Page 20 of The Jilted Lovers Club
“It’s not that simple,” he says.
“Really? Because from where I stand, it’s very simple. She embezzled from the family business and then abandoned you all to pick up the pieces. She sounds lovely.”
Ashton crouches down, then sits next to Lottie who immediately climbs into his lap. I join them on the floor, then sigh.
“I’m sorry. I mean, I’m not sorry about judging your ex, but I’m sorry for prying. None of this concerns me. How you all handled it is not for me to say.”
“You’re right, it’s not,” he says. As much as that pisses me off, I have no argument against it. “And you’re also right that we’ve let her get away with all this by keeping it under wraps. But we’retalking about Bec and Bob’s daughter here. We’re talking about Lottie’s mom.”
“We’re talking about a woman who didn’t think twice about stealing your livelihood.” Then I shake my head. “There I go again. Sorry.”
“It’s more than that,” he says, waving a hand as if to excuse my intrusion. “We’d been fighting nonstop, and she wanted nothing to do with Lottie. She couldn’t even pick up at the house. I was working my ass off, and I’d come home to Lottie in the same clothes she’d slept in, her diaper leaking, and the house a complete wreck while Sasha rotted on the couch. The worst part? Lottie didn’t even cry anymore. Six months old, and she didn’t cry. It was like she gave up.” He looks down at his daughter, twisting a piece of her hair while she leans against his chest. “To top it off, Sasha started smoking pot again. It wasn’t anything new. We both met at a cannabis farm we worked at in Oregon, and both of us had been heavy smokers. But when she got pregnant, I’d stopped smoking alongside her in solidarity. I thought we’d quit altogether, but then she started up again after Lottie was born. While I was working, and while she was in charge of our daughter. And it pissed me off. I was giving up everything for our family, and she was just getting high and letting Lottie sit in her shit.”
“Ashton, you don’t need to tell me anything else,” I say.
“No, I do. I’ve held this inside for way too long, and I’m fucking tired of keeping all of this in.” He looks at me. “I blamed it on the drugs. I wasn’t sure what else she was on. Honestly, I still don’t. All I knew was that I couldn’t take it anymore. I was fucking tired, and I worried about our daughter. I mean, Sasha wouldn’t even let me involve her parents, so I was completely on my own.” He lets out a breath. “I finally came to my senses and went to Bec and Bob with all of this. I was in way over my head. This wasn’t the Sasha I knew, and I couldn’t do this anymore.”
“What did they do?”
“They took her in,” he says. “Packed a bag of clothes and had her come to their house. It was just across the way, but she wouldn’t see us anymore. Not even Lottie. Bec put a name to it, and I felt like the biggest asshole because all the signs were there.”
“Postpartum depression,” I whisper, feeling the words ice over my like a ghost. He looks at me quickly, and I avert my eyes.
“See, even you know what it was. I had no fucking clue.”
Of course I know what it was—I knowintimatelywhat it was. But I can’t tell him that.
“Maybe you’re right,” he continues. “I shouldn’t be dumping on you. You hardly know me.”
“Maybe that’s what makes it easier to let it all out,” I offer, shaking myself from my thoughts.
He ponders this for a moment. “Maybe,” he says. “It’s just that everyone in this town knows everything about everyone else, and as you’ve noticed, loyalty runs deep. They don’t know why Sasha left, but they’d take her side over mine in a heartbeat, even with everything that happened.”
“I don’t know about that.”
He laughs, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Sasha went to the same school everyone else did. She was on the same soccer team. She hung out with the same friends and knew everyone’s parents. This town watched her grow up, and they grew up alongside her. But me? I’ve been here a whole two and a half years. They know me as Sasha’s boyfriend, or as Lottie’s dad. But as Ashton?” He laughs again, this time looking up at the ceiling, at the ornate architecture that serves as our sky. “I don’t have a real friend in this town. Not one person. If it came down to a choice between me and Sasha, no matter what she did, she’d win.”
“But her parents—”
“You didn’t see it.” He takes a deep breath, looking down as if remembering his daughter in his lap. “When we showed up in Lahoma, everyone was so delighted to see her again. They looked past her half-starved body and dull skin from months of living in my car. All they saw was her pregnant belly and the fact that their prodigal daughter had returned.”
Lottie squirms, and he releases his hold on her, letting her wobble to standing before taking off to run circles in the center of the room. “I saw the side glances that came my way next,” he continues, his eyes never leaving his daughter. “No one said it, but I know what they were thinking. It was my fault she’d left. My fault she looked the way she did. And now she was back, unmarried and pregnant, and I was to blame. If this town found out what she did, it’s not her they would hold liable. It would be me.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “She stole from her family, enough to make it hurt. It’s her fault you all had to scramble and sell the store. Of anyone, they should picket against her instead of blocking me out of this store or blaming my employer for snatching it up. I mean, did any of you even search for her? Send the police after her? Do anything to make her pay for how she royally fucked all of you?”
Ashton closes his eyes, and I know the answer.
“God, Ashton. Even if Sasha was suffering, it doesn’t excuse the fact that she stole that much money.”
“People do crazy things when they’re depressed.”
I say nothing. Because, more than he knows, I understand. Yet, even knowing that kind of pain, I want to disagree. When it happened to me, I didn’t steal from my family or abandon everyone I knew.
But the past has its own way of rotting through a person, and who am I to pretend otherwise?
“I suppose,” I finally say, my tone unconvinced as I leave the rest to fester like an old wound.
Bernie’s Town
