Chapter 29
NIA
“G ood morning, Ms. Cavanaugh.”
“Hi Linda,” I smile at the woman behind the receptionist’s desk. Every time I’m here, she smiles. Every time I’m here, she is incredibly warm. She’s either paid very well or she must be very well caffeinated. “I know I’m early, but…”
“You can head in,” she tells me.
With an appreciative wave, I adjust my purse on my shoulder and walk toward Brody’s office, pulling up the hem of my skirt just enough to make me feel like I’m making a statement.
When I enter the room, he’s seated at his desk, and he doesn’t stand to greet me like he’s come to do. Instead, he’s focused on his computer and the pad of paper next to him, hardly aware of my existence at all.
“Hi,” I greet him, waving to catch his attention.
“Hello, Ms. Cavanaugh,” he says, and my brow pinches. “Please have a seat.”
I drop into the chair across from him, resting my bag on top of the desk. “I was thinking, we—”
“Do you have the information that I asked you to bring?” He asks.
Pulling a few pieces of paper from inside the bag, I stare at him, not making any effort to hide the confusion etched into my face. “Yeah, it’s—”
“Thank you,” he tells me as he takes them from my hand.
Where quiet moments between us have typically been comfortable for me, this kind of quiet is heavy. It knocks and scratches at something in the back of my mind that makes my heart feel like it might jump out of my chest.
Every time that I open my mouth to speak, I close it again, opting instead to watch silently as he works. He’s so different today, and with hardly any effort at all, he’s managed to put so much distance between us that I can practically reach out and touch the wall keeping him from letting me in.
“My husband cheated on me,” I blurt out. Brody finally looks up from his work to meet my gaze. “He cheated on me, he shut me out, and I still don’t know what I did to push him away, and that completely shattered my trust. So I really need for you to not shut me out, too.”
“Nia,” he sighs, his eyes softening.
Moving to the other side of his desk, I use my foot to push his chair a few inches away, resting my ass on the edge of the desk in front of him. I hoist myself onto the top of it, dropping my feet onto either of his arm rests and trapping him between my legs.
“Talk to me.”
Seemingly against his own will, he rolls closer to me. His hands rest firmly on his desk as he lets his eyes meet the lacy blue thong that I’m wearing.
“I’m supposed to be preparing you for your court date,” he tells me.
“And that requires you to be a robot?”
“It requires me to have a level head,” he answers. “I— can’t risk this going poorly for you at this point. I won’t be responsible for that.”
“You’re shutting me out like I’ve done something wrong,” I tell him.
“You haven’t,” he insists. “I have. I’ve put you in a compromising position.”
“Everything you’ve done, I’ve wanted,” I tell him. “I know where the boundary lies.”
His fingers flex against the wood of his desk, and for a moment, I’m not sure if he’s going to kiss me or kick me out of his office. He’s impossible to read right now, and that thought settles deep into my chest with an ache that I can’t get rid of.
I may not know what’s happening between us, and I might go back and forth about it more often than I don’t, but I know that I don’t want it to stop. It makes me a hypocrite, it makes me no better than the people who hurt me.
But god, does it bring to life something wonderful inside of me.
“I’m not asking you to love me,” I continue. “I’m not asking you to replace my husband. I’m just asking you not to change on me…that would harm me.”
His eyes study mine, softening, as the only sound in the room is the quiet ticking of the antique clock hung on the wall. I find the sound of it growing louder with every second until it’s echoing, bouncing off of every corner of my mind.
“Okay,” he finally says. His hands move, so slightly that I could almost miss it, just a millimeter closer to me. He wants to touch me . “Okay, I won’t.”
As much as I tried to tell myself that what happens outside of this office wouldn’t change the way that I look at him or the way that I hear him when he speaks to me, it has. I pick up on the authority in his voice as he walks me through the process of meeting with the judge, as he tells me what to expect and what he expects of me.
When he speaks about Katie, I notice the gentle tone that comes with his words and the softness that settles behind his eyes.
I don’t bring up the fact that I haven’t received a bill for any of my meetings with him since the day that I blew into his office a crying, hysterical mess. I want to know why, and I have probably a thousand other questions that I could ask him; but I stay perched in my seat with my hands clasped in my lap, speaking only when spoken to.
I can bring it up later.
“Mr. Montgomery,” Linda’s voice says through the intercom on his desk, “your twelve o’clock is here.”
I’m not sure that either of us had noticed how much time had passed since I got here.
“Thank you, Linda,” he responds with his finger pressed onto a button. “We’re just finishing up here.”
I hurry to gather my purse and head to the door with a quick goodbye, hesitating as I pull the handle. Quietly closing the door again, I turn to Brody, and he meets me with an expectant arch of his brow.
“When you called me that night,” I muse, “were you planning on making me watch you?”
There’s a flash of surprise on his face, gone as quickly as it comes. “No.”
“Were you doing it because of me?”
“Goodbye, Nia,” he says, the corner of his mouth ticking up almost imperceptibly.
The only light in my bedroom is the glare from the screen of my phone as I scroll through my contacts to find Isla’s information. She told me that I could call her any time, but I’m not sure that she meant after midnight on a weekday.
Against my better judgment, I call her, and I’m not sure if I hope that she’ll answer or if I hope she doesn’t.
“Hello hello,” she sings into the phone.
“Hi,” I chuckle quietly. “I just wanted to ask you when the next event will be at The Haven?”
“Uh-huh,” she says, almost disbelievingly. “That would have nothing to do with a Volvo-driving lawyer who finds farmers’ markets to be a fun weekend activity, I assume? We have a mixer coming up. Texts will go out this week.”
“Okay, follow-up then,” I say, ignoring the rapid beating of my heart. “I need your help finding something to wear. I drop my daughter off with her dad at five thirty on Friday, if that would work for you?”
“Send me your measurements and I’ll send you my address,” she tells me giddily. “Don’t worry, we’ll put you in something that will get you in trouble.”
“Oh, I don’t…”
“Yes you do,” she teases. “See you Friday, love. Kisses!”
I laugh as the line disconnects, opening my phone’s calendar to add an appointment with Isla for Friday before I send her what I know about my measurements. I’m not entirely sure who she thinks I am or what kind of shopping she thinks I do, but clearly she’s more well-versed in it than I am.
Looking at the time on my phone, I sigh, rolling onto my back. I have to be awake in five hours, and now I’m thinking about getting into trouble with Brody Montgomery.
I enjoy his brand of trouble; pushing limits, teasing…
Rolling out of my bed, I search my dresser for the papers he’d given me when we made our agreement. Tiptoeing down the stairs with them in hand, I search the cabinet beneath the TV for a box of markers and I pull out one of the green ones.
Writing today’s date on the paper, I scribble green circles around a handful of items that I’d previously marked yellow, and even a few that I’d marked with red.
I don’t know what I’m doing. I came close enough to losing this today that I should just leave it well enough alone. I should stop here and call it good; our agreement is still intact, he’s still taking care of my case. I should be thankful for that – and I am. I should drop this.
But he was more free in that red room than I’ve ever seen him, and it felt today like something opened up for him in his office.
So screw it.
Isla Cabot is a wealthy woman, and her home is a reflection of that. I feel like an ant standing in front of the three-story contemporary, and like a stalker looking into the many windows taking up space on the walls.
Each of them are large glass panes, unobstructed by curtains or blinds. I can see right into her house, just standing outside of it.
She waves to me as she hurries past one of the windows, trotting toward the door on a pair of heels that must make her nearly six feet tall. A long, thin skirt starts at her waist, ending midway at her shins, and a sleek bustier covers her chest; and then there’s me, still dressed in a set of deep maroon scrubs and my favorite surgical clogs.
“There she is,” Isla gushes as she pulls the door open. Stepping back a few feet, she extends an arm in invitation for me to enter. “Get in here and let’s have some fun, shall we?”
“Thank you for this,” I tell her, following through the house as her heels click against the tile floor.
The entire space is decorated in modern French furniture, each piece’s hardware a soft gold which matches the trim around the long oval mirror at the end of the first hall that we walk through after climbing a flight of stairs.
I’m almost certain that I’ve gotten an extra ten thousand steps in for the day by the time we reach what assume is Isla’s bedroom. A massive canopy bed sits against the far left wall, complete with a royal headboard.
The rest of the furniture in the room is incredibly similar to that throughout the rest of the house, none of which looks like the décor at The Haven.
Three rolling racks sit in front of the bed, arranged into a bracket, each of them lined with clothing pieces of different length, style and color.
“This is your personal shopping mall,” she tells me, gesturing toward them. “Whatever you like is yours to keep, and whatever you don’t will go to the donation bin.”
“Isla,” I gape. “I can pay you for these.”
“Please,” she laughs, waving off my concern, “ I didn’t even pay for them.”
Moving to the far side of the room, she grips onto a mirror, trimmed with the same soft gold that her blush-pink furniture has, and she rolls it toward the space she’s set up in order for me to ‘shop.’
Her hands move through racks not unlike my own, stopping every now and then to pull a piece from its hanger and hold it up against my body.
“You know Brody well, right?” I ask, swiveling side to side with a dress pressed against myself. “Has he always been so…”
“He’s hard to get to know,” she tells me. Her hands move to pull the elastic from my hair as she takes a step behind me and runs her fingers through my tresses. “You know on those zombie shows, how they have all of that barbed wire fencing around their little encampments to keep the bad things out?”
“That’s him?” I laugh.
“Complete with a team of very well-trained snipers,” she says. “A lot of bad things have happened to him, and a lot of them were things that he didn’t realize were bad until he was an adult. His parents are…” She pauses, shaking her head with a disgusted huff. “I’m not allowed to meet them, because if I do, I’ll go to jail.”
My mind drifts to his office and to what I’ve seen of his home, trying to bring to memory anything I’ve seen that might have had to do with his parents. He has a few framed photos in his office, but I didn’t see anyone older in them. The people in the photos all looked his age or younger, give or take a few years.
“You’re the most fun I’ve seen him have in years,” she tells me. Reaching for a strappy black dress covered in glitter and sequins, she says, “So let’s make his teeth clench so hard they break.”
“Thank you,” I tell her, my head drooping just slightly, “for not judging me for this. I know a married woman shouldn’t—”
“ Are you married, love?” She asks. Her hands drop onto my shoulders and she tilts her head. “Because as far as I’m concerned, you were single the second you filed papers. Why did he get to have fun and get off scott free when you were playing little Susie housewife, but you don’t get to live a little now? You have got to let go of that internalized misogyny.”
With a playful nudge of her elbow to my arm, she tosses the dress onto her bed in what we now refer to as the ‘yes ma’am pile,’ before trotting away into her massive walk-in closet. When she returns only a few minutes later, her arms are full of high heels in varying height.
“Take off those rubber monsters,” she demands, carefully dropping the shoes at my feet. I do as I’m told, kicking off my comfortable clogs to stand barefoot on the plush carpet of her bedroom. She pulls a pair from the pile, unmistakably a pair of Louboutins which have to be five inches tall, and she hands them to me. “Put these on and strut. ”
“These are so tall,” I laugh. “I wear, like, three-inch heels max.”
“Well, Brody’s tall,” she shrugs. “He’s gonna Dom you, because the poor fool can’t help himself, and you’re gonna look him in the eye while he does it.” Putting her hands on her hips as she shifts her weight to one side, she says, “You are not some meek little girl, Nia Cavanaugh. You’re a grown-up, and you’re in charge of your life.”
Smiling, I slip on the shoes, using Isla’s shoulder for support as I wobble through getting my bearings.
The carpet beneath me is unforgiving to the thin stiletto heels supporting my weight, but I gather my bearings and walk from one end of the room to the other, anyway, dropping a hand onto my hip and posing with a flourish while I do.
“Yep,” Isla tells me with a smile and a satisfied nod, “that big galoot is gonna lose it.”
I can’t remember the last time I did this – I don’t know that I ever have, if I’m honest. Just hanging out with another woman, laughing and putting on what amounts to a silly fashion show while we talk about boys.
In high school, I was too focused on my grades: maintain a high GPA, get into a good college, move onto nursing school and build a career.
It isn’t that I never had the opportunity or the time to get together with the other girls, I’d been invited plenty of times. I simply never gave myself that chance. I had a goal, and that was the only thing that mattered.
Isla pours herself a glass of champagne as the night winds down, offering one to me along with the invitation to stay, but I decline. As much fun as I’ve had with her tonight, I can’t let myself lose sight of my current goals, only one of which I’m sure of anymore.
As we part, she presses her cheek to mine in an air kiss, clasping both of her hands around mine. She truly is a magnetic woman. I could learn so much from her if I gave myself the freedom to do so.
She did say one thing tonight that I need to hone in on: I am not a meek little girl and I am in control of my life now.