Page 86 of Ugly Duckling
They hadn’t expected us to come up from the right, because we never did.
But this time, that hadn’t been the case, and we got a good look at the one person that I had never wanted to see again.
I reached for my phone in Lottie’s stroller and had it up to my ear with Apollo’s name cued up seconds later.
“You do realize, right, that it’s only seven in the morning?”
“I have to get my run done before it gets too hot.” I defended my actions. “Plus, it’s eight o’clock in DC, which, might I add, you’re in right now.”
“I’m livin’ on Texas time,” he grumbled. “What’s up?”
I gave him a quick rundown on what I’d encountered, and he mumbled something that sounded a whole lot like “yippee.”
“I’ll get on it on my end and get back to you.” He snorted. “What dumbasses.”
I hung up with him and said, “Should we go past them and act like we don’t know they’re there?”
“It’d be almost impossible for them not to see us,” she disagreed. “And they’d know that we saw them because they’re in a Jeep with the top off. Let’s go back the way we came and come at it from the correct direction. That way you still have the element of surprise.”
“I guess,” I grumbled.
Every part of me wanted to confront them.
But things were starting to make a bit more sense when it came to Yates.
He’d always been super interested in my life.
It made sense that he’d ask all that kind of information when he was literally with the woman that had changed my life. The woman that still contacted me every once in a while begging for money.
“I want to throw a brick at her face,” Sutton grumbled as we backtracked a mile to come the way we usually came—catching up to the stinky smelling trash truck as we did.
It was quite nauseating, but we still had a good laugh when Lottie kept repeating, “Ewww, stinky!”
“Just wait until we’re not in quite so public of a place.” I chuckled. “Or do it in a way that you aren’t implicated.”
She grumbled under her breath, and it was making me want to laugh despite the shitty situation.
“I always felt like I was one step behind when it came to Yates,” I admitted. “Like he always knew something that I didn’t.”
“Well, apparently, he did.” She started walking again. “I’m tired. We should go to breakfast.”
I snorted. “You’re not going to eat bad because of this. It’s a pain in the ass, yes, but we’re not going to eat our feelings.”
“Watch me,” she said as she rounded the last road that would get us to the gates of the subdivision. “I want to flip them off. Hey, look, there’s a rock. That would look perfect in their windshield.”
I snorted out a laugh. “We have to be good examples because we have a three-year-old listening and watching.”
She sighed so exaggeratedly that she lost her breath by the end.
“I accidentally looked and Aleah has a set of binoculars pointed right at us,” she murmured.
A car started up farther down the road, and we both looked up in time to watch it do a three-point U-turn in the middle of the street before speeding off.
“Yates isn’t stupid,” I admitted. “He’s former military. He has quite a few years in law enforcement, too. It just stuns me that he’d be stupid enough to get with Aleah of all people. She’s not subtle in her dislike for me, nor her craziness. She doesn’t hide the fact that she’s broke and desperate. And to be quite truthful here, he felt like he had a head on his shoulders. There’s got to be something more going on here.”
“Agreed…” Her voice trailed off. “There’s another non-descript vehicle parked in front of your place.”
I sighed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the Combs are suing me for custody again.”
