Chapter 17
Thankfully, the rest of the day goes smoothly.
After work, I stop and grab a pizza and a bottle of wine.
I feel jittery and desperate for this to be over with.
Jo texts me that she’s on her way just as I’m pulling into the driveway.
I run inside and change into leggings and a sweatshirt, then sweep the back porch and set out plates and glasses on the picnic table.
Even though it’s a brisk, fall night, being outside calms me and I need all the calm I can get.
I grab my laptop from the living room and put it on the table next to me so I’ll be able to pull up the pictures when necessary. Nervous laughter bubbles out of me—I should have made a damn PowerPoint presentation.
I hear the front door open a short while later, followed by Jo’s unmistakable “Helloooo.”
“I’m on the porch. Come on back!” I call in to her.
Jo slides open the screen door and joins me on the porch. She’s dressed in sweats and an oversized hoodie. Her pale face peeks out from underneath the hood, almost lost in the spill of her tangled red hair, and it’s like I’m looking at the seventeen-year-old version of her again.
I walk over to her and wrap my arms around her tightly. She leans into me, putting her head on my shoulder as her body begins to shake.
“I can’t stop crying. I’ve been like a faucet all day.
On and off. I told Kody I wasn’t feeling well so I could hide in my room most of the day,” Jo chokes out the words between sobs.
I lead her over to the table with my arm around her.
I pour the wine and hand her a piece of pizza.
She takes a small bite but then puts it down.
“Everything tastes like dust right now.” Her eyes start to water again. Panic starts to rise inside me.
I reach across the table and squeeze her hand.
“The worst thing is the not knowing,” Jo continues miserably.
“I don’t know what he’s hiding, so I’m just imagining the worst. Is it one woman or is it women?
I’ve been going through all our calendars, bank statements, phone bills trying to figure out what it could be.
” She picks at a spot of peeling paint on the table.
“I’m so lost, Paige. If he wasn’t in the hospital, I’d claw his eyes out.
It feels pointless fighting over the phone, but I don’t know what I’m going to do when he comes home tomorrow.
How can I care for him when I know he’s hiding something that could rip apart our family? ”
She looks so broken already, but I can’t sit here in silence. I have to tell her what I know, and even if she’s angry and rages at me, it will be better than her not knowing. I take a steadying breath.
“Jo, I don’t know the best way to start, so I’m just going to start,” I say, doing my best to keep my voice steady. Jo looks up from picking apart her pizza and meets my gaze, a questioning look on her face.
“You know you can tell me anything. Did something happen with Shayne?” she asks, breaking my heart even further because—despite everything she’s going through—she’s still being my best friend, still checking in to make sure I’m alright.
I shake my head, “No, that’s not it. Remember when you gave me Shayne’s last name so I could make sure he didn’t have a secret wife?”
She nods. “Of course.”
“I didn’t find anything about a wife, but I did find his sister, Lila’s, obituary.
She was his younger sister, and she died in a car crash not far from here.
” Jo’s eyes widen, and she opens her mouth to say something, but I stop her.
“That’s not all of it. I found one of her online profiles, and one of her pictures was of her with a man who looked a lot like Andy.
I confronted Shayne about the photo because I was worried that he might be the one who sent that terrible note.
I wanted to protect you.” Jo’s eyebrows shoot up again, and her mouth draws into a thin, tense line.
“He swore it wasn’t him though, and I believe him. ”
“Paige, what are you saying to me right now?” Jo asks in a quiet, tight voice.
I give her every last detail. I tell her about the journal and the photos at Varney’s Karaoke Bar.
I tell her about the newspaper clipping and how that led Shayne to apply for the job on the ranch.
I tell her about his fear that Lila’s accident wasn’t an accident.
I tell her that the ring Andy gave her on their wedding day was stolen from a twenty-two-year-old girl who was a champion barrel racer and had dreams of becoming a veterinarian.
It kills me when I see her expression shift between moments of pain, disbelief, and anger.
When it’s all spilled out of me, silence stretches between us. Jo swirls the glass of wine in her hand, staring hard into the spinning red cyclone within. When she finally looks up, her eyes are glassy with tears.
“I have one question, P. Why have you waited days to tell me this when you knew I was sitting at home losing my mind?”
“Because I wanted to protect you. I wanted to make sure I knew Shayne was telling the truth and wasn’t some scumbag trying to get money. Here, let me show you the pictures—”
“That’s not good enough. I don’t buy it.” Her words are clipped, and I can feel the rage pulsing off of her from across the table.
“I’ll tell you what I think. I think you wanted Shayne. I think even though you knew he had it out for my family, the priority was you getting what you wanted.”
“No, Jo, that’s not it. That’s not it at all. Here, there are pictures—” I reach for my laptop, but she slaps her hand on top of it.
“If you open that laptop, I’ll throw it in the river.
Listen to yourself. You’re so dickmatized by this man that you can’t see what’s in front of your face.
This all started when Shayne came to town.
The note arrived days after he did. Who else could have hand-delivered the latest note to my fucking door?
Honestly, I’m a little upset with myself that I didn’t see this sooner. ”
Her words cut into me like razorwire.
“I’m not saying his sister didn’t know Andy.
Maybe they fucked, who knows? I don’t care right now.
What I care about is that you hid this from me and have now presented me with some insane story that I’m supposed to believe about my husband not only cheating on me six years ago but also potentially what?
Driving her off a cliff?” She’s almost spitting the words out of her mouth by the time she’s finished.
“Jo, please, I just wanted to make sure I had the right information before I came to you with it. I’ve been so worried about you.
You had enough going on that I didn’t want to worry you with some half-ass theory, but then when I found out about the journal and saw the pictures, it clicked and I knew I had to come to you with it.
” I can see my words are bouncing off her.
She’s so angry it doesn’t matter what I say, but I have to keep trying.
“Jo, there’s a reason that when those notes arrived, you knew. Deep down, you knew he’s been lying to you. How can you be with someone who stole your wedding ring from a girl he was screwing?”
“No. You don’t get to say that. You’ve been living out goddamn sexual fantasies with some cowboy, lapping up every single lie he’s fed you. How do you know it’s the same ring?”
“Jo, all you have to do is look at the pictures—”
“I’m not finished,” she hisses. “You say you don’t think he’s the one sending the notes, but you knew he was digging into my family and you…
you let me invite him over for dinner? You said nothing while I had this man living on my property?
How dare you, you fucking snake.” Jo slams her wineglass on the table, breaking the stem and sending red wine spilling across the wooden table.
She jumps up and heads for the screen door.
I run after her, grabbing her sleeve, but she jerks her arm away and rounds on me, her eyes blazing.
I’ve got a good five inches of height on, her but when she’s enraged like this, she might as well be seven feet tall.
“Jo, please, you’re not seeing things clearly.
I know this all sounds horrible, but I promise once you sit with it for a minute, you’ll see there’s no denying what happened.
Shayne wanted me to tell you. If he was trying to get something from you, then why would he be okay with me coming to you with this?
He wants you to know the truth, he doesn’t want anything else from you.
He just needs to do right by his sister. ”
Jo laughs derisively, a sound so sharp it could cut glass.
“You’re an idiot, you know that? You deserve to be taken for a ride by this…
this fraud. That’s all he is, Paige. He’s just a guy with an agenda.
Money…sex…you name it. Once he gets whatever he wants from you, he’ll be gone.
You’ll have thrown away fifteen years of friendship over some lay. ”
Tears are pouring down my face now, my breath coming out in sobs. “Please, Jo, please. I know you’re angry, but can’t you see that I’m trying to help you? I love you, I would never, ever risk our friendship over someone else.”
Jo scoffs. “And yet, that’s exactly what you’ve done.” She throws open the sliding glass door and darts through the house, and slams the front door behind her.
* * *
I stay on the porch for ages, sobbing loudly into the night, until I run out of tears. Did I let Shayne railroad me into thinking what he wanted me to believe? Have I been the world’s biggest, moony-eyed idiot?
Have I just irrevocably hurt the one and only person who means the world to me—because I so desperately wanted a man’s attention?
After a long while, I manage to calm down enough to clean up the broken glass.
I toss it and the uneaten pizza in the trash and then collapse on the couch to sob some more.
In my head, I go over everything for the thousandth time, only now I look at it through Jo’s eyes.
She’s not wrong. Shayne does make complete sense as the villain.
Am I really so blinded by lust that I ignored the very real possibility that he could be lying to me about…
everything? How did he get inside my head (and my body) so easily?
I was so eager to believe Shayne because I wanted him so badly.
I don’t have anyone to blame but myself.
Any time we’ve been in a fight before, Jo would retreat for days until she felt ready to talk to me again.
But after tonight’s fight? Hearing how betrayed she felt? I have no clue how long it will take.
* * *
The sheer depth of my failure is staggering.
Not only have I failed Jo, I’ve failed myself.
I’ve spent the past year working on myself, trying to recover what I lost after molding myself into what I thought John wanted from me.
I sacrificed myself again and again so I could feel like I belonged somewhere and to someone implicitly—a feeling I’d been chasing my whole life.
And then the opposite happened, John left me and upended my whole world.
It’s taken me a full year to finally see a glimpse of a person I could be proud of, a strong person who knew what she wanted and wasn’t afraid to ask for it.
And just when I started feeling comfortable, this happened.
I let myself become wholly consumed by another. I feel so fucking foolish.
My phone starts to buzz on the coffee table. I dive for it, hoping it’s Jo, even though I know it won’t be. It’s Shayne. I send the call to voicemail. He calls back again, and I do the same. I give in and answer on the third call. Might as well rip the band aid off.
“I just heard from Jo. She asked me to be out by the morning,” he says. His voice is infuriatingly calm and steady, as if he’d been expecting this outcome.
“I can’t talk right now,” I whisper, afraid my voice will break.
“Banshee, you did the right thing. She’ll see that eventually.”
“No, I didn’t. I let you override my senses. I trusted you when I should have gone to her immediately. Who else could be sending those fucking notes?”
“Paige, listen. I know you’re hurting right now.
I know you’re questioning everything, and that’s okay.
But trust yourself. Don’t trust what Jo or I have thrown at you.
You found out about Lila yourself. You came to me.
I didn’t force any of this on you, I just elaborated on what you already suspected.
“Honestly I wish I knew where the notes were coming from, but I don’t.
I’m guessing—based on how things have escalated so far—it will come to light sooner than later.
I’d much rather be sticking around to help figure this out but…
” His voice trails off, giving me a second to consider his words.
It’s true, I did go to him first, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have lied about sending the letters—the kindling for this whole god-awful inferno.
“I just don’t know who to trust right now. I don’t trust myself, and I’m sorry, but I don’t think I trust you either.”
“Let me work on earning your trust then. Can I stop by tomorrow? I’m headed back to Boise at some point, but I’d like to see you and at least say goodbye.”
I hate that his words squeeze my heart so painfully.
I knew this day would come, but I didn’t think it would be so soon and under such awful circumstances.
As for earning my trust? That seems impossible for him to do from such a far distance.
Maybe Jo was right. Maybe he has gotten what he wanted (if blowing up my life and then leaving me to pick up the pieces is what he had in mind), and now he’s headed off into the sunset.
“Why bother? Let’s just end it here.” My voice cracks despite my best efforts to sound detached.
“There’s no ending with us, Banshee. Only a pause. I’m not leaving forever. My mom deserves to hear what we’ve found out, and I need somewhere to put that hell horse of mine.”
“Whatever. Stop by if you’re so inclined. I’ll be wallowing in misery anyway.” We say goodnight, and I’m left to drown in the silence of the cabin yet again.
This is such a mess. I do know one thing though.
Shayne being gone will be a good thing, even though it hurts to think about.
I will be able to wholly focus on putting things right with Jo.
She’ll need plenty of help managing Kody and Andy and hopefully won’t be too angry to ask me for it.
I hear Nana’s voice in my head, as clear as if she was standing right beside me.
With Shayne gone, if any more of those God forsaken notes surface on Jo’s doorstep—you’ll know your cowboy really was telling the truth.