Chapter 13 #2
Rosie watches a short, colorful video on the TV while I prepare her dinner of corn cakes made in a skillet with chopped avocado. While she eats, I fry the rest of the corn cakes and leave them on a wire rack to cool. Later I’ll portion them up and put them in the freezer.
I hear the garage grind open and the sound of Cullan’s truck as I’m using a wet wipe on Rosie’s avocado-smeared fingers.
Cullan enters the kitchen, and he sees me and Rosie and smiles.
“Good. I made it home for bedtime.” He scoops her up in his arms and carries her upstairs, but not before giving me a smile that’s so warm it makes my insides melt.
“I’ll be back in a moment, Elena. Thank you for looking after her today. ”
I smile at him, but Leon’s visit today has shaken me up, and I still feel like I’m on unsteady ground.
I ache at the thought of losing all this.
I’m crazy lucky that a plumbing problem means I’m living in this beautiful house, even temporarily.
Wanting more than that feels dangerous. Good things don’t happen to me, at least not for long.
I should be calling him Mr. Grant, not Cullan.
I shouldn’t be flirting with him over text.
Sleeping with my boss would be the fastest way to lose everything that I’ve been working so hard for.
When my aunts finally tell me who my real mother is, I don’t hope that this unknown woman will love me on sight.
I’m not that foolish. She gave me away and never came back for me .
But I want to know why. Without knowing who she is and why she gave me away, I feel stuck.
Thirty minutes later, Cullan comes downstairs. I’ve started getting things out of the refrigerator to make dinner for us, but he shoos me away.
“I’ll do that, you sit down. You’ve been working hard all day.”
“So have you,” I point out, but I step back from the chopping board.
“I pay you to look after Rosie, not me. Besides, I like to cook.” He gets to work preparing a pasta dish. “How was your day today?”
I smile, but it trembles. “Good, thanks.”
Cullan closes the refrigerator slowly and frowns at me. “Elena. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Rosie was great. She’s a dream to look after.”
“But?”
He can see I’m upset. There’s no use hiding it. “Leon came by, and…”
Cullan’s face hardens in anger. “I must have missed the notification while I was working. I told him he’s not to come here right now without asking me first.”
“This is his home. He probably doesn’t think it’s fair he’s been excluded.”
“Leon is twenty-one years old. He’s a man, not a boy, and he needs to respect boundaries. That means mine, and it certainly means yours. I’m going to speak to him about—”
Cullan is interrupted by the doorbell. He pulls his phone out of his pocket, checks the app, and mutters a curse. “Excuse me.”
He strides out of the kitchen and disappears. I hear him open the front door and say to whoever is out there, “Now is not a good time. You’re supposed to call first.”
A flinty, feminine voice cuts across him. “We need to talk about our children. Am I interrupting something?”
I hear the sharp click of high heels along the hallway. Confident, authoritative footsteps of someone who believes she belongs in this house.
My stomach swoops. Am I about to meet Cullan’s ex-wife?
An attractive redhead in a sleeveless tank top with very sharp shoulders and pointed nails rounds the corner.
She steps up to the kitchen island and takes a pointed sip of the smoothie she’s holding while examining me with glittering green eyes.
The baby doll tee and jeans I’m wearing.
Rosie’s dinner plate that I’m clearing away.
The mug of chamomile tea I’ve half drunk.
“Isn’t this cozy? Just you and Cullan.” Her smile widens. It’s not a nice smile. “Are you having fun playing house with my daughter?”
Cullan follows her with an expression like thunder. He moves around his ex and stands protectively in front of me. “Rebecca. If you’re not here to discuss our children, get out.”
Rebecca puts her smoothie down with a sharp thump. “Of course I’m here to discuss our children. Leon’s distraught. ”
I feel my eyebrows creep up my forehead. Distraught? That doesn’t sound like Leon.
Cullan points at the door. “Then go to the living room and we’ll talk.”
She glowers at him for a moment, and then marches away.
Cullan shoots me an apologetic look. His jaw is tight with anger as he follows her.
I start to tidy up the kitchen, but I stop dead when I hear what Rebecca is saying.
“Leon’s told me all about how the girl who dumped him has got a sad little crush on you. Don’t tell me you actually like it, Cullan.”
“You will not speak about Elena.”
“Oh no, I’m disrespecting Elena,” she says, her words heavy with irony.
“That’s enough,” Cullan says sharply. “Our son has already treated her with cruelty and disdain. She doesn’t need to hear it from his mother as well.”
“You do like it that she’s simpering over you. What is she, twenty? You’re forty-one, Cullan. Don’t be pathetic.”
Cullan sighs, and I can picture him rubbing his brow with his fingertips. “You can say what you like about me. Get it out of your system. But don’t drag other people into our fights.”
I clench my fists. It’s generous of him to let his ex say whatever she likes about him, but he shouldn’t let her get away with it. He should tell her she’s out of line for calling him pathetic .
“Oh, I’ll say what I like all right,” she snaps.
“I’d rather discuss our son, seeing as that’s why you’re here.”
“No, no. You invited me to get things out of my system. How’s this for starters?”
I flinch as a diatribe of vitriol pours from Rebecca’s lips about him, their divorce, and his shortcomings as a man.
She calls him boring, and complains they never had any fun together.
There’s stony silence from Cullan as she rages on.
My chest feels tighter and tighter. How dare she lash out at him like this?
To accuse him of being boring because he cares about raising good and happy children turns my stomach. It’s not right. How dare she.
I glare at her smoothie on the counter. I want to dump it in the sink, or better yet, throw it in her face.
The cupboard next to the mugs is open, and my eyes drift to a box marked laxatives .
These must be the drugs that were prescribed to Leon a few weeks back when a combination of bad diet, dehydration, and exam stress had him clutching his stomach and rolling around in pain.
He didn’t go into detail about what the drugs did to him, but he compared it to the eruption of Vesuvius.
Rebecca’s smoothie is unprotected on the counter.
She’s still cutting loose at Cullan.
I reach for the laxatives, quietly take out a spoon and a plate, and pop the plastic top off Rebecca’s smoothie.
Two minutes later, I’m in the laundry room, innocently unloading the washer and putting wet things in the drier.
“Are you done?” I eventually hear Cullan say from the living room.
“Nothing to say? You’re just going to roll over and take it like a beaten dog?”
“You’re angry that you signed over sole custody of Rosie. You can rant and scream, Rebecca. Throw your tantrum, but it’s too late to take back those papers you signed. I have final say in who cares for Rosie, and Elena is her nanny. It’s no longer my job to deal with your drama and your hangovers.”
Rebecca gives an angry scoff. “I don’t… I’m not… Fuck you, Cullan!”
She marches back into the kitchen and snatches her smoothie off the counter. She glares at me through the laundry room door, and then rounds on Cullan, who’s leaning on the marble kitchen counter. “I hope whoever you marry next is as boring as you are. She’ll need to be to put up with you.”
“Rebecca.” Cullan speaks in a deep, calm voice.
She immediately whirls around, her eyes bright with the prospect of round two of their argument.
“In the future, you’ll stick to the terms of our divorce. You do not come to this house. Ever.”
Her jaw juts in anger, and for a moment, the woman’s beauty manages to look ugly. Without another word, she marches out of the house and slams the door behind her.
“I’m so sorry you had to hear all that,” Cullan sighs.
I wonder why Rebecca even came here. Ostensibly it was to discuss Leon and Rosie, but all she seemed to want was to fight with Cullan .
“I’m so sorry she said all that to you,” I say quietly. “I don’t think you’re boring.”
His lips twitch in amusement. “I’m glad to hear it. In the past, I would have bent over backward trying to give her everything she wanted. It’s a shock to her system to hear me tell her no. It’s not right that she marches in here and disturbs you.”
He moves closer to me, hazel eyes on my face. He cups my jaw in his hand and lowers his lips toward mine.
The stained-glass windows scream at me in my aunts’ voices.
Whore .
I turn my head away, breathing fast.
“Elena?”
A faint drumming sound reaches my ears. A pattering against the windows. It takes me a moment to realize what it is. Rain.
Rosie’s paintings. I left them outside.
I dash outside in the pouring rain. The paintings are spread out on the table where I left them, and all the colors are running together. “Oh, no. They’re ruined.”
Cullan appears at my side and reaches for them. “They’ll be all right. Let’s get them inside and onto the draining board.”
We spread the dripping pages out next to the sink. The water-based paints have mingled, but the brush marks and fingermarks are more or less still visible.
Cullan smiles at them, water dripping from his hair. “They’re very artistic. It looks like Rosie had fun. ”