Page 14 of Starting Over with You
“It’s not about if she can walk. We know she can, but we don’t want her to. She works hard all day, and then she skates. It’s about her knowing we want to be there for her and care about getting her home safely,” Missy explains, taking the words out of my brain.
“I hear you. I’m sorry,” he apologizes once more, but it just doesn’t seem genuine to me. “Does Dean have her?”
“Yes,” Missy snaps, just as Sadie mutters, “He always will.”
If my sister could, she’d wear a shirt that reads, “Dean’s Number One Fan.”
“You know I’m her husband,” he adds, and I grimace. This dude just signed his death warrant. Especially when Sadie starts cackling like a damn psycho.
“And? I’ve been her soul mate longer than you’ve been her husband.”
Missy snorts and so do I. Anyone who knows Sadie and Missy knows they are thick as thieves. If Missy were to kill Nyle, my sister would show up with a shovel, a plastic tarp, bleach, and an airtight alibi. Since there is really nothing to say to Sadie’s statement, I hear a door slam, and then Missy says, “Sorry about that. He’s still adjusting.”
After a year? I don’t tell her that I don’t want to talk about him. Instead, I ask my three questions again.
“Who? Why are y’all getting the house ready? Who do you have to meet?”
There is a pause, and then Missy says on an exhale, “She finally did it.” I hear the emotion in her voice—elation, excitement, and, also, all kinds of pride. “Kenni left him.”
My heart literally seizes in my chest. If I weren’t in such good shape, I’d be worried about cardiac arrest, but that’s not it. I remember when I saw Kenni’s fucking bastard of a husband with a woman and kids that looked just like her sons. It’s been a fuck-ton of years since that happened, and I never understood why she stayed.
Didn’t she realize that she deserved way more?
I wanted to tell her.
But I lost that chance the moment I became Missy’s baby daddy.
Missy doesn’t know about my internal turmoil as she says, “She’s coming home.”
Even though the truck is moving, I feel like everything is suspended in time.
Kenni left her husband.
Finally.
And she’s coming home.
I probably shouldn’t be grinning right now, but my lips curve sobig, even Wagner gives me a sideways glance. “Please stop telling everyone about the damn smoldering romance section! You’re not funny.”
I don’t care what he thinks, because once upon a time, I could make Kenni laugh.
And it was the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.
CHAPTER
FIVE
Kenni
“A Lot More Free” by Max McNown blares through my car at unhealthy volumes while I slam my fist to my chest, screaming the lyrics as if I wrote them myself. I didn’t, but damn if I don’t feel each word deep in my soul. I keep coming back to the ballad, needing the lyrics and the Southern twang in order to keep driving toward my hometown. And the harmonica—I like that harmonica.
I’m almost home, a place I haven’t visited in six years. While my dad is pissed that I haven’t been back, he understood when I’d use the boys as an excuse. He’d fly up to watch games and to spend time with my boys, usually bringing my niece with him since Missy was working. I also suspect she didn’t want to face me as much as I didn’t want to face her. When Missy found out about Stratford’s infidelity, she lost her damn mind, as did our best friend. It was easier to ignore their request to leave him over the phone, but if I faced them? I’d crumble like an overbaked cookie, and everything I had planned would go to shit.
I always crumbled to them. Being the youngest of our triowasn’t easy, growing up. Sadie and Missy are two years older than me, but that didn’t stop them from corrupting me early on. The two coolest girls in Thistlebrook were my best friends, and I wanted to be just like them. They gave me my first drink, my first joint, forced Sadie’s brother to kiss me at fourteen because I couldn’t be that “weird band girl who has never been kissed” going into high school, and dragged me along to all their wild ideas of fun. It was easy to blame everything on me because our dad and Sadie’s parents thought I was too sweet to get into trouble. I basically got away with murder, and I loved every moment of it.
I looked up to Missy and Sadie. They weren’t only my sisters, but part of my soul. I was ten when they were twelve, and Missy decided that Sadie needed to be blood sisters with us. We used Sadie’s brother’s hunting knife, cut our palms, and then locked hands until wefeltthe blood of one another. Thinking back on it, we were dumb as hell, but I loved them and wanted to share my blood with them. It was Sadie who decided no man would ever come between us. That our souls were connected, and while we still needed dick, we would always show up for one another.
And we did.
