Chapter 10
Jillian
Howls of pain intruded on my ears as I taped up a box of Frankie’s shirts, and I walked outside to see Frankie clutching the porch railing.
“Jillian, please,” he begged. “I’ll never see her again, I promise. I’ll block her number. It was just a mistake, and I regret it so much!”
But he smelled like sin.
“Either you leave or I leave,” I said. “But I’m not staying in the same house as you.”
“Frankie cheated,” Cash put it. “He should be the one to leave.”
“I’ll get him out,” Mrs. Greenberg called from her own porch. “Begone, you!”
My husband looked truly alarmed now, his handsome face white with horror.
“We need to come to a satisfactory agreement with the lawyers,” I added.
“Lawyers?” Frankie yelped. “We don’t need lawyers.”
“You don’t seem to realize that it’s over,” I said, swallowing the sick knowledge that it was true.
How could it be? It had been only yesterday I’d sat on the beach and watched him surf, digging my toes into the sand, sipping on coffee while knowing I was the luckiest girl in the world.
“Please don’t do this,” Frankie hissed. “Let me fix this.”
“There’s nothing to fix,” I said.
My voice seemed to come from a great distance away.
“You don’t love me enough. Nothing else matters.”
And Frankie instantly went to pieces, wringing his hands anxiously, his eyes looking half-crazed with worry.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I do love you enough! I can’t deny I fucked up! But it was a total mistake. Just a foolish attempt to—to relive the past. I can’t—believe I did this to you. Caused you this pain. It was disgusting of me. Disgusting!”
I said nothing. The anxiety in his eyes made me want to vomit. I couldn’t bear his regret or his pity.
Poor old, reliable Jillian, everyone would think. Unless I did something to change their mind, show that I wasn’t an object of pity.
Frankie would be wracked with guilt about how he had hurt me, because he knew exactly how much I loved him.
“It was kind of like something I had to get out of my system,” Frankie pleaded as Cash snorted derisively. “And now that I have, it’s all over. I promise.”
And, suddenly, I knew I couldn’t be an object of pity one second longer.
“Stop!” I bit out. “I do not accept your apologies. No, you don’t get my forgiveness.”
“Jilly, please—“ Frankie begged, his eyes startlingly filling with tears, but I turned to go back into the house.
“Find somewhere else to stay. I don’t want to look at you.”