Chapter 1 Red - Rock bottom, but lower
Ican’t fucking breathe.
I mean, I’m sure my lungs are doing their best, but their best is simply not fucking good enough right now as I try to inhale every bit of oxygen I can.
The air is thick with humidity and doing absolutely nothing to help me work through these shallow breaths. I try to focus on anything to ground myself.
I hear tires on the pavement, car doors opening and shutting, and the beeping noise of an ambulance reversing. I try to keep focusing on every sound and smell happening around me, rather than the darkness that feels like it’s consuming me from the inside.
Keeping my eyes squeezed shut, I keel over one of the bushes that line the outside of the hospital I just burst out of like someone on the run.
You will not puke, Red. You will pull yourself the fuck together and not give that asshole another piece of you.
I repeat these words over and over in my head, sprinkling in some other random affirmations about being strong and smart for good measure.
It helps until it doesn’t. I feel the bile rise in my throat again when another intrusive thought comes crashing through the positive mantra wall I was building in my head.
She’s having his baby.
I waited for what felt like my whole life to have a baby. His baby. Dean’s baby. And poof, here I am. Bent over outside of a hospital an hour away from home, swallowing down my own vomit, while that same Dean, my ex-husband—Dean—is inside with the mother of his child. Who is not me.
Now, am I possibly jumping to conclusions and Dean Fitzgerald just so happens to be visiting a random hospital the very same day Sawyer Hale’s ex-girlfriend is giving birth to her mystery baby? Perhaps.
A hunch tells me I’m not, though.
The same hunch had me driving to a slum-city, cockroach infested motel at 2:00 a.m. on a random Thursday to find Dean fucking two women in said motel’s equally disgusting ass bed with the wedding ring that I put on his finger the day we got married sitting on the busted nightstand.
I had the majority of his shit on the front lawn and John coming down to change the locks on the doors by the end of the day. That was a little over two years ago.
I’m fine now. I’m healed.
Okay, I’m healing. Ish.
I spent the better part of the last two years avoiding a single meaningful conversation or connection and throwing myself into my coffee shop that I maybe, sort of, have started to resent now. But yeah, I’m good. I’m so good.
“Oh, honey…” A familiar, strong, feminine voice breaks through my inner monologue, and I feel a soft hand on my back.
“I’m okay!” I shoot up, swiping under my eyes to brush any loose tears and mascara away. I twist around to face one of my favorite people on the planet, Beth Rivers, Sawyer’s grandmother.
“You’re not, and no one’s asking you to be.” She pulls me into a tight hug.
“Do you think…” I start, but I can’t bring myself to finish the question.
Either that baby is her grandson’s, and he didn’t find out until maybe a week ago, and he’ll be spending the rest of his life co-parenting with his toxic ex, or the baby is Dean’s. There’s no winning here.
Beth sucks in a sharp breath before releasing me to pull apart and holds me at arm’s length.
She waits until my eyes meet hers, and I can see tears forming on her lash line that I’m sure match my own.
A sad, knowing look crosses her face when she says, “I’m gonna tell you the same thing I told Sawyer.
We’re gonna figure this out. All of us.”
I nod my head and start to feel my breathing level out. I needed someone here to pull me back out of the dark. It’s okay to still need a hand sometimes. At least, that’s what my therapist keeps telling me every week during our sessions.
“Thanks, Beth, but you didn’t have to come after me. You should probably head back in.”
“Nah.” She lets go of my arms and waves her hand at me. “Crowded as hell in there. Red, be honest with me, you feeling okay to drive?”
I give myself a once over. I’m not teetering on the edge of a breakdown as much as I was a few minutes ago. I might need to give myself a couple extra seconds to cool down in the car...But— “Yeah, I think I can manage.”
“Good girl. Let’s get the hell out of here then.
Hop in your car. I’m following you home.
” She pulls the sunglasses that were perched on the top of her head down and turns to start walking away before I can object.
It’s a smart move on her part and a sign of the fact that no matter how old she gets, Beth Rivers knows all of her Merrymount kids well, blood related or not.
I find my keys in my purse as I get to my driver’s door.
I click the unlock button and hurl myself into the seat, landing with a thud.
Everything feels so fucking heavy. After taking those extra seconds I thought I maybe needed that I definitely did need, I reverse out of my spot, and see Beth stopped in her old truck in the middle of the aisle in the parking lot.
There isn’t a drop of impatience on her face.
I spend the drive back to Merrymount skipping every single love song that comes on and looking in my rearview mirror to see Beth behind me the entire way. She follows me until I park in my driveway, and she pulls to the side of the street in front of my house.
Beth rolls down her window when I step out of my car. “Red!” she calls.
“You didn’t have to follow me the whole way home.” I shake my head smiling, walking down the driveway towards her.
“Sure I did. My job is to look after all of you. But before I take off, I wanted to say something, and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.”
“Okay...” Beth Rivers is known to say the most out of pocket things, but they’re all always out of love. Doesn’t mean I’m not nervous for whatever wisdom she’s about to bestow on me.
“You were and always will be too good for Dean Fitzgerald. If that baby is his, and God help him if it is, I’m glad you’re not the one in that hospital bed.”
Her words hit me hard, and I bark out an ugly laugh. I cover my mouth before I do something even worse, like snort. “Yikes, Beth.”
“The harsh truth. I needed to get it out. I don’t need to give you the whole speech, but I’m up the road if you need me, and if I don’t hear from you, I will be checking in tomorrow.”
She rolls up her window and gives me a look before driving away, a look that reminds me while I might feel alone sometimes, I’m never truly alone in a town like this.
It’s another subtle reminder I need before heading into the empty house I live in, the house I thought would have one day been filled with loud, loving tiny voices to greet me. The house that now only greets me with a deafening silence I can never seem to fully drown out.
I last until the sun sets. I pace and putter and clean every nook and cranny before I feel like I’m going out of my mind. I have to get out of that painfully empty house.
After checking the clock on the dash of my Mini Cooper for the ninetieth time and realizing all I did was waste a lot of gas driving around for two hours, I find myself at the back of the coffee shop, unlocking the door after shimmying the finicky lock a few times to let myself inside in the dead of the night in search of anything to do with my hands.
There’s always something to clean or organize or plan. I can occupy my time until the sun comes up and maybe then my body will finally find sleep.
Trying to be mindful that it’s almost 3:00 a.m. and there are sleeping people occupying the apartment above the shop, I quietly flick on a few lights and make my way through the back room.
I step past stacks of to-go cups, hot sleeves, and covers I know for a fact can be sorted through to be put away.
Sounds like a good starting place to me.
Once I make it to the counter, I gently toss my phone and keys onto it, opting to sit in the silence rather than attempt to play any sort of music, regardless of the volume.
The last thing I need is to wake either of the humans upstairs, because then I’d make a fumbling idiot of myself in front of Miller Caswell in the early hours of the morning after arguably one of the worst days of my life. That’s something I’m trying to avoid for the rest of fucking forever.
I’d also like to avoid Miller entirely for the rest of forever, but that’s not really working out for me, seeing as how his half sister is the closest friend I have slash best employee, and he’s now living in the apartment I own above the coffee shop with his five year old daughter…
because I offered it to them when their place fell apart from water damage.
It’s not his fault I’m acting like this. He hasn’t done anything wrong. I don’t think he’s programmed to do anything wrong actually, and that’s what’s so Goddamn infuriating. He’s nice. Like, to the bone kind, and gentle, and caring.
I stumble over every other word and look like a crazed animal whenever he’s around.
I’ll always catch him staring at me with this dumb, puppy dog look on his face.
And fucking hell, it’s a cute face. But just when I’m about to scream and ask “What?!” his even more adorable, cute puppy looking daughter will whip her head around, and I have to clap my yap shut.
Before Margot came to town, it wasn’t like this.
Miller was a regular ole customer that would come in and order a regular ole thing off the menu.
I could think about how lickable his jawline was without guilt, because he was just some guy.
He’d sit in a booth and do whatever it is he does on his laptop.
I still haven’t figured out what that is exactly, but that’s beside the point.
We were content in our respectable strangership. Two ships passing silently in the night, or whatever. Now I’m hyper-aware of his every move, and I don’t know what to do about it.
I spend the next few hours organizing and reorganizing the stacks of paper products I passed earlier in the small stock room we have in the back.
I plan the baked goods orders from our supplier for the next four months, getting us through the New Year, which feels excessive, but it’s fine.
I type out my weekly email to my parents, filled with white lies of my happiness post-divorce and questions about their tropical travels that I’ll skim the answers to whenever they grace me with a response.
I jump from task to task until I crash into a booth.
I’ll rest my eyes here for a couple minutes and then lock up to go home and finally sleep like the dead in my bed, hopefully.
The clock on the wall says it’s about fifteen minutes until 6:00 a.m. We’re not open today, and I’ll be out of here before Miller or Penelope wake up.
I try to turn over in my bed, but my face feels stuck, and I have to pry it free from the plastic covering. I jump up, bashing my knee on the table, and kick the blanket that was covering me aside to take in my surroundings.
I’m not in my bed. I’m still at the cafe because I fucking fell asleep. Based on the sun shining right through the floor to ceiling windows in the front, it’s well past the fifteen minute time limit I gave myself to rest my eyes. God, I’m such an idiot.
There’s a big circle of dried drool on the seat I’m going to have to make disappear before I sneak out of here undetected by Miller and Penelope. I pick up the crocheted blanket that got tossed on the floor in my freshly awakened panic and fold it to put back in the closet upstairs.
How, why, and when the fuck did a blanket from the closet in the upstairs apartment get down here?
Abandoning my plan to clean the booth, I rush to the back door to see Miller’s car, that was parked right next to mine when I showed up earlier, is gone. I let my forehead hit the cool glass window on the door, close my eyes, and sigh to myself.
When I pry my eyes open, I catch a spot of color above the lock on the door. It’s a pink sticky note with some scribblings of probably the worst handwriting I’ve ever seen in black ink and a small P, written with what looks like purple crayon.
Happy Sunday, Red. Penelope said to tell you that you look like Sleeping Beauty. I agree. -Miller & P
After quickly and pointlessly looking around to make sure no one is watching me, I find my phone and fold up the sticky note to tuck it into the back of my phone case. I tell myself there’s no particular reason why I’m not just throwing it away. It’s just there for safekeeping for the time being.