Chapter Twenty-One
Honor
For at least thirty seconds, I wonder if I’m hallucinating. Because it makes no sense why my mother and my ex-husband are standing in front of me. Together.
“Hi, baby girl!” Mom greets enthusiastically, wrapping me in a hug that feels as fake as her smile. Her arms squeeze around my unmoving body, and I want nothing more than to back into Bodhi for comfort. “It’s so good to see you.”
I don’t think I could will myself to lift my limbs and pretend like I want to touch the woman who constantly berated me for my life choices, no matter how hard I tried. The idea of hugging her back would mean I forgive her. And I don’t.
“Look who I ran into,” she tells me, pulling away and gesturing to Max, who’s currently looking at Bodhi with interested recognition.
I’m not sure when I step toward Bodhi, but he hooks a protective arm around my waist to curl me into his side. “What are you doing here, Max?” I ask, hating how weak my voice sounds.
When was the last time I saw him? It must have been when I was packing my things into cardboard boxes.
He didn’t offer to help, not that I expected him to.
He’d simply watched as I loaded the moving truck that was taking my belongings eight hundred miles to New York.
Had he said anything to me? Given me a hug? Told me he was sorry?
No. He did nothing.
A sour, bitter feeling fills my stomach. How dare he be here with her. How dare she be here with him. “What,” I say slowly, “are you doing here?”
Max, who looks like he belongs to Silicon Valley, has the audacity to smile the same way he would for a business meeting with investors.
It’s as phony as the love painted over my mother’s face.
“You didn’t reply to my texts,” he replies casually, looking between me and Bodhi.
“It’s interesting what company you keep these days, Honor. And here I thought you hated hockey.”
After the first text he sent, I received approximately four more. All in which I ignored, because I know how much he hates when people don’t give him the attention he wants. It felt kind of good deleting them after opening them so he could see the read receipts.
“It’s rude not getting back to people,” Mom chides in a maternal tone that is almost too well rehearsed to be real.
I gape at the woman who I used to look so much like.
What happened to her? She’s aged years since I’ve seen her, no longer looking like the fifty-something she is.
She smells heavily of expensive floral perfume, which is an old party trick of hers to cover up the alcohol seeping through her veins. I hate the smell of it.
“You are hardly one to talk,” I say, trying not to sound upset. “Why are you even staying in a hotel and not at the condo?”
She pauses, suddenly looking guilty. “Well…” She clears her throat. “I sold it. A while ago, actually. It was too good of an opportunity to pass up in the current real estate market.”
What does she know about real estate? She’s never expressed interest once in it, not even when she dated somebody who did well selling in the city.
He’d even been casted for some reality TV show that highlighted a brokerage he worked for.
It wasn’t long after filming started when Mom decided he wasn’t good enough for her.
“You’re giving me crap about not getting in touch with people, yet you sold my childhood home without saying anything to me about it first?”
She dismisses the comparison with the wave of her hand. “That isn’t the same thing. And what would you have done? Bought it? They don’t allow pets there anyway.”
Her eyes give a passive look to Puck and her nose scrunches.
“He’s not just a pet,” I correct her. “Puck is my service dog. You’d remember that if you weren’t so drunk the last time we spoke about him.”
Her eyes, which used to be a beautiful shade of green but now are taken over by a glassy red glaze, roll. “I remember the conversation perfectly fine. That doesn’t mean I agree that you should have one. It seems a bit…obtuse. There are people who actually need them.”
My nostrils flare, and I feel Bodhi go rigid beside me. “Excuse me?” he says for the first time, voice low and rough.
Mom’s eyes widen a fraction at his unimpressed tone. “Service dogs are for people with disabilities,” she tells Bodhi, as if she finds it incredulous that someone like me has one. “I mean, look at her. Does she look sick?”
A crestfallen feeling fills my chest. Is that what she thinks? That I’m not sick enough? That I don’t deserve the security of a dog like Puck who can literally save my life? Who has?
Bodhi answers before I can. “She has epilepsy. They don’t just train and hand out dogs unless they see a need for them.”
Mom laughs, but it sounds nervous. “She had one seizure.”
Now I’m officially mad. “No. You only witnessed one seizure. I lost count at how many I had as I got older, Mom. Do you have any idea how life threatening grand mal seizures are? Do you even know what that is?”
Educating her would do very little. People have to care in order to learn. The way Bodhi learned about my PCOS. He didn’t need to spend his time understanding something that I dealt with day to day, but he did. But my mother has never done that. Not once.
I swallow down the pure disappointment, the raw anger boiling inside of me.
“The first time,” I tell her, “that I had to deal with one alone, I was petrified. I had no idea where you were. You didn’t come home.
I was—” My voice breaks, and I feel betrayed by it.
“—I was so scared. One second I was fine, and the next Mila, her parents, and at least three EMTs were surrounding me on the floor and asking me if I knew my name.”
I didn’t. I didn’t know where I was or who I was.
I didn’t know Mila or her parents’ names.
It took a while for that information to come back.
I’d spent a night in the hospital being monitored for a concussion because I’d apparently hit my head on the floor during the episode and was discharged to Isabella and Manuel the next morning.
Nobody asked me where my parents were.
Nobody threatened to call CPS or get in touch with my father.
At the time, I’d been grateful. I didn’t want to move away from Mila or my home, even if my home didn’t feel like one.
But now…
Maybe that would have been for the better.
“It wasn’t just one,” I whisper. “It was one of many. There’s a difference, Mom. And if you’d been around more, you would know that.”
You would care, I add silently. Bitterly.
Max sticks his hand out at Bodhi, ignoring the tense conversation between my mother and me without inputting anything useful. Then again, he’s no different than my mother. They were always a little too alike. “I’m Max Decker. Honor’s husband.”
Without missing a beat, Bodhi says, “Ex-husband from what I hear.”
Max doesn’t seem phased by it. In fact, his lips tug up at the corners as if he’s amused by our current standing. What a dick.
Bodhi’s head cocks, and recognition has his eyes narrowing curiously. “Did you say Decker, as in—”
“Decker Sports Systems,” Max cuts in, with the same cocky grin he always has when talking about himself. “Did Honor tell you about our hockey games? I mean, I wouldn’t have been able to get them out if it weren’t for her.”
I want to shrink. To disappear.
Of course Bodhi would have heard about Max Decker and his stupid multi-million-dollar video game franchise.
It started off as a pipe dream that didn’t seem like it was going to go anywhere.
After all, plenty of games existed within the sports realm already.
But my ex-husband believed he could make the hockey version of Madden into the next best-selling game in the industry.
And he did.
Bodhi doesn’t react as though this is all new information to him. “I don’t suppose those unanswered texts you mentioned were leading to her helping you with more games, were they?”
The question has me glancing up at him, then over at Max. Max’s grin slips only a fraction by being called out.
“Maybe I just wanted to talk to my girl,” Max tells him in challenge. It seems bold considering Max, who’s by no means short, looks small in comparison to the pro hockey player who’s even closer to me than before.
“Funny,” Bodhi muses dryly. Heat surfaces on my face as his arm tightens around me, locking me against his ribcage. I suck in a breath when his fingers massage the soft, fleshy part of my hip. “She sure doesn’t look like your girl right now.”
Mom clears her throat. “Oh, boys. No need for a measuring contest.”
But the ‘boys’ ignore her.
And so do I.
“Guess I should have known this would happen,” Max says, studying the way Bodhi holds me. “You always were a chubby chaser, weren’t you, Hoffman?”
I choke on the breath I take. Because seriously? This prick knows I’ve been sensitive about my weight since I started gaining it. He watched me try fad diet after fad diet with no luck or result. And he brings my weight into this?
For the first time since Max and my mother approached me, Bodhi takes a lengthy step forward with his fist clenched. “I swear to God, if you say another word about her—”
I put a hand on his chest, afraid of what he might do. “He’s not worth it,” I tell him, meaning every syllable of it.
Max baits him, not paying me any mind. “Or what, Hoffman? You’ll hit me? Go ahead. That sounds like a great payday to me. I’ve got a few more ideas that could really improve the next game launch and that kind of money would—”
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Bodhi all but growls.
I hold up a hand toward both of them, looking only at Max. “Do you care about anything that we’ve been through? About hurting my feelings? Or is the only thing you think about how to get more money for yourself and your stupid game?”