2. Melanie
CHAPTER 2
Melanie
The house was such a disaster, I didn’t even know where to begin.
Glancing around, I took a crunchy bite of my dill pickle. The mess was partially my fault. I could admit that. I’d known moving day was coming, and I’d let things pile up—quite literally. I’d take twenty-five percent of the blame. It was only fair.
My phone rang. There was the other seventy-five percent.
More specifically, his lawyer.
Eighty percent his fault. At least.
I took a breath. I was going to answer the call calmly and rationally. My voice would remain steady. I wasn’t going to yell, not even a little bit.
I let my breath out, then answered, purposely using my maiden name. “Melanie Andolini.”
“Hello, Mrs. Davis… Excuse me, Ms. Andolini.”
I let that slip go even though I was convinced he did it on purpose. “Mr. Traver.”
“I’m calling to confirm you’ll be out of the house by this afternoon.”
I glanced at the chaos. It didn’t look good, but I also didn’t have much choice. “Why? Is Jared afraid I’ll be here when he finally comes to get his things?”
“That is a concern.”
I rolled my eyes. “And he says I’m dramatic.”
“Ma’am, the last time you two were in a room together, you called him… a bulbous pustule of duplicity.” It sounded like he was reading from his notes. “As well as a deceitful scumbag. And you made it clear if he were to enter the home in question, he would, and I quote, 'regret it with every ounce of his maggot-infested soul.’”
“So what you’re saying is, my ex-husband is afraid of me.”
He sputtered. “No. I wouldn’t say that.”
“Can that be added to the divorce decree? I don’t care where, even a side note. I’d like that to be on the legal record.”
“Ms. Andolini, the issue is whether you are vacating the house and what time Mr. Davis can arrive to retrieve his share of the belongings.”
This wasn’t about Jared’s stuff. He’d moved out a year ago. There was nothing in the house he actually needed. He was mad that I hadn’t rolled over and capitulated to his ridiculous terms and was trying to make me pay for it.
I hadn’t wanted anything extraordinary. Just half. He was the one who’d walked away from our marriage and then had the audacity to suggest he should get the majority of our assets. Why? Because he was a high and mighty attorney who thought the years he’d spent in law school made him special. And more important than the woman he’d married.
The worst part was, most of the value of those assets had already been eaten up by debt—his, not mine—and the rest was going to the never-ending legal fees. I was freaking broke.
“I have until four. And if he’s so terrified of seeing me again, tell him not to get here at three fifty-nine. I’m going to need every minute.”
“Noted. Thank you for your time.”
I wanted to say you’re not welcome because you’ve been awful to deal with, and I hope I never have to hear your slimy voice again . But he hung up.
Slightly disappointing, but probably for the best.
Slipping my phone into the back pocket of my jeans, I looked around again and took another bite of my pickle.
I’d met Jared when I was living in LA, but his career had taken us to Seattle a few years after we got married. Not my first choice of cities, but the house had been a dream. It was big, airy, and beautiful. But its pretty exterior and expensive finishes were just a facade. The reality of my life in it had been anything but a dream.
A nightmare? That was a little much. It hadn’t been a nightmare, but it hadn’t been good. Especially when Jared had declared that he was leaving me to shack up with one of his twentysomething paralegals.
Wives weren’t usually cast aside until they were middle-aged, right? I was still in my thirties. Hardly the frumpy and sadly underappreciated woman who’d given her best years to a man who decided to go through a midlife crisis and trade her in for a newer model. We hadn’t even gotten that far.
Obviously, it was for the best. I wasn’t sad about my marriage ending. I wasn’t even angry—not anymore. I had been at first, but a few weeks into life on my own, I’d realized how inevitable—and necessary—the end of our relationship had been.
So there I stood, in the middle of a giant mess of boxes, half-sorted and half-packed stuff, on my last day in the house we’d shared. And I laughed. Hard.
I burst out in a fit of laughter that shook my shoulders and made my stomach cramp. Clutching my middle, I doubled over, gasping for breath. I probably looked ridiculous, but I didn’t care. No one was watching. And I would have laughed just as much either way.
The heady sense of freedom almost made up for the fact that I had days’ worth of work to do before the movers arrived and only a few hours in which to do it.
Pushing aside the temptation to just burn the whole house down and be done with it, I finished the last bite of my pickle, then gathered my long dark hair into a ponytail and cinched it with a hair tie.
I hadn’t meant to procrastinate so much. I’d honestly thought I could sort and pack everything in plenty of time. It was possible time management wasn’t my best skill. But hey, I was an actor. Weren’t creative types supposed to get a pass when it came to organizational skills?
There was a knock on the door, and I shot a glare across the house, as if the door itself had insulted me. It couldn’t be the movers already. I had three more hours. How dare they?
I went to answer it, ready to beg them for more time, but it wasn’t the movers. It was my older brother, Nathan, and his wife, Sharla.
Although we were five years apart, Nathan and I were often mistaken for twins. We had the same brown eyes and olive skin that tanned in about five minutes, thanks to our Italian dad, but Nathan had a sprinkling of gray at his temples, where I was all dark brown, thank you very much.
Sharla was athletic, with a sporty blond pixie cut and a butterfly tattoo on her ankle that she openly regretted. She and Nathan were the type of weirdos who loved to run marathons. For fun.
They also lived a couple hours away in Tilikum, the small town in the Washington Cascade mountains where we’d grown up.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“You said you had to be out by today,” he said with a casual shrug .
“And we figured you’d need help,” Sharla added.
“You didn’t have to come all this way.” I stepped aside so they could come in. “I’ve got this.”
Sharla craned her neck to look deeper inside at the chaos of boxes and stacks of stuff that still needed to be packed. “When do the movers arrive?”
“A few hours, but I’ll be fine.”
She put a hand on my arm. “You don’t have to do everything alone.”
“I know,” I said, injecting a bit of affront to my voice.
Nathan raised his eyebrows at me.
“What?”
“You suck at asking for help.” He walked past me straight into the house.
Following him to the kitchen, I rolled my eyes, but he wasn’t wrong. I was terrible at asking for help.
Time for a change of subject. “Where are the kids?”
“With Mom and Dad.” He picked up a pizza cutter sitting on the kitchen counter.
“That’s Jared’s.”
He let it drop.
Nathan and Sharla had three kids, Lucia, Zola, and Nico. My nieces and nephew were a big part of why I’d decided to move back to Tilikum. The whole starting over thing was daunting, but at least I’d be there for birthday parties, school plays, and soccer games.
I’d missed too much already.
Sharla put her hands on her hips and looked around. “Where should we start? I take it everything isn’t yours?”
“No, Jared’s stuff is here, but I don’t know what he’s planning to do with it. He won’t speak to me directly anymore.”
“What?” Sharla’s voice was incredulous. “What do you mean, he won’t speak to you directly?”
“We have to go through our lawyers. As if I have money to burn and want to pay my attorney a million dollars an hour to forward his attorney’s emails.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because he’s a dick,” Nathan deadpanned.
“True.” I paused and twirled a lock of hair from my ponytail around my finger. “And it might have something to do with the fact that I called him a bloodsucking tick on the ass of humanity who wouldn’t know integrity if it hit him in the face with a shovel.”
“Good one,” Sharla said.
“And also a festering boil.” I started ticking off insults with my fingers. “A lying toad, a craven weakling, a stinking pile of dung, and a disgusting excuse for a man who’s an embarrassment to his parents and men everywhere.”
“You’re not wrong,” Nathan said.
I looked around, wishing I had another pickle—they’re my comfort food, don’t judge—not sure if even three people were enough to get things under control by the time the movers arrived. “Maybe we just burn it down, and I buy all new stuff. How about this? I cook bacon, get the grease good and hot. It catches fire, then I throw water on it and claim I didn’t know how to put out a kitchen fire.”
“Or we just pack what’s important and leave the rest for the shithead,” Nathan said.
Sharla patted her husband’s arm. “I like this plan.”
“Are you sure? I think there’s some bacon in the fridge.”
“We’re not burning the house down,” she said.
“Fine. The important stuff is my recording equipment. That’s all packed.” I worked as a voice actor, and since I had my own setup, I was able to work from home. It wasn’t a bad gig, although jobs could be few and far between. “It’s the rest of it that’s the problem. His attorney sent over an inventory list. I’m supposed to stick to that.”
Nathan picked up the printed-out list. “What a tool. ”
I waved it off. “I don’t care about most of it. If he wants the pizza cutter and all the bar glasses, he can have them.”
“What about the furniture?” Sharla asked. “Are you keeping the bedroom stuff? I feel like that would be weird.”
“I slept on that bed alone more than with him, but no, I’m not taking it. He can get rid of it.”
“Fair enough.” She rubbed her hands together. “Let’s get started.”
Nathan’s brow furrowed as he read over the inventory list. His eyes moved to a glass sitting out on the counter. “Bar glass?”
I nodded.
His face expressionless, he batted it like a cat, right into the extra-deep farmhouse sink. The sound of breaking glass tinkled.
It was music to my ears.
“Don’t make a mess,” Sharla said. “You’re going to get her in trouble.”
The corners of his mouth lifted in a slight grin.
“Come on.” She grabbed his arm and tugged him out of the kitchen. “Let’s pack some boxes.”
We got to work, sorting through what Jared and I had accumulated over roughly a decade. The more we packed, the less I decided to keep. So little felt untainted by the ups and downs—mostly downs—of our relationship.
The movers arrived before we finished, but they were able to get started loading the truck while we madly sorted through books, kitchen items, and a closet we’d totally missed. Part of me wanted to take the curtains, bathroom mirrors, toilet paper holders, and light fixtures simply because they weren’t on Jared’s inventory list. But I opted out of that level of pettiness and settled on taking all the tools in the garage since Jared had neglected to divide them up.
His loss. And a girl never knew when she might need an electric drill with three sets of drill bits .
After the movers loaded everything, they shut the truck door with a bang. I stood on the front step, gazing at the moving truck with the contents of my life stuffed inside. Sharla sidled up next to me and put an arm around my waist.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. I really am. I mean, I’m broke and about to move back to my hometown to completely start my life over. But I’m okay.”
“I think it’s going to be great. The kids will love having you close. When does the truck drop off your stuff?”
“Tomorrow afternoon.” I paused. “I just hope it’s not weird living in Tilikum again. It’s been so long, I hardly remember what small-town life is like. I haven’t been back for more than a summer since I left high school.”
“It’s the same, but different. But the same.”
Wordlessly, I nodded. I was going back to the beginning for a new beginning. There was something poetic about that. I certainly had plenty I was ready to leave behind, and not just my ill-fated marriage.
And most of my memories of Tilikum were good ones. Not all. But most. And the ones that weren’t?
I’d just have to avoid them.