3. Murray #2
Kelly slept in my old room whenever she stayed with her grandmother. “Mum, what happened?”
“I asked her if she wanted to be the one to tell you, but …” Mum shook her head, her short, poker-straight white hair sliding along her jaw with the movement.
“Then you tell me.”
“Jill … Jill has a new boyfriend. This one is sticking around more than the others. Kelly told me she—and this is a direct quote—‘gets bad vibes’ from him and his friends.”
I tensed. “In what way?”
Mum’s expression hardened. “She says he’s always touching Jill in front of her. That … he and his friends smile at Kelly in a way she doesn’t like. She can’t explain why, but I think you and I both know why. We can’t send her back there, son. We can’t.”
Fuck!
I shifted to the side so I could pull my phone out of my back pocket.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m calling Jill.”
“I don’t think—”
But I was already up and pacing as the phone rang.
“What is it?” Jill answered impatiently.
I gritted my teeth against snapping back. “Kelly tells me your new boyfriend and his friends are acting inappropriately around her.”
“What? Rubbish. She’sh lying.”
Was she slurring? “Are you drunk?”
“So what if I am? You have the kid. I can do what I want.”
The kid.
“I’m not sending her back, Jill, if creepy blokes are going to be around her. It’s your job to protect her.”
“Dorian ishn’t a creep and he is not going anywhere, so goooo fuck yourshelf. You bring her back or we’ve got problemsh.” She hung up.
Panic tightened my chest as I lowered the phone, my mind reeling, searching for solutions.
For the past year, I’d been scared every time I had to send Kelly back to Jill.
I knew she was neglecting my daughter, keeping her for the child support money, but without proof (and there was no way I was asking my fourteen-year-old to testify against her own mother), I didn’t know what else I could do.
“We need to do something, son.” Mum stood, expression pleading.
“I know. I’ll call my solicitor again in the morning. Let me check on Kelly.”
“Pancakes for breakfast?” Kelly slid onto the stool at the island with a sleepy grin the next morning. “Is it my birthday and I just forgot?”
Pancakes were usually for celebratory occasions.
However, yesterday when I’d seen how distraught Kelly was, I was plagued with guilt because she was only fourteen.
She might come across older than her years, wiser, but she was still a child.
And she’d been dealing with Jill’s neglect for far too long.
My teenager should be thinking of school and friends and even boys.
I wasn’t ready for her to be thinking about boys, but I’d take it over this shit.
“Just felt like spoiling you.” I nudged the stack toward her along with a bottle of maple syrup. Then I slid onto the stool next to her to eat my own stack.
Kelly gave me a forlorn but grateful smile before she turned to her plate.
She was tall for her age because both Jill and I were tall. She’d inherited Jill’s blond hair and brown eyes. Truthfully, she looked like a mini version of her mother. Thankfully, she reminded me of Mum in nature. She was a bit feistier than Mum, to be fair.
“Dad …” Kelly lowered her fork with a giant piece of pancake on the end. She sighed like she had the weight of the world on her shoulders. “Do I … do I have to go back?”
My father was the first person to break my heart. Then I broke my own heart when I realized what a mistake I’d made marrying Jill. Smaller pieces continued to break every time I had to leave Kelly on the mainland.
This time when it broke it was so painful, I had to rub my chest to ease the ache.
“Dad? I don’t want to go back.”
I squeezed my eyes closed and nodded to let her know I’d heard her.
I’d never felt like more of a failure. More powerless. “I’m trying.” I opened my eyes to look into hers. “I promise you, m’eudail, I’m trying to get sole custody. I’m calling my solicitor after breakfast.”
“I’ll tell the lawyer I want to live with you.
” Kelly’s lips trembled as she tried to hold back her tears.
“I’ll tell the lawyer that Mum leaves me alone for days and that she gets drunk when she is home and she’s always bringing strange men back because it’s true.
She’s … she doesn’t care about me. She doesn’t care about anything!
” Kelly jumped off the stool, running from the room.
Her feet pounded downstairs and then her bedroom slammed shut.
I blinked back the burn in my eyes. There had been a lot of tears and highs and lows from my daughter lately.
I knew part of it was hormones and all the rubbish teenagers went through.
But it was more than that. My kid was angry.
Not just at Jill. She was angry at me for not protecting her from this.
I was angry at me.
Seconds later I had my family law solicitor, Andrea Raisani, on the phone. “I’m sorry for calling you out of hours.”
“Has something happened?” Andrea sounded genuinely concerned. She and her partners had tried to do everything to get me out of that dumb fucking marriage contract, but we were absolutely trapped by the ironclad clause.
“Kelly is with me for the Easter Holidays, and she’s just informed me that Jill has a boyfriend who is acting inappropriately around her. She says Jill leaves her alone for days at a time and drinks when she is at home.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that, Murray.”
“I can’t send her back there.”
“If you don’t send her back, you’ll be violating the custody arrangement and that gives Jill a better chance of appealing for sole custody.”
Which she might do just to spite me.
“Then we need to do something fast.”
“I can apply for an emergency child arrangements order if you believe Kelly is at immediate risk of harm, but we’ll need proof. Will Kelly testify?”
“I don’t want her to,” I hedged. “Can you put in the order, and we’ll find proof?”
“Bear in mind if you don’t find proof, Jill could become more vindictive.”
My solicitor knew my ex-wife well. “I know, but I don’t know what else to do. I’ll hire a private investigator to look into what’s happening in that house.”
“I would do that immediately. Also … you do know a judge would look more favorably on you for sole custody if you had a two-parent household. And marrying someone would have the added benefit of cutting Jill off instantly.”
I let out a huff. Oh aye, like I’d be able to find a wife in the next two weeks. “Apply for the order. I’ll work on getting that evidence.”