Page 20 of The Hampton Beach Café 3
There was nothing. She was blocked!
Suddenly not nervous at all, she opened up an incognito browser and logged into the old account they had set up for the rescue dogs they were sponsoring a few years ago. They––well, Frances––had run the page with a different dog's profile for months until they got adopted and then moved on to the next one.
Search: Malcolm Crawford
There he was.
That jerk.
He'd blocked her! As if divorcing her wasn't enough, he wanted to try and stop her from even internet stalking him. What the actual...
"Oh..."
His latest photograph was of him and the same woman Hayley had seen him with at an event in Texas. They stood, her hand resting on his arm and the two of them smiling into the camera.
Was that in his dad's old office? Frances leaned into the screen and squinted at the paintings on the wall.
Yep, there were the hideous––and hideously expensive––imports that Malcolm Senior thought made him look European and sophisticated. They just made him look rich, which she'd soon learned he felt was the same thing.
Malcolm really didn't like his dad, and he hated his dad's law firm––there was absolutely no reason he would be there voluntarily.
Frances shook her head...what if it was all a lie, though? What if he never really hated them and secretly resented her when she was so relieved that he never wanted to go back to Texas? They’d treated her so badly. She wasn't the rich little old money girl next door that they had picked out for him.
She was a poor, unsophisticated, scholarship student that spoke her mind and didn't really care about being a wife. They liked her because all she did care about was that Malcolm loved her...
Or had he ever? Was she just his exit strategy? How could he have ever done this to her? He had never been exactly romantic or over the top but...he'd never been overtly nasty. Cold, short-sighted, and kind of boring sometimes, but...
Tears streamed silently down her face as she stared. This was why she never wanted to stop being active. If she was doing stuff, she didn't have to be thinking, or feeling, or giving in to stupid whims and searching him up on a dogs’ social media profile just to hurt her own feelings.
"Luce!" she called, unable to stop staring at the picture.
Lucinda's attention snapped away from Vincent immediately. Frances could see her shape moving towards her.
"What? Babes, what is it? Oh..."
She came to a stop next to the chair.
"That son of a––I'm going to kill him, or have him killed. We'll feed him to some pigs––or hogs, whatever they have in Texas."
Frances could almost bring herself to laugh, and Lucinda leaned down and slowly used the trackpad to log her out of the screen. Closing the lid, she turned and perched her butt on the table.
"You didn't laugh at my pig-based murder suggestion. You must be really upset," she said solemnly.
That did actually make her laugh, which Frances thought was ironic considering she had actually really wanted to laugh at the pig thing but knew it would have come out more like a sob.
"I just...I don't even care, about her. I mean," she said. "It's not her, it's not even him...I'm not explaining this very well."
She sniffled, and Lucinda handed her a napkin. Frances wiped her eyes and took a deep breath.
"It's just...she was his destiny," she tried to explain. "Their families are some of the richest and oldest in their town, and they had this great dynasty-making plan, you know? Malcolm started dating her in high school, took her to prom, they both went off to college, and he...met me."
Silence descended as she trailed off, Frances could almost feel Vincent trying not to eavesdrop in the other room and Alex had stopped singing.
"Yeah?" Lucinda prompted. "And?"
"And...well, it feels kind of terrible that I broke them up, but now he's back with her? What if it never meant anything? It was all just a lie? What if, by dating him and loving him...I ruined his life?"
Lucinda squeezed her eyes shut and held a hand up to stop her talking.
