Chapter 7
Seven
The more I get to know people, the more I realize why Noah only let animals on the boat.
—Nettie’s secret thoughts
Nettie
My head was reeling, and it wasn’t even noon yet.
I was full of pizza and considering a nap in my car while I waited for my sister’s practice to start, and ready to breathe some clean Montana air.
Boone followed beside me silently, stopping to hold the door open for me and several other ladies heading to lunch, when we heard it.
“What are you doing here?”
Gail Windsor’s voice was worse than nails on a chalkboard.
She sounded like that screaming goat you saw all over social media, but with a feminine flair to it.
I hated it.
I hated even more that I was about to have to deal with her for however long while the FBI did their thing.
Unless they kill her first.
I shouldn’t be happy about hearing those words come out of the man I love’s mouth.
Yet, I was.
If there was one person on this planet that I thought didn’t deserve to be here anymore, it was her.
“Oh, Gail.” I smiled. “What a surprise. Boone and I are getting married, and we met with Sawyer since he’s been like a second dad to me, to tell him the good news. We were heading your way next.”
Lies.
I would die before I told her any of my news.
Gail’s eyes narrowed. “Are you pregnant again like last time?”
The nerve…
“Nope,” I lied. “We just decided we were fighting the inevitable. Love truly conquers all, and Boone and I finally came to our senses.”
Lies.
Well, mostly.
I did love him, and I knew that he loved me.
There was never any doubt of that.
But there were some things even love couldn’t fix.
Like this bitch’s belief that she had a right to interfere in our lives.
Maybe if she wasn’t around anymore, I might reconsider everything. But until that became a reality, Boone would never be a safe space for me. For us.
I watched as Gail’s eyelids twitched, which I counted as a fuckin’ win since she used so much Botox that not much expression ever showed on her face.
Boone’s arm came around my shoulders, and he pulled me into his side. It was such a normal move that it felt utterly natural to lean into him and press my head to his chest.
“When did…when did this happen?” Gail cleared her throat, her eyes moving to take Boone in.
“It’s been something we’ve been discussing for years,” Boone said softly. “It was just now that she’s been able to move closer to home with her work.”
“Where will she be working?” Gail asked, sounding oh, so curious.
My first thought was “don’t tell her anything, she’ll jinx it.”
My second was, “why would she care?”
“Why do you care?” Boone asked, echoing my thoughts. “You never cared before, Mother.”
Gail’s face went soft, which was the biggest lie of all, when she said, “Is it not normal to care about who my son chooses as a life partner?”
Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
This woman was so good.
She could become an actor and make blockbuster movies if she put her mind to it.
I mean, it took real skill to play the type of game that she was playing.
And I wasn’t just talking about the doting, caring mother act she was putting on right now.
I’m talking about the “fool everyone and steal them blind” act.
Along with several other acts.
“When is this marriage taking place?” Gail asked when neither one of us replied to her bullshit earlier comment about life partners. “Not soon, I hope? It takes time to plan a wedding.”
“Next month, at city hall,” I said, knowing it would be the most horrible to her. City hall and her son should not have ever been mentioned in the same sentence. “But we have thrown around the idea of going to Vegas and getting hitched.”
Gail’s face went stark white as she thought about those possibilities.
“Oh, absolutely not.” Gail was shaking her head. “The only way for this to be done is with a grand wedding at a church. Maybe your parents’ church?”
I snorted. “We both know damn well that church has been shuttered.”
Gail’s face went scrunched. “Well, we’ll find a new church.”
“We’re not really church people, Mom,” Boone added in, knowing it would only make her angrier.
Gail was a “devout Christian woman” that was all “my son will be going to church so he doesn’t wind up in hell” religious.
Which was hilarious seeing as some of the most “devout” people I knew were some of the most corrupt.
“It’s not your decision, Mother.” Boone pulled me closer. “Have a good day.”
“Wait…”
But Boone didn’t wait.
In fact, he ignored her screeching—something that I knew she’d be embarrassed about doing in public later—and walked me to my car.
The car that we’d picked out when Sawyer had found out about my pregnancy and wanted to keep me safe. I’d kept the car here for when I was visiting in Montana.
When we got to my car, Boone let me go, and I refused to think about why it bothered me so much to no longer have his heat surrounding me.
He shoved his hand in his pocket and pulled out his phone.
“Let me have your phone,” he ordered quietly.
I handed it to him.
He didn’t hesitate to type in my password.
He’d always known it, and I’d never changed it.
Our anniversary date was the code to get into both of our phones.
0409
April ninth would forever be burned into my memory.
The day that I’d said yes to dating him had been one of the best days of my life.
We may not have ever gotten married, but that date would forever be important to me.
He downloaded an app onto my phone, then signed into it.
He twisted my phone around to me and said, “This is the app to unlock the house and turn off the alarm system. All you have to do is press Disarm and then Unlock and it’ll get you inside. You have the garage door opener. Park in either bay.”
I took my phone from him as he said, “You know that my mother will lose her shit, right, when we get married?”
“That was just to get a rise out of her,” I admitted.
His eyes gleamed. “We’ll see.”
Then he backed up, and I took that as my cue to get into the car.
I wouldn’t examine how it made me feel when he’d announced “we’ll see” as if it was a forgone conclusion that I was his.
I also wouldn’t examine the way it made me feel to think about forever with him.
No, those were two things that I was going to keep buried deep, and only examine when I had a couple of hours to cry it out while I did it.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?”
No, I wasn’t sure of anything when it came to Boone.
However…
“I’d really like to see her downfall,” I admitted. “She’s lived rent-free in my head for years, Eddy.”
My sister studied me.
A ball came aiming right for our heads, and I expertly headed it back to the player, causing her to smile. “One day I want to be able to do that.”
Eddy kept talking despite the interaction.
“It’s just that I think you’re in a really vulnerable state right now, and this might not be the best time to seek revenge on her and her cronies.
” She fielded another ball that came our way, lobbing it back all the way across the field, placing it perfectly at the girl’s feet. “What if something happens again?”
I knew what she meant.
“Short of killing me entirely.” I shuddered. “I won’t let anything happen this time. I trust Boone when he says that she won’t be able to get into his house. He said that this new place, she hasn’t ever even been inside of it.”
She blew out a frustrated breath. “This is insane.”
It was.
“Have you ever heard of that Ida Bell lady?”
“Actually,” she said. “I have. She’s a nanny.”
“Really?” I asked. “For who?”
“Did you ever meet Koen?”
I struggled to come up with the name, or the face to go with the name.
“No, I don’t think I did.” I studied her. “Is he one of them?”
One of them meaning the escaped convicts that made this town their home.
“Yeah,” she whispered, glancing around as if the world could hear us.
They couldn’t. We were in the middle of a soccer pitch with thirty girls screaming and laughing.
“He has two really young kids. She just started nannying for him last month. And just sayin’, I’m only making assumptions that this is the same Ida Bell.
But what are the odds that there would be two Ida Bells that live in the same town? ”
She had a point.
“We should befriend her,” I said. “I’ll bet she has no freakin’ clue who her real parents are.”
“I’ll get with Birdee or Mable and see if they can introduce us,” she offered.
Birdee and Mable were also married to two of the escaped convicts in the county.
The women had formed a sort of trauma bond when it came to their men and their past lives.
I liked that Eddy had friends here.
I liked even more that she was glowing and living her life to the fullest now.
I couldn’t help but feel a little bit left out, though.
Another ball came sailing our way, and I stopped it before it could find a new home underneath the bleachers.
I juggled it for a minute or so before kicking it back to the senior that’d run our way.
“Wow,” the senior had said. “Maybe you could go undercover as a student and just sneak into our game and help us win.”
I snorted. “Y’all don’t need any help from us. You got this.”
The senior’s chest puffed out and her chin raised. “You’re right. We do have this!”
I winked and watched her go before turning back to my sister. “I need your full support on this, because I have a feeling this is going to really kick my ass.”
She threw her arm around me. “I can’t believe you’re pregnant.”
“Can’t you?”
She snorted. “I guess you’re right. I mean, it’s bound to happen, seeing as the two of you have zero control when the other is in the room.”
She wasn’t lying.
“Do you think you two could ever work it out?”
“I want to say yes,” I admitted. “But there’s a lot of trauma in our background, Eddy. It’s like…” I swallowed. “I’ve been hoping for years he’d come around. That he’d come after me. But he never did.”
She pulled away from me and stared into my eyes for a long moment before she said, “Did you know that he came to every one of your games that were within either a six-hour flight, or four-hour drive, since you started playing professionally?”
I blinked. “He worked himself to the bone. Putting in all kinds of hours so that he could pay for those flights. And just sayin’, but he didn’t take his daddy’s plane, either. He did it all in secret.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it. “He did?”
“He even flew to Tokyo for a week to watch you play in the last Olympics.”
My heart ached. “He did?”
“He’s been to every single out of country game you’ve ever played, too,” she said.
“And until he started this new job as a park ranger, he’s never really done anything but stay in.
I never even see him out and about the town.
He’s always working. Or he’s at home. Or he’s flying somewhere to watch you play. ”
My stomach ached.
“To say that he didn’t come after you would be a lie. Because he did. All you had to do was look up into the stands and see.”
My stomach rolled, and I had to will myself not to rush to the trash can and throw up.
“And I never see him anywhere with his mom. Every time I happen to run into her, she always talks about how busy her son is, and how he never has time for her. She always makes sure that you’re where you’re supposed to be, so she knows that he’s not spending his time with you.”
“I hate her,” I said.
The only thing I could say.
I couldn’t examine all those other things right now.
“She hates you, too.” Eddy snorted.
I groaned. “This is going to be a nightmare.”
“It is.”
“Do you think I should fight for him, Eddy?”
She studied me with the same eyes that I was staring back at her with.
It was so long that I started to squirm.
“I think you’ll live the rest of your life miserable if he ever moves on.”
What felt like an electric shock jolted through me at her words.
Pain took life on my face, and she nodded as if she understood what her words had done to me.
“Do you want him to be happy, Nettie?”
I swallowed. “Yes.”
“Do you want him to be happy with someone else?” she pushed.
I couldn’t help the shaking of my head. “No.”
“Then it’s time to start living your life, Nettie. Stop putting it on hold. Stop denying that he’s it for you, and you’re it for him. Be happy. Have a baby. Get married. Live happily ever after. You know you’re not going to find that with anyone else but each other.”
She was right.
When the thought of him with someone else literally felt like I couldn’t breathe, I needed to examine how I wanted the rest of my life to look.
Because one day he would give up.
One day, he’d stop trying so hard.
One day, he’d move on, and I would have nobody to blame but myself.