I think you need more help than just a dog.”

Gunner was sitting at my feet, and he cocked his head and quirked his ears forward, eyeballing her.

“Yep,” was all I said.

After all, there wasn’t anything to say.

Nothing to say about the fact that I just packed her shitforher when she was the one so desperate to leave in the first place. Nothing to say about the fact that she’d been sneaking around behind my back for years and had a totally obvious crush onConnor, who was just as much of grouchy-ass raincloud as I was. Nothing to say about the fact that I’d loved her since I was a teenager and signed my life away to the USMC to make sure I could provide for her. Nothing to say about the fact that they used me up and spit me out, but I still put my ass through college and built a business and a literal fuckinghousefor her. Nothing to say about the fact that I would literally get down on my hands and knees just like when I paved this concrete path myself, and crawl after her, andbegher to stay, beg her tolove mehow I hadalwaysloved her if I thought it might fix things.

But there was no fixing it. No changing her mind or any of the disloyal shit she’d done.

It was just the end.

I didn’t move from where I was standing on the porch, and I watched her roll her suitcase down the path, and she dragged it right over the blossom of a pale, pink-vein petunia that was sticking out into the path.

She didn’t even notice, and she didn’t even say she was sorry.

Foranyof it.

She just kept walking.

And that was that.

I was alone with Gunner, and that was just that.

Just as Mia was loading the suitcase in the passenger seat of a U-Haul truck, Brennan’s blacked-out Audi RS 6 rolled onto the street and slowly made a wide turn around it. He drove up the street and parked in front of Connor’s house, and he got out just as Mia was getting in the moving truck.

The truck started to pull away from the curb, and I couldn’t watch. I also didn’t really want to go back inside. Everything felt like a raw nerve. I sat down on the top step and grabbed the pack of smokes and lighter I hid in a potted flower. I lit up and hunched forward to rest my elbows on my knees, dropping my head below my shoulders as the burn spread and scorched without warning, and I ignored it. Just like I did with everything that bothered me.

Gunner sniffed the back of my head and then planted his ass on the porch next to me, his feet slowly sliding until he was lying down, and he rested his head on my lap. Even with as much as I griped at Luke about not treating Gunner like a pet, he really felt like one sometimes. He felt like the faithful dog that would’ve been great to have around growing up, who might have laid his head in my lap like this during so many other things that hurt just as much as this did.

I rubbed his floppy yellow ears with my free hand. “Good boy. Good boy, Gunner. Good boy.”

“Afternoon, Stassarn’t,” Brennan piped up from a short distance from me.

I didn’t even really know this fuckin’ kid that well. He’d started hanging around the neighborhood a couple years ago because he and Connor had become friends working at a local record label. “Really don’t need to call me that anymore, Riley.”

“Right,” he said quickly, “anyway, are you doing anything? I’m meeting Connor at the Old Point to watch the game, and Luke’s working. Want to come?”

I squinted incredulously up at him, resisting the urge to groan. Brennan was a weird one. He had a reputation the size of Texas for how much he slept around, but his favorite activity seemed to be tagging along with Connor and the other vets in the neighborhood even though he was a trust fund baby from the upper crust of New Orleans society whose “bachelor pad” was one of the most famous and expensive houses in the French Quarter. It was painfully obvious he didn’t really have any friends—or at least he didn’t have any friends who didn’t have a snooty, upper-crust stick up their ass—and started driving his fancy-ass car across the river to find some amongst us Westbank plebes.

Brennan was wearing a basic white t-shirt, jeans, and a pair of dark shades that made him look like a Millennial James Dean. He pushed the shades up to sit on his head and tugged at the strap of an expensive, saddle-brown, leather messenger bag across his chest. “Also,” he added, still standing there on the path in front of me like I’d invited him over or some other shit I’d never do. “I’m taking calculus this semester, and it’s kicking my ass.” He jerked his chin at me. “You took that, right?”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose with my thumb while still holding the smoldering cigarette between my fingers. “Yeah.”

“I’ll buy you a pitcher of beer if you help me study.”

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