Chapter 14 #2
We ended up going to lunch instead of staying in the stairwell any longer.
I turned the conversation away from my former relationship and onto our company, and she had a lot of interesting insights into the history of the Whitaker family who had founded it.
And as we ate, I learned a lot about her, too—like that she had been married before, when she’d been in law school, but she had been happy to divorce.
“I’m very content with my life now,” she explained. “Grosvenor is more than enough to manage.” Absentmindedly, she rubbed her wrist—that was where he’d bitten her on their holiday cruise.
“So, you don’t feel any…” I stopped, because what I’d been about to say was intrusive and not appropriate. Not that anything had ever stopped Octavia from asking those kinds of questions herself, but my mother had worked hard to raise me better.
“Go ahead,” she urged. “I personally don’t hold anything back. I may have upset Iker this morning when he showed me a picture of his pregnant wife, and I mentioned that if she gets any larger with that baby, she won’t be able to fit into their car.”
“Oh, no! You didn’t really say that, did you?” I briefly closed my eyes. “You’re going to have to apologize to him. No, I’m going to have to get HR on this. Octavia…”
She seemed unperturbed. “What were you going to ask me?” she pressed.
Well, if we were all going to be rude, then I would just go right ahead. “I was wondering if you ever felt any regrets about not staying married or having kids.”
She didn’t even have to think. “No,” she answered immediately. “No, that’s not for me.”
“It’s definitely not for everyone,” I agreed, and I thought of Silas.
He wasn’t interested in marriage or in children.
Just this morning, before he’d started his online class, I’d tried to show him a very, very adorable video of a little boy’s first steps.
He hadn’t even looked at my phone as he murmured something about yeah, cute.
“Personally, I think that you’d do better to focus a bit more on your career and less on your boyfriend,” she advised. “You’ll advance further and faster if you don’t engage in romantic twaddle.”
“Well, I already advanced past you,” I said, and she looked at me for a moment and then nodded.
“Touché,” she said, and raised her can of Coke. “But I’m correct that it’s twaddle. After the song got so hot, I asked Rashelle about your ex, the criminal. Not your current criminal,” she specified.
“Silas isn’t a criminal. What did she say about Dax?”
There was quite a bit. It was mostly guesswork, since I’d never confided any of my relationship problems to my coworkers, but Rashelle had been able to piece together quite a story.
For example, she assumed (correctly) that he cheated on me.
He also made me drive some piece of crap car and kept the good one for himself, and he wasted my money so that we’d had to live in a terrible apartment on an awful street.
“We could have lived somewhere else!” I protested angrily. “You shouldn’t encourage her to gossip.”
“She didn’t need encouragement.”
No, I was aware of that. And from an outsider’s perspective, it had probably been like watching a movie. The problem was that there was no guaranteed happy ending, and that was all I wanted to see.
“You’re a great attorney,” Octavia said suddenly. “I told her that those stories had to be wrong, because someone with so much professional success wouldn’t have been such an idiot in her personal life.”
“No, I was definitely an idiot,” I stated. “My ex-fiancé really was a horse’s patoot. He did cheat, and he did lie. He took my money, too.”
“Yes, yes. He didn’t respect you, he didn’t listen to you, he had no regard for your feelings, he broke promises, et cetera,” she said. “I find it disappointing that you wasted your time with him.”
“So do I,” I said. I was disappointed with myself and I was sorry that I hadn’t seen what was so obvious to the rest of the world.
..no. “I did see it,” I conceded. “I thought I could fix it.” I had never admitted it to myself, but I had believed that if Dax could love me, if I was able to force it somehow, then—what?
Then would I be good enough? It was pathetic.
“Camille, we’re professional, powerful women. Are we really going to sit at lunch and bemoan the loss of your philandering idiot of a boyfriend?”
“No!” I said. “I’m not bemoaning anything.”
“Well, I don’t have the time to fix your relationship drama. Love yourself first, boundaries, blah, blah. Miss?” she hollered at our server. “I’ll need a to-go box for this. I have a lizard.” She started to get into his diet again, frozen rodents and all.
I decided to ignore her, which she didn’t really notice. But as we waited to cross the street to go back to our building, Octavia said something else that interested me. “How odd. It’s the same car.”
“What?”
“That black SUV was in front of our building when we came out. Now it’s back, on our side of the street. It was parked just down the block while we were eating, too.”
I thought of Dax again. I still wasn’t bemoaning—I was remembering how he’d sent some of his friends here to this building to bother me.
But according to Silas, my ex hadn’t been around lately.
He had been quiet on all his socials, too, which I knew since I regularly checked.
He definitely hadn’t texted or called me in months, but as we crossed the avenue, I looked at the black car. Had it really been following us?
I was still thinking about it that night as I ate dinner at home, for which I had arrived on time so that Silas, Lyra, and I could be at the table together.
It was something that Beckett did, too: he always left early enough to make sure that he was home to eat with his wife, Juliet, and soon, there would be three of them in that palace of a house they had.
She had texted me today to say that she and her sisters were working on finding a bunch of single guys for me, and she’d also talked a little about her pregnancy. I thought of a baby—
“Cammie?” Lyra waved her hand in front of my face. “Cammie!”
“Sorry,” I told her, coming out of my daydream. “What were you saying?”
She had wanted to know if I would help her go over her vocabulary list, which I would (of course) and she also wanted to know if I would drive her and Boris to school the next morning, so that they didn’t have to take the bus.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because he and his grandma always have her famous tuna fish casserole on Thursday nights, so on Friday, he has to bring tuna leftovers in his lunch bag,” she explained.
“It’s not as bad as herring, but it stinks and everyone on the bus yells about it.
The driver won’t let us open the windows until it gets warmer. ”
“Temperatures are supposed to rise next week, getting near fifty,” Silas offered, but that wasn’t soon enough to save the kids on the bus tomorrow.
“Maybe I could talk to Mrs. Alford about that,” I suggested, but Lyra answered that it was too late because they were already having the casserole right now.
Boris always ate as much as he could so that there wouldn’t be anything left for lunch, but there was only so much tuna that a boy could take down.
And his supposed enthusiasm for the dish only further convinced his grandmother that it was his favorite food, and that she should keep making it weekly.
“Please drive us?” she begged me, and I had a hard time saying no to her little face.
“Pushover,” her brother said, pointing his fork at me, but he wasn’t one to talk.
The Saturday before, he had stayed up until two in the morning finishing the basement so that Lyra and Boris could spend their Sunday playing down there.
It really did look nice, and next on the renovation schedule was her bedroom.
That meant she would temporarily be with me, which I was thrilled about.
We finished dinner and I started cleaning up, still thinking.
The water poured over the dishes and I remembered scrubbing different pots and pans after I’d made meals for Dax—since he hadn’t believed in the division of labor, I had been doing the cooking and also the cleaning.
I had also done the shopping to buy the food, and I paid the bills for the water to wash them and electricity to see what I was doing.
When I looked back now, I recognized that it was nothing like the movie life I’d wanted.
Had I ever been happy with him, when it was all so much work?
Not just the dishes, but trying every day to get him to feel—
A hand rested on the small of my back and I jumped.
“What’s going on?” Silas asked. “I said your name about ten times, and you didn’t even hear me.”
“Sorry,” I told him. “I was preoccupied.”
“Is Octavia bothering you at work? Do I need to threaten her lizard?”
“You shouldn’t go near Grosvenor,” I advised. “She got five stiches in her hand after he ‘nipped’ her on New Year’s Day, and she called it ‘his latest infraction.’ That means there were other bites in the past.”
“Is she pissing you off?” he persisted. “Go ahead and say something terrible, like, ‘She did try my patience today.’”
“No, she was fine. We actually had a very nice lunch together.” I described it for him, and also what had happened afterwards, about the black SUV.
“She always sees conspiracies and tricks, but I think it was just some guy driving. I don’t think it was him,” I said, and Silas didn’t have to ask who I meant by that.
“Dax hasn’t been at any of the clubs. No one’s seen him,” he told me. “I cornered two of his little friends—”
“What? Why? When?”
“Lots of questions,” he commented. “It was last weekend, after you and Lyra were asleep, and I think the one guy’s name was Terry. I’m not too sure, but it didn’t matter because he was useless. The only thing he told me was that he heard Dax was back in Chicago, where he grew up.”