Chapter 59
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Savannah
When we get home—Brayden and me in Brayden’s truck and Asher in his hybrid—Brad and Barb’s car is sitting out front.
Brayden told me he bought it for them when he got his signing bonus, the same way Blake had bought them a different luxury vehicle.
The car looks enormous next to Asher’s compact little hybrid—the one he manages to fit all six-foot-something of himself in on a regular basis.
Still, all I’ve heard Brad say about the car his son bought for him is that it doesn’t have enough legroom.
We get down from Brayden’s truck, intercept Asher where he’s about to go up our front path. “My parents are here,” Brayden says.
“Oh.” Asher nods, goes back in his car like he might drive away. Except he pops the trunk and withdraws something from the back. A bat. The one he left on our kitchen counter when he’d come over thinking I was in danger.
“It won’t be like that,” I tell him. At least, I hope it won’t be like that, even if Brayden’s face has gone pale under the glow of the streetlight.
“If you say so.” Asher puts the bat back. “What’s the plan?”
“I’ll talk to them,” Brayden says. “Might as well get this over with.”
“Hey”—I lean up to kiss him—“this can’t be much worse than the first time I met them.”
He nods tightly. “Things can always get worse.” But he goes up the path to our house first like he’s trying to protect Asher and me from the inevitable fallout.
Barb and Brad have let themselves in, of course. They’re standing in our living room, a garish tennis bracelet on Barb’s wrist, a drink already in Brad’s hand.
“Brayden, I see you’ve brought your…” Barb makes a face like she just sucked a lemon. “People.”
“The word you’re looking for is wife,” I say to her. “The other word is fiancé.”
Asher is standing next to me, eying them both. He’s in his normal street clothes after a game—jeans with a rip in the knee, a T-shirt cropped at the arms and hem, like he was designed in a lab to piss off Brad. He extends a hand. “I’m Asher.”
Brad looks at his hand, declines to shake it. Turns to Brayden, his full back to Asher as if determined not to acknowledge his presence, so he doesn’t see the slow smirk that crosses Asher’s face like Brad was just tested and failed.
“Brayden,” Brad says, “we should talk in private, without these…eavesdroppers.”
More like witnesses. I’m about to tell Brad he can go back to his own private home anytime, when Brayden says, “Sav and Asher are family. Anything you have to say to me, you can say in front of them.”
I don’t have time to savor that—that however fake our marriage was to begin with, it’s real now—when Barb moves forward and takes her son’s hands in her own pale claws.
“You’re being led down a dark path, Brayden, one you don’t fully understand.
These people"—Barb spits the word as if she can’t bear to say our names—“do not have your best interests at heart. If you continue on like this, there’s no telling what depravity you’ll be drawn into. ”
“Depravity was actually what we were planning to do before you showed up.” Asher smiles at them, hard. “Maybe some of it on that couch where you were sitting.”
Barb goes white, her lips practically disappearing into the pale powdered surface of her face. She steps back as if Asher slapped her.
“Are you going to let them speak to your mother that way?” Brad barks.
“This is my house—” Brayden gestures to the room around us, then points to Brad and Barb. “Our house. And you will not come into it and disrespect the people living here. The people I love.”
Barb recovers enough to scoff. “What do you know about love?”
“Maybe I don’t know anything about love—but I know depravity is not caring if Blake’s happy so long as he’s successful.
Depravity is letting me drink myself to death rather than admit that you fucked up raising us.
” Brayden grinds his teeth, squares his shoulder, looks to Asher then to me.
“Love is someone who challenges you to be better, not someone who molds you into only serving them. I don’t know what you’ve been doing all these years, but I can tell you, it’s not love. ”
For a moment, neither Brad nor Barb says anything. Finally, Barb turns to me. “Do you like that necklace my son gave you—the one that’s been in my family for generations? Do you like all the other pretty little diamonds he buys you?”
I nod to her tennis bracelet. “I could say the same thing to you, Barb, only that thing on your arm is fake.”
“Yeah,” Asher drawls, “it’s easy to tell what’s real if you know what to look for.”
Barb’s face turns the color of the flowers she wouldn’t let us have at our wedding reception. Brad sputters something that sounds like words—none of them good. “Don’t do this and call yourself a Forsyth.”
“I thought about that. Then I remembered Blake’s also got my name and he’s better family than either of you.” Brayden squares his shoulders, like he’s finally ready for this fight. “Go to hell. And if you can’t do that, at least go to therapy. Either way, get the fuck out of our house.”
The next day, I wake up to about a hundred text messages, everyone I ever talked with in San Diego apparently wanting to get in touch.
Half just read some version of two husbands?
?? in slightly delighted outrage. Cherri, my favorite ex-stepmother, sent a congratulatory voice note and advice about prenups.
And another note, from my father. Where were you when I needed you? Still, I hit his number. “Hi Sav—” he says, when he picks up.
But I don’t let him get out more than that.
“I’m just going to say this once and then I’m going to hang up and really think about if I ever want to speak to you again.” My words come out in a rush. I take a breath, deliberately slow down. A lesson I got from him: in a negotiation, make the other person listen at your pace.
“You should have told me the business was in trouble,” I say.
“But you didn’t. They cut off my health insurance, and you screened my calls.
I worked to get into my dream program, and because of you, I couldn’t pay for it or get financial aid.
I didn’t know how anything works, really.
But I figured it out. Some of it was the lessons you taught me growing up, but more of it was what you didn’t show me: that even if I won, that didn’t mean someone else had to lose.
“I should be grateful, in a way. If you hadn’t cut me off like that, I don’t know if I would have learned any of what I have.
I’m happy now with Brayden and Asher, and my life in Atlanta.
Whatever reason you had for calling, I don’t really care.
The fact is, it took me getting proposed to on live television for you to pick up the phone.
I’m not mad we were broke. I’m mad you broke our relationship when it was convenient for you. ”
For a moment, the other line goes so quiet I wonder if the call cut out. “Sav, honey,” he says, “I’m so proud of you.”
Despite our distance—the months apart, the fact that the only person to walk me down the aisle at my wedding was Miss Shirley and Miss Shirley’s vape—my throat goes tight.
But I brace myself: a compliment might be a feint, the beginning of a negotiation between a bankrupt businessman and his suddenly rich daughter.
Nothing else comes. Not an angle, not a line. Just that simple statement.
“Goodbye, Dad. Thank you for everything you’ve given me.” And then I hang up.