by Shelly Ellis
Evan paused from removing his necktie as he stared at the room and all its chaos. His brows knitted together. “What are you doing?”
“I’m moving out,” she muttered with heavy breaths as she dragged the now filled trash bag across the room and sat it beside her suitcases.
“Moving out? Moving out where?”
“I don’t know where. Maybe to one of the guest rooms or guesthouse. Maybe to a fucking hotel. I don’t care! I just . . . I just need to get out of here,” she said, waddling back into her closet, feeling pain radiate across her groin. But she ignored the pain and started to clear out yet another shelf. She rubbed her stomach, calming her baby girl, who was shifting anxiously. Leila stared at the five shelves still filled with clothes and glanced at the piles and bags of clothes several feet away.
Since moving in with Evan she had accumulated so many things.
So much crap, she thought with disgust. But she would get rid of all the baggage she had taken on since they got together. I’m done with this shit!
“What do you mean you don’t know, Lee?” He charged toward her closet and braced his arms against the door frame, blocking her path. “What the hell is happening?”
“Get out of my way,” she said tightly, turning toward him.
“Not until you tell me what the fuck is going on! Why are you moving out?”
She gripped the wooden shelves and closed her eyes. “Did you really kiss her? Did you kiss Charisse?”
She opened her eyes in time to see his face fall. “She told you?” He sighed and shook his head. “She didn’t waste any time, did she?”
So it was true! At the realization, her stomach turned.
“I should have known she’d tell you,” he continued, muttering to himself, “even when I asked her not to. Of course she would! She wouldn’t miss the opportunity to gloat about something like that.”
“You asked her not to tell me?” Leila’s voice choked and came out in a strangled whisper. Tears pooled in her eyes. “You kissed her and tried to hide it?”
“I didn’t kiss her,” he said impatiently. “She kissed me! Well, I guess . . . I guess you could say we kissed each other. It was the only thing that was standing in between her sticking to her guns or granting me a divorce, so I just—”
“You kissed her, Evan!” she screeched. “Stop acting like it was nothing! Like it wasn’t important! You kissed your wife when you told me that you didn’t want anything to—”
“But it was nothing, Lee! It didn’t mean anything!”
“It means something to me!” She pointed at her chest. “It means something to me, goddammit!”
“But it shouldn’t,” he snapped, glowering at her. “Look, Lee, I know this is upsetting. I know how it seems at face value, but stop seeing it that way! We want to be together, right?” he began in a measured voice, infuriating her even more. “We want to get married. In order to do that, I have to be divorced. This was the minor obstacle to that. Don’t get distracted by this one thing, Lee! Don’t you see that Charisse is just trying to manipulate you again? Don’t get muddled in the petty details that don’t—”
He didn’t get to finish. The jaw-rattling slap across his face stopped him cold, catching them both by surprise. He raised his hand to the spot on his cheek where she had hit him. She dropped her hand to her side and started trembling as tears flooded onto her cheeks and down her chin.
“My feelings and my hurt and your betrayal aren’t ‘petty details,’ Evan,” she said, pointing at her chest again. “You hurt me and I’m not . . . I am not giving you the chance to do it again! I’m not going to be married to or live with yet another man I can’t trust . . . who doesn’t respect me!”
He lowered his hand from his face. His jaw tightened. Instead of looking contrite, he looked furious. “So you’re going to leave?” he asked in an eerily calm voice. His gaze darkened. “I did this . . . I did all of this to make you happy, to be with you. And now you’re just going to walk out on me . . . on us?”
That was his response to her admission of heartbreak and devastation?
Leila shook her head and shoved past him, no longer concerned with packing her things. She just needed to get out of that closet, that room. She had to get away from Evan or she would start screaming. She would start pelting him with punches, and she wouldn’t be able to stop.
“But you were never invested in us, were you, Lee? What I did was never good enough!” he shouted after her. “You always had one foot out the door, ready to leave whenever I wasn’t perfect! Whenever I pissed you off! You were just waiting for an excuse to walk away,” he said, stopping her in her tracks, making her angrily turn to face him. He charged toward her across the bedroom. “If it wasn’t your past shit with Brad, it was your current shit with Isabel! If it wasn’t Isabel, it was some drama with Charisse! You were always, always looking for a fucking excuse to end it.” He laughed coldly. “You were never invested in this! Just admit it.”
She shook her head, feeling all her fury drain from her as she gazed at the man she once loved, whom she still loved, but could no longer trust. “You know that’s not true.”
“And now you think you can just . . . just walk away, walk out on me yet again? Is that what you planned to do? But this time you wanna do it with our baby, right?”
They were only inches apart. He towered over her. Evan’s face contorted with so much rage she barely recognized him.
“But let me tell you something, Lee. I’m not just rolling over and accepting it this time. You are not walking out and taking my kid away from me. It’s not gonna happen! You have no idea what you’re up against. You don’t want to tango with me, baby! I will come after you with everything I’ve got,” he said with a flat iciness. “You fucking hear me? I will get the best goddamn lawyers in town to—”
“To what, Ev? Sue me? Have my baby taken away? Have me thrown in jail?” She stared up at him. “Is that what you’d really do to me?”
His hard visage softened. He took an unsteady step back. It was as if he realized exactly what he was saying and whom he was talking to. He lowered his head.
“You can bully me and threaten me all you want, but I can’t stay here.” She turned and reached for the door handle. “I’m moving to one of the guest rooms. I’ll let you know what I decide to do after that when I figure it out.”
“Lee,” he began, squeezing his eyes so tightly shut that it looked painful. “Lee, please don’t do this.”
But she didn’t know what else to do.
“I have to, Ev. I have no other choice,” she said as she opened the door, stepped into the hall, and shut the door behind her.
Chapter 21
C. J.
C. J. felt lower that the gum wrapper now beneath her heel as she stepped out of her car and walked across the lot toward the doors of Aston Ministries, but she told herself to take a deep breath, push back her shoulders, and paste on a smile.
“What’s that saying?” she mumbled to herself as her high heels clicked along the asphalt. “Fake it until you make it?”
She would have to do that today.
It had been more than a month since she and Terrence had broken up, but the pain was still raw, like an open wound that still had yet to heal over. She didn’t know why her healing was dragging on for so long, why she didn’t feel incrementally better with each passing day. She had tried to focus on other things, supporting her father’s congressional run, getting involved in her church again, and going out to dinner at least twice a week with Shaun. His presence was comforting, but with every joke he told she thought of a dirtier, funnier joke that Terrence had once told her. Every time that Shaun held her hand, she thought of a caress that Terrence had given that had made her shiver all over. It was worse at night when she was alone. She would replay all their moments together, all the things she and Terrence had told each other. She remembered the future she had envisioned with Terrence at her side.
She just couldn’t let him go.
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When they had first started dating, she had joked that she could never be away from Terrence for too long. “I have to get my Terry fix,” she had said with laugh. Now she knew it wasn’t a joke; she felt like a junkie going through withdrawal.
But I have to move on, C. J. told herself. I have to accept that this is the life I was meant to lead; the life I was meant to have.
She gazed up at the church’s glass exterior.
This was the church that her father had built, where she had received her first baptism, and where she had attended Sunday school as a child. This was the place where Shaun served as assistant pastor, and Shaun still professed to love her.
“I can see us together, C. J.,” he had told her just last night as they sat at the restaurant table, gazing at each other over candlelight. “God showed it to me. I’ve seen it! That’s why I never lost hope that you and I would get back together. You don’t believe me?”
She had shrugged in response, not knowing what to believe.
“In my vision you were my wife and we had two kids, and a dog . . . a little schnauzer.”
“I’m not really a dog person,” she had confessed with a shake of the head.
“Okay, maybe the vision was a little off. Maybe God meant for us to have a cat instead,” he had said, making her laugh.
So, even after everything she had put him through, Shaun still wanted to make her his wife and the mother of his future children. Shaun and Aston Ministries not only held her past, but they could very well hold her future—if she’d let them.
She paused as she neared the doors, tightening her belt around her waist. So why did it still not feel like she was at home here? Why was she still hesitant to plant roots again? Was it because of Victor and his warning that she would one day become like him? Or was it something else, something more?
“Don’t you dare push me!” a woman screeched as one of the doors swung open. C. J. jumped back to keep from getting hit by the door. She watched as a brawny security guard gripped the yelling woman around the forearm.
The woman looked disheveled. Her hair was in a loose ponytail at the nape of her neck and she wore a red velveteen tracksuit that was shiny at the elbows and frayed at the hem. She balled her hands into fists and pounded into the security guard’s shoulder. “I’m holding a baby! You could’ve hurt my damn child!”
C. J. squinted and looked more closely at the woman. She realized that there was a baby—a squirming infant—in the pink cotton sling across the woman’s chest. C. J. could see the tuffs of the baby’s black curly hair at the top of the bundle.
But the guard didn’t look fazed by the baby or the young woman’s warning. Instead he continued looking down at her. His broad shoulders blocked her path and kept her from re-entering the doors as she tried. She darted around him, going to his left and his right, but each time he held out an arm.
“Ma’am, I think you better get out of here or we’re going to have to call the cops!”
“To hell with you!” she declared with tears in her eyes, finally giving up. Now the infant began to wail. “To hell with all of you! You call that a church? You call yourselves Christians? If you were, you wouldn’t treat me this way! You wouldn’t do this!”
The guard let out a gust of air through his flared nostrils and turned back toward the glass doors. “I said get out of here. That’s your last warning,” he muttered before stepping through the doors and shutting them firmly behind him.
The woman turned, mumbling to herself. She cradled the baby’s head and bottom through the sling, rocking it softly to calm its wails. “It’s okay, honey. It’s all right,” she cooed, before wiping away a lone tear from her cheek.
That’s when C. J. realized who she was. She was Rochelle, the woman who said C. J.’s father was the father of her baby. But the paternity tests had proven that she had lied. So why was she here?
The woman looked up and realized C. J. was standing only a few feet in front of her. She glared back.
“What are you looking at?” she snapped, still gently bouncing the baby.
“N-nothing,” C. J. stuttered, embarrassed to have been caught staring.
The woman sucked her teeth and strode toward C. J. As she passed, C. J. watched something tumble from the baby’s sling to the parking lot asphalt. She realized it was a pink pacifier.
“Hey!” she called out, bending down and grabbing the pacifier. The woman stopped in her tracks. “Hey! You dropped this!”
The woman paused midstride and turned back to C. J., who held the pacifier out to her. C. J. watched as her glare disappeared, like a mask of defensiveness had been ripped off of her face. Her stony features softened, and C. J. got a glimpse of the beautiful woman she must have been a year ago, back when she was still working at Aston Ministries. She could see why it was plausible to many that this woman could have had an affair with her father.
“Thanks,” she said, taking the pacifier out of C. J.’s hand.
“Excuse me,” C. J. began hesitantly, “but are you . . . are you Rochelle Martin?”
The woman eyed her again. “Yeah?” she shouted over the crying baby. “Who’s asking?”
“Um, my name is . . . uh, C. J. . . . I-I mean Courtney Aston. I’m . . . I’m Reverend Pete Aston’s daughter.”
Rochelle’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Oh, yeah?” She looked C. J. up and down. “I can kinda see the resemblance. Your daddy told me about you, you know?”
C. J. took another step toward her. “He did?”
Rochelle nodded. “He said I reminded him a lot of you.”
C. J. gazed at her, taken aback.
“He said we were both strong-willed,” Rochelle elaborated, twisting her mouth into a wry smile. “I guess that’s why things didn’t work out too well for me and your daddy. I wasn’t good at following orders.”
C. J. frowned. “So you’re still sticking to the story that you and my father had an affair?”
“It’s not a story! I didn’t make it up! It did happen. Just because he’s not the baby daddy doesn’t mean nothing ever happened between me and him.”
C. J.’s stomach muscles tightened. Her father had sworn to her that nothing had gone on between him and Rochelle. Had he lied to her yet again?
“But you don’t believe me,” Rochelle continued with a sad shake of the head. “That’s okay. No one else in that damn church did, either, even though everybody knows the real truth about your father. I wasn’t the first woman he had on the side and probably won’t be the last. I know that now. In fact, the only person who seemed like he would even believe me was Shaun.” She lowered her eyes and gazed at her infant. The baby’s wails had died down to a few soft whimpers and hiccups. “But now even he won’t even talk to me. He let them kick me out!” “Shaun?” C. J. squinted. “You don’t . . . you don’t mean Pastor Shaun Clancy, do you?”
Rochelle nodded. C. J. was once again caught by surprise. Shaun had known about her father’s affair with his young parishioner?
Why hadn’t he said anything to me?
“He told me he would have my back! He promised it to me, but I should have known he was full of shit just like the rest of them.”
I’ll have your back . . . It was the same promise, the very words he had said to C. J. in the beginning.
“I’ll always have your back, even if it means standing up to Victor,” he had told her.
“I just wanted him to see the baby,” Rochelle insisted, cradling the baby’s head again. “I wasn’t going to do anything. I just wanted him to see her, because if Reverend Aston isn’t her daddy, then he has to be! It can’t be anybody else!”
“Who . . . who is ‘he’?” C. J. asked, now even more confused. “Who are you talking about?”
Rochelle paused and gazed at her as if that was the most ludicrous question in the world. “I’m talking about Shaun! Shaun’s her daddy!”
* * *
Ten minutes later, C. J. walked down the hall of Aston Ministries, still feeli
ng shell-shocked, like she had just stumbled away from a car wreck and barely survived. She had talked to Rochelle a bit longer, learning more details about what had happened with the young woman and Reverend Aston, about what later happened between her and Shaun. Now C. J. wished she could wash her brain of all she knew. She wished she could bleach it clean, but she couldn’t. She approached one of the doors in the corridor and hesitated only briefly before knocking on it.
“Come in,” Shaun called out.
She slowly pushed his door open, revealing the austere-looking office of a seemingly simple man she had once respected, one she had been trying to convince herself she could someday grow to love. She watched as he looked up from a note he was scribbling on the yellow steno pad as he flipped to a page in the Bible. It was probably notes for the opening reading he would give that Sunday.
When he saw C. J., his face brightened.
“Hey!” He rose from his desk and lowered a ribbon to bookmark the section in the Bible that he was reading before closing its pages. He walked toward her. “What have you been up to?”
He stepped forward and kissed her cheek. She recoiled, making his dark face crease into a concerned frown. “What’s wrong?”
“You knew,” she blurted out, unable to hold in the secret long enough to step through the doorway. She shoved past him and into his office. She then turned to glare at him. “You knew this whole time and you didn’t say anything?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Rochelle! Rochelle Martin! Remember her? You knew she was cheating with my dad. She came to you and confessed everything! She turned to you when she could turn to no one else.”
He continued to stare at her. Shaun made no denials, and she knew that any hopes she’d had that Rochelle had been lying about everything had been dashed.
“You were supposed to counsel her, Shaun—not screw her! How . . . how could you?”