Chapter 20
There was a woman outside her bedroom door. A Scottish woman. Willow was sure of it.
“Ash… Babe …you knew what was meant to happen on that day, and it happened . Can you blame me for being over the moon about finally getting what I wanted?” After a beat of silence, the woman’s voice continued. “Are you really going to just bugger off and out of my life because I held up my end of the agreement?” The woman spoke in a hushed tone, albeit an exasperated hushed tone, which made it sound all that much less hushed .
So…yeah. There was a Scottish woman outside Willow’s door calling Ash Babe . Which shouldn’t matter because they agreed days ago to dial it back to friends while they finished the song. She had a mirror full of song titles about friendship to prove it, from Ash’s initial nod to Toy Story to Willow countering with The Golden Girls theme song, “Thank You for Being a Friend,” all the way to songs that evoked the idea of friendship even if they didn’t have the word friend in the title, like “Count on Me” by Bruno Mars or “I’ll Be There for You” by the Rembrandts. She had days’ worth of evidence that she and Ash were, in fact, friends and nothing more, yet the sound of a woman’s voice outside her door calling Ash Babe while sounding like a Spice Girl was throwing her into a tailspin.
Willow might have still been groggy with sleep, but she was certain of two very important things. One, a stranger in her house calling her friend Ash Babe was not on her bingo card for this week, and two, she had to pee. Like… now .
Willow hopped out of bed and ran for the bathroom. In her haste, she stubbed her pinkie toe on the doorframe, hard , and let out a string of whispered expletives through gritted teeth as she simultaneously shimmied out of her underwear and took care of business.
Only after she’d risen to wash her hands and face and to brush her teeth did she realize how badly she’d jammed her poor little toe. Hot tears pricked her eyes as she put weight on her foot, and when she looked down, she could see that the tiny toe was already visibly bruised and not as tiny as it used to be.
“No, no, no, no, no,” Willow told herself as she splashed cold water on her face and attempted to continue her morning routine. She needed a game plan for how she was going to react when she walked out into the living room to find Ash with the only Scottish woman she could imagine in connection to Ash. His wife … Or, she guessed, ex -wife.
With clean teeth, a fresh face, and morning hair piled into a messy bun on top of her head, Willow hobbled back into her room, absently threw on a hoodie over her tank and leggings, and then sniffed back the tears that were surely from her throbbing toe and nothing else. Then she squared her shoulders and threw open her bedroom door.
“Morning!” she cried, way cheerier than anyone should greet anyone first thing, but Willow Morgan was a singer. An actor, she was not .
Ash was mid-pace on the floor in front of the couch while the woman—yep, that was Annabeth Calder-Payne—stood in a fitted white tennis dress with her sleek blond bob parted down the middle, arms crossed as she glanced from Ash to Willow.
Ash’s eyes widened. “Wills, I’m sorr—” but he cut himself off before finishing the word, clamping his mouth shut as Willow watched the wheels turn in his head.
“ I’m sorry,” Annabeth interjected, striding toward Willow with a hand outstretched. “Annabeth Calder—” But the other woman stopped short as well when Willow limped in her direction. “Are you injured?” she asked instead.
“I’m fine. Totally fine.” Willow waved her off. “Just stubbed my toe on the way to the bathroom,” she added with a nervous laugh. “Or I guess you call it the loo, right? Or toilet?” Willow offered the other woman her hand. “You must be Annabeth.”
The young woman—she was barely twenty when she and Ash got married, right?—smiled tentatively with perfect red lips as she glanced down at Willow’s outstretched hand. She looked like the perfect combination of Taylor Swift and Posh Spice.
“Don’t worry! I washed my hands after,” Willow joked then cringed at what was not at all funny. Nothing about this situation merited laughter.
Annabeth gave her hand a firm shake, firmer than Willow had been expecting, so much so that she lost her balance, put extra weight on the outside of her foot, and then yelped at the sudden onslaught of pain.
“Jesus, Willow.” Ash finally spoke again as he strode not around but over the couch to meet Willow where she stood precariously, balancing mostly on her left foot. His eyes widened. “What the hell happened? I think you freaking broke your toe.”
Oh god. This was not happening. Willow was not interrupting a reunion between her…her… housemate and the woman who was very recently her housemate’s wife without finding out why she was here and what it meant. But Ash was suddenly guiding her toward the couch, almost carrying her as Annabeth clapped her hands together and announced, “Right. We’ll need some ice, cotton, and surgical tape so we can use the next toe over as a splint. Have you got all of that, Ash?” Annabeth was already at the freezer, pulling out the ice tray as Ash helped Willow lower herself to the couch.
“It’s my brother Eli’s place,” Ash called back to her as he situated Willow in the corner of the couch so she could extend her legs. He propped the right one on top of a throw pillow.
“Ah!” Annabeth replied. “Then that means Dr. Murphy has the place stocked. Will I find a first aid box in one of the cabinets, then?”
“Yep!” Ash answered. “Pretty sure it’s the one by the sink.”
“I’m fine ,” Willow insisted, but when Ash’s thumb brushed so much as the outside of her foot near the toe, she hissed in a breath that gave away her big, fat lie.
“Sorry!” he said. “About hurting you…your toe , I mean. I didn’t… This isn’t…” He pinched the bridge of his nose, then soft enough so only Willow could hear, added, “I can explain. This isn’t what it looks like.”
“What does it look like?” Willow asked in the same hushed tone, but then Annabeth was there. In one hand she held a tea towel tied around a mound of ice and, in the other, the same first aid kit Willow had used to patch Ash up the night she mistook him for an intruder all those weeks ago.
“Right,” Annabeth began, shooing Ash out of the way so she could sit beside Willow’s propped foot. “Now look, this will do bugger all for the pain at first until you’re good and numb, but it will help with the swelling so you can hopefully still fit into a shoe.” She raised her brows, which Willow realized was the other woman asking for permission to do whatever she was about to do, so Willow nodded.
Annabeth then unceremoniously lowered the sack of ice over Willow’s foot, and Willow swore through gritted teeth, this time not caring who heard her.
“Ah, yes,” Annabeth replied matter-of-factly. “Maybe I should have warned you better, but the quicker you ice it, the quicker we can tape you up and have you on your feet again.” She pressed her mouth into a red-lipped smile. “Broke the same toe in the middle of a three-hour match during the U.S. Open last year. Played through it so I didn’t have to forfeit or even take a time-out. It was so swollen and hurt so bad that my trainer had to cut my shoe off. Can you believe that? I could barely walk for two weeks after that.”
“Did you win the match?” Willow asked.
Annabeth nodded. “Aye, but I had to forfeit the rest of the tournament on account of the whole not-being-able-to-walk thing.”
Willow’s throat tightened, but she forced a smile. “Thank you,” she told the other woman. “For the ice and for the story to distract me from the ice.” Then she groaned.
“What’s wrong, love?” Annabeth asked. “Did my distraction not do the trick? Do you want to see my toe? It’s crooked for life now unless I let them break it again just to set it right.”
Willow laughed. “No… I don’t want to see it.” Although maybe visible confirmation that the beautiful woman almost five years her junior had at least one physical imperfection might not be the worst thing in the world. “It’s just…” She nodded toward where the ignored Ash sat sulking with his arms crossed on the other end of the couch. “You’re…fantastic. I get why Ash wanted to marry you.” She cleared her throat. “Did you come here to work things out?”
Annabeth burst into a fit of laughter. Ash shook his head and sighed. And Willow, who could no longer feel her frozen toe and almost half of her foot, furrowed her brows.
“That’s…funny?” Willow asked. Because neither she nor Ash were laughing, but somehow Willow didn’t think it was for the same reason.
Annabeth slowly let go of the bag of ice, and once certain it was balancing just fine on its own, slid back on the couch so she was sitting next to Ash. She took her ex-husband’s hand and clasped it between hers.
“Ash, love,” she began sweetly. “Did you not tell her the whole story?”
Willow’s stomach dropped, and she felt the familiar sting behind her eyes again, though she wasn’t sure why. Whatever the other woman had to say wouldn’t change what happened four years ago. But…would it change what was happening now?
Ash glanced up at Willow with the kind of look she swore she never wanted to see on his face again…apologetic.
“I tried,” he replied to Annabeth, but his gaze held firm on Willow.
“Right,” Willow mumbled. “Texts and emails that never quite made it my way.”
“I swear I did, Wills. You did block me and get a new number, but I understand if you don’t believe me.”
Willow straightened, and the towel full of ice fell to the floor. Both Annabeth and Ash made a move to reach for it, but Willow gave them one sharp shake of her head, and the two retreated like reprimanded toddlers.
Ugh. She hated that she couldn’t simply stand and give herself the higher ground. The two of them sitting across from her felt like a united front through which she had to break.
“I was humiliated and heartbroken,” Willow finally replied. It was one thing to admit those words to Ash, but it stung even more to say them in front of Annabeth. “I was escorted out of your tour bus so you could greet your new wife and take announcement photos. Did you honestly think there was anything you could have texted or emailed that could have erased that sort of mortification?”
She heard Annabeth breathe in sharply before whispering, “Oh god.”
The muscle in Ash’s jaw pulsed as he shook his head. “No,” he admitted. “You’re right. There’s nothing I can say that will fix that, and I hate myself for it.” He scrubbed a hand across his stubbled jaw and sighed.
Willow shrugged. It was time to rip off the Band-Aid. After all the curated social media posts she’d seen over the years of the happy couple splitting their time between Nashville and Edinburgh when their schedules allowed…the magazine interviews that talked of the mutual love, respect, and support that kept their relationship going despite it sometimes being long distance…Willow needed to hear it all, and she needed it to be done quickly.
“Tell me, Ash. Tell me what you should have told me before you ever threw around that four-letter word.”
Annabeth whistled, brushed her hands together, and crossed one leg over the other. “Here we go,” she said, and Willow thought she detected a hint of nervousness in the overly confident woman’s voice.
“Here we go,” Willow repeated and hoped she wouldn’t regret it.