The Place You Call Home (Green Branch #2)

Chapter 1

The sky stretches above into nothing more than a dull flat gray surface.

A single sheet of cloud blocks any real sunlight and warmth from breaking through.

June has no business looking like this. This sky is for damp November afternoons and drawn-out January nights.

Not early fresh-squeezed days of summer that should be rolling in with a warm western breeze.

I step out of the courthouse and suck in the warm stale air and wish for rain. Or sun. Or even a shift in the wind for that matter. But the wind and the sky and my mind all sit together in a desensitized stand-off. Nobody moving.

“Hannah.” Diane, my lawyer, hands me the folder she has clung to for this entire case.

One of those brown paper accordion-style folders with a single piece of twine to keep it shut.

It’s filled with the broken pieces of my life and tied together into something awfully sad. “Congrats. You’re a single woman.”

I have waited in staid composure for months to hear those words, and yet I am still waiting for them to mean something. I wait for them to roll or shift or even hurt. But like the sky, my heart remains dull. Flat. Gray. Numb.

I guess it was juvenile to expect the finalization of my divorce to send me into a bachelorette style glee where I skip out of the courthouse with my daughter in one hand, and a bare ring finger on the other. But it feels like neither grief nor elation. In fact, it doesn’t feel at all.

“Thank you,” I tell her as earnestly as I can muster and let her hug me like I'm sure she does with every other woman leaving their dickhead husbands. The final send-off, like a schoolyard of children on the last day of school. The teachers telling you to not let the door hit you on the way out.

“It’s okay to not be happy,” she says to me quietly as my family approaches. “It’s okay to let it hurt.”

I nod like she nailed it on the head. But it doesn’t hurt. I even try to imagine Ethan’s face over the video conference just ten minutes ago, where he looked like he did on our wedding day. Cleaned up, trimmed up, well kept. Smiling.

The office behind him, once Winnie's bedroom, sat tidy and organized. The walls already painted gray from her purple. His lawyer sat at his side making small talk and laughing like they planned on golfing and drinking on the green together the moment they checked this off their to do list for the day. I wonder if Maggie, his mistress, was waiting in the other room for him. Though, it should make me irate, or at the very least break my heart, it doesn’t.

A part of me always feared that nobody else would ever see the side of him that I had to live with.

The side where he would shift seamlessly between controlling and easily aggravated to entirely cold and detached.

The way he dismissed all of my concerns about him going out late at night and coming home at early hours of the morning, as to me being paranoid.

Or worse, my fear was that he was right.

That I was too sensitive. That I was lazy and inconsiderate.

I guess the benefit of having all of our dirty laundry aired out on a damn clothesline, is that it finally feels like everyone can see that face behind the well-kept Forrest mask.

He was charming, just to win me over. He was thoughtful and inquisitive, just so he could learn ways that he could push me and bend me to his will.

But the judge knew better. And she gave me my daughter, my name and full custody. Even Ethan’s brother, Sebastian, who sat with my family in solidarity, smiled when the judge made her declaration.

Now, Mom throws her arms around my shoulders, Paul, my stepdad, pats my back and Lauren, my younger sister, scoops up Winnie into her arms, watching me closely.

“You did it.” Mom smiles at me. “I am so proud of you.”

I shrug at the compliment I'm not sure I should be accepting and allow the hugs from Paul, Lauren and her fiancé, Rhett.

“Now you just need to come visit us,” Lauren insists. “Tanner would love to see you again, I'm sure.”

I try to give her a sharp look, but the thought of Tanner softens it.

Because Tanner, Rhett’s best friend, showed me a kindness that helped me realize there was so much more for me in life than an apathetic husband who worshiped at the altar of his job, his father and the naked body of his mistress.

Sebastian, my now former brother-in-law, steps over with that big brother smile of his. “I know that was hard. But you did the right thing.”

Though he is Ethan’s younger brother, he never looked or acted the part. Sebastian is incredibly tall and broad and much more intimidating than his brother.

Like every spare to the heir, Sebastian Forrest was still sent to all the same schools, held to the same standards, but still never was his brother. No matter how hard he seemed to try to prove himself.

“Thank you,” I say as he kisses the top of my head.

Winnie gives him a big squeezing hug before he says goodbye and is off to his big blacked-out SUV.

“Alright buggy.” I turn to Winnie and kiss her head. “Where do you want to go eat?”

She tips her little head to the side, questioning my questioning her. As if it was really a question.

Every Friday night is spent in the exact same way. Divorce or not. Sitting around a tiled table, eating our weight in chips and salsa at an understaffed and outdated Chili’s. Tonight is no different.

A boy a table over is being sung to for his birthday by the high-school-aged staff that look just as embarrassed about the ordeal as he does.

A few suit-clad men meet over margaritas in the booth adjacent with their loosened ties.

Winnie is doodling on the back of her kid’s menu, the one she has sworn she hasn’t needed since she turned five.

Mom questions the waitress on substituting just about everything on her sandwich including the bread itself.

Paul tells Rhett about his and my mom’s trip to Florida for the entire summer.

All the while Lauren is looking at me with her brows furrowed, thinking. She’s always thinking.

“You know.” Mom sips her glass of wine, eying me. “Paul’s company is hiring.”

“Mom. Maybe now isn’t the time,” Lauren counters quickly.

“No time is ever the right time. You just need to make decisions and hope they work out,” Mom clips back, unrolls her silverware, then smooths the paper napkin onto her lap.

“I mean, I wasn’t ready to go work at Paul’s when I did.

And look where I ended up. If we waited to be ready, then we would never do anything. ”

I remember when Mom told us, after a few failed relationships, that she was going on a date with her boss.

Lauren and I took bets on how long it was going to last because if our mom did anything, she failed at relationships.

But here they are, all these years later and Paul is just about the best person I know.

A saint among saints to put up with my mom.

Then again just “putting up” with her wouldn’t be fair. He loves her. A lot.

“No.” Paul shakes his head. “Hannah, when you’re ready and if you even want the job, it’s yours. But no. We are not talking about jobs today. Today has had enough worries of its own.”

“I’ll drink to that.” Lauren raises her cup. “To Hannah.”

“Beers!” Winnie calls out with her kid’s cup raised.

“Did you say beers?” Paul asks.

“Yeah, it’s what you say when you clink cups. Beers!”

“Cheers, honey.” I tuck a strand of her hair. “We say cheers.”

“Oh. You always drink beers.”

My eyes shut and I know the involuntary blush of embarrassment covers my face.

“I love this kid.” Rhett laughs and clinks his cup off Winnie's.

Once we finish, we gather in the parking lot, Winnie clinging to Paul’s hand while she talks his ear off.

She suddenly seems older. Taller. I don’t know when she stopped being a baby.

Her toddler legs must have stretched over the winter under her snow pants.

Her blonde curls no longer thin and wispy, but thick and strong as they bounce with her.

Her dress is too small now, even though it was too big at the end of last summer.

“Did you tell her what was going on today?” Lauren asks as we both watch her giggle and avoid cracks in the cement.

“I told her that her dad and I would be officially not married anymore and that she probably won’t see him for a while.”

“Was she upset?”

I shake my head. “She asked if we could go to Chili’s still since it’s Friday. Then asked if she could quit dance and go to ABC camp.”

Lauren’s brows furrow. “Summer school?”

“The YMCA. One of her friends at dance goes and it’s all she can talk about.”

“Wow, Hell hath no fury like a child indifferent.”

“Alright kiddo. Hop on up.” Paul slides open my minivan door and helps Winnie into her seat.

“Laur, are you and Rhett going to stay the night?” Mom asks but Lauren shakes her head.

“No, I'm not feeling great. I just want to be in my bed tonight. But we will be back down for Winnie’s recital next weekend.”

“I am going to quit dance,” Winnie announces.

“Not before we finish the recital,” I tell her and help her buckle in.

To see Lauren and know her home is hours away breaks my heart a little bit.

I don’t think she even remembers those promises we made back when we were little, while our mom and dad were fighting.

We promised each other that we would live together one day.

Get our own place where dad wouldn’t be allowed, but he died before we even got a chance to move out of the house and enforce that rule.

“Your mom and I are gonna go ahead and head out. We’ll wait up for you to put on Dateline,” Paul tells me.

Ever since I moved in about six months ago, and I introduced my parents to streaming, we end just about every evening with Keith Morrison and Lester Holt.

“I'm proud of you.” Rhett hugs me. “If Ethan causes any more trouble, just give me a call. Tanner and I will take care of it.”

“You got it.”

He kisses Winnie on the head, and she gives a sleepy goodbye before he returns to his truck. Lauren waits behind with her own set of dark circles under her eyes.

“Are you okay?” I ask and she shakes her head with a smile.

“Don’t worry about me. How are you? Really?”

I hike my shoulders up and drop them. Like Winnie does when she doesn’t have an answer to any of my questions. “I'm fine. I think that’s what feels the weirdest. I don’t feel anything.”

“Well, this didn’t happen overnight. Legally maybe, but the marriage has been over for a while for you. You’ve been feeling it all along.”

I don’t say anything. I just hug her. Because she’s right. It’s been death by a thousand cuts. A million cuts. For years.

“I’ll see you in a week. But you need to come visit soon.” She pulls away and a smirk creeps up on her face. “Tanner says hi, by the way.”

“He always does.”

“I know.” She winks before joining Rhett in that red truck I'm surprised still runs.

I wave and stand there in the quiet of the early summer evening, watching my younger sister go be braver than I have ever been. She took a chance on her writing career and now she lives up in Michigan in a little magical cabin with her fiancé, writing their novels.

Her risk paid off. But right now, I am not sure if the risk of choosing myself is going to be worth it.

Because at twenty-eight, I am officially a single mom living in my parent’s house with no real direction.

My college diploma in finance is lost and unused in the boxes in my storage unit and I have no real passion other than my daughter.

Halfway home, with Winnie sound asleep in the back, I take the chance to call the person Lauren has no idea I am still in communication with.