by Hart, Hanna
He walked over to his sleeping wife and knelt down, briefly considering leaving. Instead, he set his hand on her shoulder and whispered, "Wake up."
Riley stirred, and he shook her harder until those bright gray eyes opened for him, going wide and confused as she looked back and forth from his gaze.
"You're all wet," she said sleepily.
"Let's go home," he said, grabbing her hand in his and pulling her up from the couch.
To his surprise, and relief, she seemed sober. She nodded and followed him to the back door.
He looked her over, her hair smelling salty and dried curly from the ocean water, then he noticed she was wearing Tim's pajamas, and he twitched. "Where are your clothes?"
"Bathroom," she said but didn't elaborate.
"And your shoes?"
"I didn't have any," she said.
He licked his lips in annoyance and led her out the door, making the same cold, painful, silent walk back to his house.
"How'd you know where I was?" she asked once at the door.
"Magic," he said curtly. "Tim called me."
"So, what... you're talking to me now?"
"Yep," he snapped and pointed toward the grand staircase leading up to his bedroom and the top floor of the condo. "I'm going to get changed."
He wandered upstairs and put a change of clothes on, slipping his wet ones into the laundry chute. He hesitated in his bedroom for several minutes before taking a deep breath and walking back downstairs. To his surprise, Riley was still sitting in Tim's wet pajama's, sitting on a towel laid across the couch.
"You're not cold?" he commented.
"I think we need to talk," she said, looking up at him, bare-faced.
"I'm fine with that," he said, already fired up. "Let’s start here: why'd you leave earlier?"
"Because you clearly didn't want me around," she said, flipping her palms up. "And when I'm not wanted, I tend to take the hint and leave."
"So, we have one fight, and you run off to confide in Tim, of all people?"
"He's your friend!" she argued.
"Yeah, well, not tonight," he scoffed, pacing the room.
"What did I do, Logan? I thought things were going great with us," she said, emotion pitching her voice up an octave higher and she began to get frantic. "Did I say something to upset you?"
"No," he said lowly.
"Are you seeing someone else?" she asked, and her face immediately crumbled. Her eyes filled with tears, and while she controlled herself, he could see them calmly spilling down her cheeks. "Because if you are, I deserve to know about it."
He winced in annoyance. "You're talking about Stephania?"
"Of course I'm talking about Stephania!" she screamed.
Outright screamed.
Her voice cracked as she yelled across the room, looking furious and hurt all in the same shot. "I want to know," she demanded.
"You've made your point," he seethed, smacking his hand down on the table, his nerves rushing to life at her furious tones. "I'm not seeing Stephania."
Riley was in full-blown tears now.
"I'm not doing this again!" she cried out. "I can't wonder where you go or what you’re doing or if something's wrong. I'm tired of getting stepped on. I won't do it again, Logan! I need to know. I need to know!"
"I didn't even know Stephania was here until Tim told me tonight!"
"Promise me," she begged.
"I promise!” he yelled with irritation. “I told you, I'm done with her. And unlike you, Riley, I actually mean it when I say that."
Her eyes went wide, and all the sudden narrowed toward him; she took a sharp breath that was almost like a gasp and she fumed, "I don't love him anymore. I told you that, and I meant it."
Logan shrugged, which only seemed to infuriate her more.
"I want to know why you're not talking to me."
He inhaled a fiery breath and snapped, "I want to know how long you've known my sister."
The sentence hung there, grabbing the air between them and toying with it.
She went deathly still. Her mouth was ajar, and tears were still spilling down her cheeks and meeting at the tip of her chin. She breathed sharply for several breaths, studying him carefully, trying to see what he knew.
"Three years," she said evenly, eyes wide as she watched him.
The words cut him. He hadn't exactly been expecting that.
A couple of months, maybe.
But… years?
"She used to come to my diner all the time," she swallowed nervously. "I would bring her coffee and then she just started talking."
"Were you friends?"
"Sort of," she said with a single shoulder shrug. "We saw each other a couple times a week when she would come in. We... went out drinking the night I signed my divorce papers."
"Holy shit," he breathed and pinched the bridge of his nose.
The silence continued to dredge by as he took it all in. His sister had known all along: about the kid, about Riley and all her problems. Then she just played along? But, why?
"Logan?"
He held his hand up, squeezing his eyes shut. "Give me a minute."
When he looked back at her, she had stopped crying. She looked up at him nervously from the couch, her hands covering her mouth.
"Anything else you want to tell me?" he asked, scraping his teeth along his bottom lip.
Riley swallowed. "No."
He sighed deeply.
Wrong answer.
"It's just lies with you, isn't it?" he squinted.
"Well, if you already know it then just say it," she hissed at him. He blinked in surprise, and she cocked her head to the side. "I have a daughter," she finally said, and he felt his face got hot.
He could deny it every day leading up to this conversation. But he couldn't refute it anymore. She was a mother.
"Why did you lie?" he demanded.
"It's not like you were open to it!"
"Why don't you just say it, Riley. Just say you wanted the money."
"Well, of course I did!" she cried. "Do you know what my life was like before I met you?"
"I don't care!" he yelled back, throwing his hand into the air. "You lied! You lied, Riley! You should have told me the minute you kissed me!"
"Yeah, that's romantic."
"You..." he pinched the bridge of his nose and turned away from her. "This is all scrapped now. Literally months of planning and it's all gone to shit."
"Because I have a daughter? What difference does it make?"
"It’s just not what I wanted, and you know that," he said, finally calming down. "And you make my own sister lie to me?" He inhaled sharply. "And the lies." He shook his head. "I don't want to deal with this shit. Not from you."
"I'm sorry," she said, setting her jaw and wrinkling her forehead. "I didn't know what else to do. I had to provide for my daughter."
"And that's fine," he said, raising his hand in decline. "But I'm done here. You're not who I thought you were."
"Let me explain it, please," she asked, her voice going shaky. "If you just met her—"
"Met her?" he interrupted, furrowing his brows. "And what? How do we explain that to people? Here's my wife and oh yeah, by the way, now that it's been four months, I think you should know she has a child? No!"
"I'm not Stephania," she said, shaking her head. "I didn't betray you, Logan. I didn't even know you then!"
"I think you should go," he said and looked down at the floor. It's what he'd been thinking for days.
Every time he thought about Riley—her laugh, the way she made him feel—it was immediately sullied with the knowledge that she was so capable of lying to him. That she had this whole other life she hadn't shared with him.
"Think about what you're saying," she said, breathless. "Logan, really think about it. You don't believe we can work through this?"
"I have thought about it," he said, pulling a checkbook out from his briefcase that was laying on the table by the front
door. "I've spent a week thinking about it, and right now, I can't stand to be around you.
"Logan," she said, her rage and sadness melting into pure shock. "I love you."
"This is what you call love?" he scoffed as began filling in the check for ten thousand. It was hardly what he'd promised her, but she wasn't giving him what she'd promised, either. He handed her the check and said, "Consider this your severance."
She looked up at him, her chin trembling wildly as she tried to keep it together.
"Take it," he said.
"Logan..."
"Take it, or I'll have the bank wire it to your account," he snapped at her.
She may have hurt him, but there was no way he was letting her leave and go back to nothing. Especially not if she had a little girl to take care of. Obviously, she had been relying on his payment to keep her family of two afloat.
Chapter Fifteen
Riley
It had been weeks since Riley had left Crystal Beach Romance Resort and its surrounding billionaire community. She went to Gabriella’s and scooped up her daughter.
Gabriella offered for her to stay the night but Riley couldn’t bring herself to do it. Instead, she’d managed to beg her way into an apartment with the severance she’d embarrassingly taken from Logan.
She got a job several days later after she finally dragged herself up off her apartment floor. She cleaned hotel rooms now, wiping up after all of the tourists.
Nights were lonely. Painfully lonely.
The apartment she now rented on the mainland was practically empty.
She’d been familiarly broke since she’d gotten the apartment. She was able to get Zoe’s bed, stroller, and a handful of toys back from Leah. As well as her clothes and a few other personal items. But the only furniture she had managed to get were two barstools for the eating counter that she’d found on the side of the road, and an old TV she had bought second-hand.
Riley had taken to sleeping on the hardwood living room floor in front of the TV, watching whatever she could catch without paying for premium cable.
She heard the ring of the jangly doorbell. It was some obnoxious tune that went on for far too long. Her eyes went wide as she looked down at Zoe to see if the noise startled her. She was still sleeping peacefully.
Brushing a hand gingerly along the blonde curls that lay across Zoe’s face, Riley stood and made her way toward the door.
She leaned in through the peep-hole and took a step back, surprised to see Gabriella standing on the other end of the door.
“Just a sec!” Riley yelled through the door, knowing Gabriella likely heard her walk up to the entrance.
It wasn’t like she could pretend she wasn’t home now.
She took a deep breath and quickly checked her appearance in the mirror beside the doorway. Her hair was a crazy mess of not-yet-tamed bedhead curls and awkward kinks. She tried in vain to brush her fingers through it and wipe the smudged mascara that had gathered under her eyes away.
Pulling the door open, Riley slapped on as sincere a smile as she could muster and announced, “Gabby!”
“Riley!” Gabriella cheered back, pulling Riley into a warm hug.
She looked absolutely perfect, as usual. She wore a white skirt-suit and a black, lacy crop top underneath the creamy white fitted jacket.
That was Gabriella’s style, it seemed. Always cusping on adult attire with just a smidge too much skin showing.
Her ex-faux-sister-in-law held a bouquet of flowers in one arm that were slowly being crumpled in their embrace. In the other arm, she had a bottle of wine and an orange-netted bag of grapefruit.
“What’s all this?” Riley asked with a smile, backing away from the woman and taking a look at her gifts.
“Ah!” Gabriella said, tapping her own nose with a free finger. “Housewarming! Or, at least, what I think is a housewarming gift. Flowers,” she said, handing them over to Riley. “Because, you know, celebration for getting an apartment. Then grapefruit because… actually, you know? I’m not really sure. But you always see people bringing fruit to housewarming parties.”
“Yeah,” Riley snorted, “And it’s usually accompanied by other healthy snacks in some kind of basket, isn’t it?”
“Well, well!” Gabriella laughed and announced, “You get a little piece of the high-life, and someone’s too good for my grapefruit!”
“I’m kidding,” Riley said, though she really wasn’t.
In her twenty-two years, she’d never seen someone bring a bag of fruit to a housewarming party.
“And the wine?” she asked, and Gabriella rolled her eyes playfully.
Gabriella walked the giant bottle of red to the small eat-in kitchen countertop that jutted out from the cabinets and grabbed two plastic, purple juice glasses from the open cupboard.
“Um?” Gabriella snarked. “I think it speaks for itself?”
Riley smiled, and her eyes flicked toward the clock on the stove. It was six-thirty, which was just an hour shy of when she was usually comfortable drinking. But hey, tonight was a celebration, she thought. Live a little.
She watched as Gabriella struggled, hilariously, with popping the cork from the bottle and received the plastic cup from her.
Gabriella raised her glass and took a giant gulp before turning her head.
Down the hallway from the kitchen was one bedroom and one bathroom, both on the right side of the hallway. She and Zoe had been sharing a bedroom, which was just fine considering how little space Zoe took up.
Her daughter’s footsteps pattered against the hall floor and she came out excitedly and then suddenly shy when she spotted Gabriella.
“Hi,” Zoe said quietly as she approached the visitor.
“Mama’s talking to Gabby, honey,” Riley said. “Go in your room and play.”
Gabriella waved Riley away, receiving the little girl with a hug. “We’re celebrating your new house!” Gabriella said, kneeling down to regard the girl. “Do you like it?”
“Yeah,” Zoe said, a smirk slowly forming at the corner of her perfectly full lips.
“I like it, too,” Gabriella said in her ‘kid friendly’ voice before reaching to tickle Zoe. The little girl burst into laughter at the sudden touch and raced around the room to find protection behind her mother’s legs.
“Come on,” Riley instructed with a giggle, twirling her fingers through Zoe’s curls. She picked her girl up and brought her into the ‘living room’ just steps away and set her down on the couch.
The apartment was entirely open-concept. And small.
Even her dishes were cheap. All plastic and bought from the local dollar mart.
“So,” Gabriella began, looking down into her glass.
While her tone was still light, Riley knew some serious conversation was about to happen, and she wasn’t sure if she was ready for it.
“So,” Riley repeated and thinned her lips.
Gabriella looked around the apartment and Riley could tell she was trying not to judge the sparsely decorated space. But, for once, Riley wasn't embarrassed. She was proud of herself: proud that she was able to pull herself up off the floor, again, and try and pick her life back up.
She was happy that she'd managed to get an apartment so fast and that she was being a good mother to her daughter once again. No more lying.
No more hiding things.
“How have you been? Things look…” Gabriella’s eyes flitted around the room, and she looked back to Riley with a sheepish smile. “Clean!”
“You mean sparse,” Riley snorted.
“No! It’s great,” Gabriella insisted. “You’ve really pulled things together.”
“I had to,” she replied and let an awkward wave of tension fill the room.
Gabriella nodded and leaned against the eat-in-kitchen bar. “Is it weird to say that I miss having you around?”
This made Riley smile. She tilted her head to the side and said, “Of course not. I miss you, too.”
“You know
I tried to get him to see—”
Riley put her hand up in a wave of polite but insistent decline. “That’s okay we don’t have to talk about… you know, that whole mess.”
“I think I need to,” Gabriella said, her brown eyes glistening. “What he did… was wrong.”
“Thanks.”
“But, let me just say… you shouldn’t have lied.”
“You helped me!” Riley said quickly.
Gabriella sighed. “I know… but you guys seemed good for each other. At least, you seemed good for him. I’m not used to seeing him so happy, you know?”
Riley shrugged. She had no idea, no other version of Logan to compare his behavior to. Maybe he did really care about her… But anyone who cared about someone wouldn’t reject their child the way he did.
“He loves you,” Gabriella said, half concerned and half lecturing. “I have no idea why you are holed up on land when you guys obviously belong together!”
“He loves me?” Riley repeated with a bitter laugh. “No.”
And that was the endless circle of thoughts that plagued Riley’s mind regarding Logan. A bittersweet heat would fill her chest, and she would long for his kiss and the long talks they would have. She would ache for the connection they shared that had taken away that familiar sting of loneliness.
Then she would become furious: furious that he could deny her right to her child, to not be accepting of something that was so precious to her after he professed to love her.
“Yes, he, does!” Gabriella argued back, enunciating every word. “I know him, Riley. And he’s been miserable since you left.”
“Good,” Riley scoffed.
Gabriella’s friendly smile faded and her shoulders sloped, disappointed at the reaction she was getting from Riley.
“Riley,” she lectured. “I’m serious. He’s planning some trip to the New Zealand or something. I’m telling you, he’s going nuts without you! He needs you back to set him straight.”
Poor little rich boy, Riley thought to herself.
He couldn’t just handle a breakup like a normal person: eating ice cream, ranting to friends, watching guilty-pleasure movies you’d never admit to watching.