“You won’t tuck me in?” Hope asked softly, and it broke through Sam’s composure.
Sam knelt in front of her. “Not for a few days, but I will on the weekend. You can come stay with me at Nana and Pop’s.”
Hope started to cry. How could Sam explain that this was the right thing? That she needed to do this for herself and was certain she wasn’t good for any of them right now. Sam picked Hope up, surprised by the tightness as her arms curled around Sam’s neck.
“Don’t cry, honey. You’ll see, it’ll be like a big sleepover party, sometimes with Daddy, sometimes with me. Daddy has been putting you on the bus in the mornings anyway when I go to work. It won’t be that different.”
“Yes it will,” Allegra snapped.
Sam looked over Hope’s shoulder to Allegra. Her daughter’s gaze could only be called furious.
“You’re lying. You’re leaving and everything is going to be different.”
She bolted into the hallway with her back to them before whipping back around. “What about my birthday?” she hollered, then slapped her sides. “Oh, I get it, my parents are getting divorced for my birthday. Great. Thanks a lot.”
It was the first time she sounded like the pre-teen she was about to be.
“Honey, no one’s saying that’s—”
“No, don’t lie. I hate you!”
As Allegra ran up the stairs, Hope slithered out of Sam’s embrace and sprinted after her sister. The door to Allegra’s bedroom slammed, and Sam pinched her eyelids shut.
Divorce—the word sounded like a death sentence.
She took a breath, wiped her face and opened her eyes. Brady was slumped over the countertop, head bent.
“Why are you the one leaving?” he asked. “Shouldn’t I be the one to go?”
Because that was what men did, right? Men like Hanna’s ex.
Was Sam as bad as he was?
“It’s your house,” Sam said. “Your parents bought it. It’s not mine.”
It wasn’t the real reason—not completely. She needed to get away from him, from herself, from the person she’d become in this space. Whether he believed her or not, though, he didn’t reply. Sam walked over to her suitcase and pulled out the handle.
“You can heat up frozen chicken tenders for dinner. And corn. Microwave that, though. Make sure it’s not too hot.”
No response.
“It’s supposed to be nice out tomorrow. Allegra will want her yellow spring coat. I brought it up from the basement last week. It’s in the coat closet.”
A silent nod.
“I know we still don’t have a sitter,” she added, because she had to keep talking. “Maybe we could use Mimi. Until we figure things out.”
He visibly stiffened. “Sure,” he said. “Whatever.”
She glanced to his ring. He wasn’t rubbing his fingers over it, and she wasn’t wearing hers. Her engagement ring and wedding band were on the dish on her nightstand along with her necklace where she’d left them last night.
So much for taking care of one another.
Maybe Allegra was right. Maybe this was the way their story ended.
Sam started toward the door, then stopped. “It’s better this way, Brady.”
“No,” he said. “It’s not.”
Friday morning felt like a month later. Allegra had called Sam every night crying, then yelling. Hope had become even more withdrawn. And Sam had no idea how Brady was.
Or how she was, herself.
She couldn’t figure anything out, so she’d focused on work instead. Staring at the computer screen, she tried to reconcile bills for the Choate file. She’d closed out everything except this past month. This time, the checks made out to cash didn’t match anything at all—a check had been written on March 26th for two hundred and thirty dollars, one upwards of five hundred a few days later. Pierce was stealing in bigger and bigger chunks, almost like he wanted to get caught. She should tell someone, but her head hurt, and Sam was in too much of a daze to make sense of anything.
She automatically reached for her necklace, but it wasn’t there, and her hand felt bare without her rings. It was uncomfortable not wearing them, but she didn’t know where she and Brady stood right now, and she’d felt too awkward to go into the house to get them during the week anyway. She’d hadn’t wanted to go inside at all, resorting to taking the girls to the library and coffee shops to help with homework before dropping them off when Brady got home.
When Lilly and Cassie walked in, Sam could barely find the energy to smile.
“Hey, lady,” Cassie said. “I had a meeting in the area and figured I’d pop up and say hi. How are you doing?”
I’m in complete crisis. I’ve failed at everything.
She didn’t want to say that, but she didn’t have the capacity for pithy conversation either.
She looked at her friends, the ones with hot relationships and great jobs and who seemed to have it all. “You know what I said about romance novels, how it wasn’t possible for women to have everything?”
Cassie nodded, and Sam felt the pressure of every parent blog-writer, the condescending, superior looks from the stay-at-home mothers at the gym. The PT assistants she’d met during her mom’s recovery, working women who’d said they’d chosen “less competitive” lives, too, and how smart it was, the people who said it was such a pity she had to leave Washington.
“I was right.”
Happy endings were a myth. And if they weren’t, they weren’t for her.
Her friends glanced at one another and frowned. “Do you want to go to the gym with us over the weekend?” Cassie asked.
Sam hadn’t gotten to the gym in weeks. She’d been eating low-calorie frozen dinners at her parents’ place to compensate, but the extra sodium had made her feel bloated and disgusting.
“Thanks, but I can’t.” She’d have the girls this weekend. Discussing that was the only conversation she and Brady had in the last few days, over text messages of course, and she didn’t want to tell her friends just how bad things had gotten.
“Is there anything we can do?” Lilly asked.
She wanted to ask them how they made it work. How their kinky relationships didn’t screw up their lives.
She shook her head instead.
Cassie checked her watch. “I’ve gotta run. Call me if you need anything, okay?”
“Okay,” Sam said, but even if she did reach out, she had no idea what to say.
At lunchtime, Hanna came around with her purse slung over her arm.
“Up you go,” she said. “I’ve found you coverage for a full hour. We’re having lunch.”
Sam was too exhausted to say no.
They went to a fancy French and Italian fusion place. It was noisy, but they sat at a kitty-corner table and ate way too much, which Hanna insisted was her treat.
“BDSM is supposed to be about openness, right?” Sam asked when they were waiting for the bill. “Aren’t a submissive and a Dominant supposed to be honest with each other?”
“Starting that kind of relationship is like the discovery phase in a trial. You should always go in with as much knowledge as possible. Neither party should keep secrets. But it doesn’t always work that way.”
“That’s what the congressman I worked for said. Trying to hide things can turn a secret into a scandal.”
Hanna’s expression grew distant, but when the server returned with the check, her usual smile returned. She reached for the billfold and fished her wallet from her purse.
“By the way, Mimi loved the girls,” she said. “She’d be happy to pick them up after school if you need some time to yourself. Take a nap or a bath or something.”
“Do I look that bad?”
Hanna pulled out some cash. “Of course not, love. Just trying to help.”
Sam was considering her suggestion when Hanna’s phone rang. Hanna glanced at the screen and frowned.
“It’s Mimi.” She put down the billfold and stood. “I can’t hear a
thing in here. I’ll be right back.”
Sam hoped nothing was wrong. Wanting to help out the friend who was so eager to help her, Sam reached for the check. She could at least pay the tip. But as she was pulling it toward her, she accidentally knocked Hanna’s wallet to the floor. Dozens of receipts fell out of it in a mad cluster, and Sam cursed. Crouching by the chair, she started snatching them up. She stuffed half of them back in Hanna’s wallet, then caught a glimpse of one from Saks Fifth Avenue.
No matter what had happened in the last week, she was still a curious person. And she wanted to know how much that concealer with caviar cost.
She picked up the receipt. Two hundred and thirty dollars.
On March 26th.
No. Oh, no.
Sam glanced up. Hanna was still standing out in the hall. Grabbing her own phone, Sam drew up her calendar, and looked at that date. The same day that check had been written from the Choate file was the day she and Hanna went shopping.
Sam’s gut sank. This couldn’t be happening. She had to be wrong. Keeping one eye toward Hanna, she rifled through all the receipts until she found the one from Molly’s of Mercy.
Five hundred and ninety dollars. Two days later.
By the time Hanna returned, Sam was seated again, receipts and wallet back in place. “Everything okay?”
Her voice came out smooth, despite the fact that inside, Sam was shaking.
“Mimi is sick.” Hanna grabbed her wallet like it was a burner she’d left on too long and pulled out some cash. “I have to cancel that offer for her to take the girls today. Turns out I’ll have to leave work early.”
“It’s fine. I covered the tip, by the way.”
Hanna smiled. “You’re a doll.”
Sam forced a smile back.
They walked in relative silence back to the office. When Hanna left for the day, Sam emailed her personal mail the login to the Choate online bank account. She needed to go through everything, to be one hundred percent positive that Hanna was stealing. Gathering up her things, she passed by Pierce’s office. He was slamming file drawers shut, moving from one to the other as he searched for something Hanna could’ve purposely misplaced.
Suddenly, he no longer looked like a sleazy attorney embezzling funds. He looked like a toothless lion, lost without the secretary who was possibly duping him.
Brady had been right not to trust Hanna. He’d held back, not wanting to be intimate with someone he didn’t know, but he’d done it anyway, for her. Now look where it had gotten them. She should’ve trusted him, but instead she’d put her faith in the wrong person.
And she had no idea what that was going to cost her.
30
“Dude, where’s your head at?”
Brady glanced up. The conference area was set, screens ready for today’s big meeting. Months of work had gone into prepping for today’s launch. And Myles and Wendell were staring at him.
“I’m sorry, what?”
Wendell cued up the presentation on the flat-screen. “I asked if you were good to go.”
“Totally good,” Brady said, nodding a few times for emphasis. “Just tired.”
It was an understatement. He was exhausted. This week had been hell.
Sam had avoided him every day. She’d never come in the house, just dropped the kids off. He had no idea how long she planned on crashing at her parents’ place. Allegra was barely speaking to either of them, sullen as fuck and shutting herself up in her room. Oddly enough, Hope was the one talking now, quietly crying when he’d tried to read her a bedtime story and whispering that she missed Mommy.
Yeah, he did, too.
He’d barely managed to get them onto the school bus every morning. There was so much crap to keep organized it was insane. It made him painfully aware of how much he’d relied on Sam, the stuff he didn’t know. Where the Band-Aids were. How she was able to cram everything into the dishwasher. Even his own goddamn schedule. He’d tried to set up a system for himself to compensate, but shit was still a mess.
Maybe some of what he’d been doing was selective defiance—a new term he’d Googled recently after Allegra’s doctor had emailed him and Sam an article about ADHD in teenagers and what to expect. Maybe he hadn’t helped out as much at home because that stuff wasn’t his wheelhouse, and he knew she’d pick up the slack. Or maybe it was because he’d always rather have fun and make everyone happy than figure out what tasks needed to be done.
Whatever it was, he barely remembered everything when Sam was there. Without her, it was impossible, especially given how overloaded he was at Helios. At least he hadn’t forgotten to put on a suit today.
“You sure you’re gonna make it through?” Wendell asked.
“We can hold it down without you,” Myles added. “Better that our lead Dev guy is absent than here and checked out.”
He had been checked out. For weeks. These guys had always been cool, but there was a splinter of tension in their tones, a clear sense that if Brady wasn’t going to knock this one out of the park, he should go the fuck home. Paul sat on the other end of the table, munching on a slice of pizza and darting glances around like an air hockey puck.
“I’m sure.” Brady picked up the second slice he’d piled onto his own plate, then dropped it in disgust. He missed Sam’s healthy kale chips and zucchini fries.
Screw that. He didn’t miss the food. He just missed her.
“Cool. But maybe go home after that,” Wendell suggested. “Take the weekend off.”
“Yeah, all right.” Although his empty house wasn’t where he wanted to be this weekend. He reached for the salad that came with the pizza and ate that instead.
After the meeting ended and they had a happy client on their hands, Brady gave them all fist bumps before gathering up his things. Paul hung around with a sheepish smile.
“Thanks, Brady.”
The guy was finally calling him by his first name. “For what? You did the work.”
“For having faith in me. Now I get why everyone looks up to you so much here.”
Brady paused, closed laptop in hand. He would’ve joked that everyone looked up to him because he was the tallest employee, but he didn’t feel like being funny, or like he was the kind of person anyone should look up to right now.
Not knowing what to do with himself, Brady left and drove around. He didn’t want to go home, so he put himself on the Pike and headed east. Before he knew it, he was weaving through the streets of Allston, heading toward the B.U. campus. He turned down Babcock Street, his old dorm on the left, Nickerson Field looming over Rich and Sleeper Halls on the right.
He pulled into a spot on the street. He didn’t get out, though—just cut the engine and rolled the windows down. Lacrosse and soccer were played here now, but Brady remembered the feel of the AstroTurf, the russet of the rubber track that surrounded it. The sound of plays called, of pads and helmets smashing into one another, the lights shining on the field. The short yards and long touchdown passes, the speed of the game.
The feel of cement against his skull. Of his knee hitting concrete.
He palmed his phone, dialed a number and threw it on speaker.
“Hey,” Nick said.
“Hey.” What was he doing? Why was he poking this bear? “Can I ask you something?”
“Fire away.”
He stared at the stadium wall. “You really don’t ever miss football?”
A few moments and one long exhale passed before Nick answered.
“No, but it was different for me. I never felt that same camaraderie. I was in the closet, and hiding who I was made me feel like I didn’t fit.”
Brady let out a laugh. He got that.
“I know you miss it, though,” Nick continued. “I never forgave myself for that day.”
“You? You didn’t do anything.”
“That fight ended your career. You sacrificed it for me.”
“It was the right thing to do.”
“That’s what makes you
such a hero. You did it without thinking.”
Was that what made a hero? Doing things without thinking? ’Cause he certainly did that often enough.
“I could’ve died that day,” Nick added. “I probably would’ve, if it weren’t for you.”
Brady was quiet for a minute. They both were. A bus pulled up in front of the athletics building. Brady watched a bunch of the lacrosse team members pile out of it. It was still a gut-punch for him, what he’d lost, but what must it have been like for Nick in that locker room years ago? How much had that day cost both of them?
“Why do you think they did it?” he asked.
“Because some guys are threatened by anything they see as weak or feminine.”
That threw him for a loop.
He’d looked at football as something that evened him out, the thing that made him the most masculine. But thinking about it now, the homophobic culture that still existed, football players tweeting anti-gay comments, the pressure to be a man—maybe it made him worry that being submissive would negate his masculinity. Because some guys were so threatened, they were willing to kill for it.
It also made him wonder if Nick had known that about him all along.
“How’d you get through it?” Brady asked.
“Forgiveness, for one.”
“You forgave those jerks?”
“Not right away,” Nick said. “But eventually, yeah. It took a while to get there. I had to talk to people.”
“Talk?”
“Yeah, you know. Like healthy people do, instead of covering it up with jokes?”
Brady snorted. “Cheap shot.”
“True shot.”
He’d always thought jokes were easier. Simpler. Maybe they weren’t. Not talking certainly hadn’t helped with Sam. If he’d told her half the things he’d been feeling, maybe they wouldn’t have ended up in this shitty place.
“Look,” Nick added, and Brady knew what was coming next. “I know you have your issues when it comes to Jack, but talking to someone who understands the kind of relationship you’re in—”
“Oh, dude. Why do you know that?”
Their Discovery (Legally Bound Book 3) Page 28