Chapter 16
FLYNN
I jolted awake and before my brain came online to tell me why, my heart started to race. I was on the couch, in my living room, and all the lights were on. That wasn’t normal. A quick glance at the clock in the kitchen told me I’d dozed off for only an hour. Courtney didn’t have work because of the three-day weekend, so after the disaster in my office with Beckett, I came back home to try to catch up to her here.
How in the hell had I fallen asleep on the couch?
It dawned on me in the next second that the house was too quiet.
“Courtney!”
I jumped up and ran to our bedroom only to find the bed still made and nothing had changed from how it was left the day before. Where the hell could she be? I went back to the living room and found my cell phone burrowed down into the cushions. Once I dug it out, it was clear that my wife hadn’t tried to call or message me either. It had already been four hours since she left my office.
I tried to call her, but it immediately kicked to voicemail. Either she had her phone off or my wife decided to block me.
Great!
I sent a text to her next.
Flynn: Sweetheart, I need you to call or message me that you’re okay. You can hate me if you need to, but please let me know you’re not hurt or in trouble somewhere.
I wanted to add that she needed to let me know she hadn’t gone to my cousin, but that seemed like the wrong thing to do. I was pretty sure she hated him more than me.
When another hour passed, I got up and left. “Where would she go?” I asked myself on the way to the car. The fucked up thing is that I didn’t know. There were things I still hadn’t learned about my wife. Despite the fact that we had been friends since before high school, there was a certain distance I maintained from Courtney over the years to spare myself the heartache of having to see her happy with someone else, especially since that someone else was my assholish cousin.
There were two people who might know more than me, though I really didn’t want to go there and admit I was failing their daughter. Still, she might go there, back to the pool house where she lived before we got married. Once I thought about the fact that she used to live there, it dawned on me that my wife had not brought a lot of her things to the house we shared. It was as if she had been waiting for the other shoe to drop and didn’t want to get too comfortable.
I scoffed at myself for not seeing it sooner. She wasn’t all in and I was too complacent to see it. The drive over to the Parker family’s house turned into a steady stream of what-if scenarios. I wasn’t normally a person who dwelled in that space because self doubt was a killer of dreams, but she was more important than anything else I had ever done in my life. My business could go to hell, friendships, even my family could be pushed aside while I accomplished my goals, but Courtney… I needed her in a way that made everything else fall to the wayside.
I didn’t even get a chance to knock on the door before it opened and I stood there facing Reed Parker, Courtney’s dad. “Hey,” He called out to me as he glanced around my shoulder as if looking for something - or someone. “Where’s Courtney?”
“That’s what I was here to find out.” The panic that gnawed at my stomach hit a little harder.
“She’s not here, and I don’t think she pulled up at the pool house without me knowing either.” He stepped back and left room for me to enter. “Why don’t you fill me in on why you have no clue where your wife is while we walk out to the back to see if she’s there?”
I nodded my head and explained everything that had gone down the past two days concerning his daughter, Beckett, and me. Reed never said a word as he took it all in and we walked through his stately house to the sliding glass door that led out to the deck that overlooked the pool below and the pool house that was clearly dark and without a car parked in the drive leading up to it.
“We’ve come this far, might as well go the whole way.” I followed Reed down the stairs and out onto the lawn, all the while we both remained silent. Once we got to the pool house, Reed inputted a code on the door and headed inside. His face slipped into a frown as he took in the space his daughter occupied prior to our marriage. “She didn’t take a whole lot with her, did she?”
I shook my head as I looked around at all the little things that made the space uniquely hers, like her easel and paints. The paintings, many of which had her signature on them. “Jesus,” I whispered as I took the space in.
“Obviously, my daughter hasn’t settled into married life yet. How is it that she’s been living with you since your wedding and all of her stuff is still here?”
“I don’t know. I thought…” I spun in a slow circle and took it all in again. “I thought we were going to give it a real shot, but…” I had no words for the fact that I was a blind moron who hadn’t realized that his wife was having nothing more than an extended sleepover with him, and hadn’t actually moved in.
Reed’s hand clapped down on my shoulder and he squeezed. “If there’s one thing married life has taught me, it is that men are generally the blind ones in the relationship. The women see everything, and they aren’t afraid to hold it against you that you don’t.” He sighed and then tipped his head toward the couch that looked out a sliding glass door toward the pool. I nodded my agreement and we sat.
“I don’t know how to fix everything. Did I doom us by agreeing to the marriage even when I knew that it wasn’t what she wanted?”
Reed chuckled. “Son, I hate to tell you, but if a part of my daughter didn’t want to marry you, she wouldn’t have even entertained doing it.”
My eyes tracked over to Reed’s amused face. He had the same russet hair color as his daughter, with exception of a little gray that had started to sneak in around his temples. Courtney looked more like her mother, but inherited her coloring from her father. That was probably for the best as Jill was always a little washed out and pale, especially when combined with her naturally light blonde hair. His blue-gray eyes stared straight at me, and almost dared me to contradict him.
“I call her Nemesis.”
“I wasn’t aware that you two were in competition for anything.”
“We’re not.” I chuckled at the memory of how she earned that nickname. “I call her that after the Greek Goddess of Vengeance.”
Reed burst out laughing and slapped me on my knee. “Shit, Flynn,” He managed to choke out between the laughter that died off to a chuckle. “Maybe you see more of her than I gave you credit for. You think she only agreed to marry you as some sort of payback for Beckett offering her up to you.”
“I think that was a big part of it. She did it to hide from him and her heartbreak just as much, though.”
Reed shook his head. “No, I don’t think my daughter has been in love with him for a long while now. She thought she was because they’d invested so much time in trying to stay true to some dream they cooked up as children. The truth was, that boy didn’t make my daughter happy. She was content and comfortable enough to go with the flow, but that was it. Beckett is a selfish prick who never deserved my daughter.”
I nodded because what else could I say.
“He comes by that shit honestly. No offense, I know Marty is your Uncle, but that fucker is just as bad - worse even.”
That was news to me. The Parkers had always been exceptionally tight with my aunt and uncle. It was how Courtney and Beckett grew so close as children to begin with. “I thought all of you were friends?”
“We were. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes you have friends - even good ones - who you know aren’t the best people. Gayle is as solid as they come, but Marty has always been the friend who I took at face value and didn’t look too closely, for fear of what I might learn that would put me in a compromising situation.”
“If you thought that poorly of him, why would you trust your daughter to his son?”
“We’re not our parents, Flynn. I thought I was doing the right thing, and that she would outgrow him. Courtney did just that, but the problem was that she didn’t realize she had outgrown him because my little girl was still hung up on that silly dream about the future they planned when they were too young to understand what it all meant.”
We sat there in silence for a few minutes, taking in everything. I was about to get up and leave when Reed heaved out a heavy sigh.
“Not a fan of you discussing my daughter’s sex life with Beckett, or me for that matter. I get why you had to tell me what was said, but I’d prefer to think of my baby girl as a virgin who could still go cloister herself away in a convent somewhere, never to be touched by a man.” The sharp look he gave me was almost enough to pierce skin. “As a man, not thinking about the woman in question as my daughter, I get it. It’s obvious you care about Courtney. If I were a man, in love with a woman, and I had to face down her ex who wanted to keep stringing her along while he had his fun, I’d probably have thrown it in his face too.”
“I already know it was the wrong move. It didn’t hit me why she never answered him until she got angry with me for doing it. I thought maybe it was because she wanted to keep her options open where he was concerned.”
“We men are fools,” Reed put in.
“Yeah, it took me a minute, but I got it. She didn’t owe him that truth and she didn’t want to share it with him. My Nemesis was playing the long game, in a way. It hurt him more to stew on the unknown than it did to face the truth of what was happening between Court and me.”
“I’m sure that was a little of it, but I think mostly it boils down to my daughter being a private person. Pretty sure she doesn’t even tell Hadley about her sex life, and that girl is all about oversharing.”
“Hadley,” I whispered, and then wanted to kick myself for not thinking of her sooner. I turned to look at my father-in-law with narrowed, accusatory eyes then. His response was to laugh in the face of my suspicion.
“Yep, figured you’d think of her eventually, but I didn’t want to bring up the possibility of my girl being at her best friend’s place until you were able to talk through some things first. Can’t have you going after her all half-cocked and getting it wrong.” He winked at me, to let me know he was sort of teasing. “I like you for my daughter. There was a time when I confided in my wife that I wished you were the one Courtney was hung up on.” He shook his head as if that conversation did not go well.
“Jill didn’t agree?”
“No, she was hung up on the wrong Robeson for some fucked up reason too. Wasn’t until recently that I realized why, but when I did, it made it all so much worse.”
“What do you mean?” I had a sinking suspicion I knew where he was going, but hoped like hell I was wrong.
“I wanted to put a private investigator on Beckett, because I had a suspicion he was stepping out on my girl, but my wife wouldn’t let me.”
“That’s weird, isn’t it?” I asked.
Reed nodded and looked sick about whatever he was going to reveal to me. “I think she was afraid the PI might focus on her as well. I’ve suspected she’s having an affair for a while now, too. I was more concerned for my daughter than finding out the truth for myself, though. It was the other reason I wasn’t sure about Beckett being in her life in a romantic way. I thought maybe I was projecting my own relationship issues onto my daughter’s.”
“You don’t think they were getting together, do you?” I asked, feeling sick. Courtney would not recover from her mother fucking someone she had been engaged to.
“No, but I think maybe it is someone close to him. She all but panicked when I brought up the idea of using a PI.”
“My uncle,” I guessed.
“That’s my guess. We’ve always been close friends, but in recent years Jill and Marty have been closer.” He cleared his throat and looked away. “I should have said or done something sooner, but I didn’t want to taint my daughter’s relationship with everything. Little did I know, that prick was all too happy to rid himself of my girl.”
“A move I think he regrets now.”
“Only because he thinks he will lose her forever,” Reed said. “He has always been a weak spot for my daughter. His problem is that he assumed he always would be. He also doesn’t know how to work for anything worth having, and that includes my a relationship with my daughter.”
My father-in-law stood and looked around the room before he spoke again. “You should take a couple of these with you, so when you bring my daughter home, there’s no question that your future is together.”
I nodded and glanced around. “Any clue which are her favorites?”
He chuckled. “If they’re hanging on the wall, stands to reason, they’re her favorites.”
“That narrows it down,” I muttered sarcastically. My wife had so many canvases on the wall that you wouldn’t know the walls were white underneath it, unless you took a peek behind something.
“Anything worth having is worth working for,” Reed reminded me. “Especially when it involves my baby girl.”
“I’ll take a few of the smaller ones, but I want her to pack the rest up herself. I’ll do more harm than good if they end up damaged because I didn’t protect them properly while moving them.”
“There it is. The reason I always liked you better,” Reed laughed as he walked toward the door. “ You use your brain sometimes.”
An hour later, I pulled up to the apartment building where Hadley lived and made my way inside. She didn’t live in a place with a fancy doorman. My wife’s best friend was a teacher without the family money to fall back on. I was able to walk right up to her third floor apartment and knock on the door without anyone stopping me.
When the door cracked open ever so slightly, Hadley peeked up at me from the little space available. “What do you want, Flynn?”
“My wife,” I demanded.
“What if she doesn’t want you?”
“Then I would like to hear that from her. If she doesn’t want to talk to me right now, needs some space, or whatever then I will respect her wishes, but I need to hear it from her. I need to see that she’s okay.”
Hadley sighed as a piece of her black hair fell into her eyes from a blob of hair on top of her head big enough that it could have been used to smuggle a small child. She rolled her bright green eyes at me and then closed the door to remove the chain latch before she pulled it wider to let me in.
The first thing I saw - the only thing - was my wife staring out the window like the answers to all her problems were just out of reach. When she finally turned toward me, I couldn’t hold myself back. I crossed the room and pulled her into my arms. “I’m sorry. I should have never shared our personal business with him,” I admitted.
“And you call me Nemesis,” She whispered into my chest. If she could make a joke, then we would be okay. We just needed to get on the same page with everything first.