Total pages in book: 196
Estimated words: 186555 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 933(@200wpm)___ 746(@250wpm)___ 622(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 186555 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 933(@200wpm)___ 746(@250wpm)___ 622(@300wpm)
When Clara wasn’t running around the shop talking to customers, we talked about the store. When she asked about my life, I told her bits and pieces, tiny fragments that didn’t exactly piece together properly and left plot holes the size of Alaska, but luckily the store was busy and she got distracted constantly. She hadn’t grilled me yet on what happened with Kaden, but I had a feeling that she had an idea since I was avoiding the topic.
That part of my new start in Pagosa was great. The Clara part of it. The hope I felt in my heart. The possibility of new connections.
But actually working at the store….
I’d come into my new job being realistic. I had no idea what the hell I was doing working at an outdoor outfitter. For the first ten years after I’d moved away from Colorado, the closest I got to doing outdoor activities were the times I’d gotten on my uncle’s boat. Over the last ten, I’d gone to a beach a few times, but we’d stayed at upscale resorts that served pretty and ridiculously expensive drinks.
My mom would have disowned me, now that I thought about it.
I had never felt more like an imposter than I did working at the shop though.
Today, someone had asked me about a wade trip, and I’d literally stared at them blankly for so long, trying to figure out what they were asking about, that they had told me not to worry about it.
Fishing. They’d been talking about a fishing trip, Clara had explained to me with a pat on the back.
An hour later, someone asked for recommendations on tent hammocks. There were different kinds of tent hammocks?
I’d had to run to ask Clara to help them even though she was busy with another customer.
What kind of fish are there around here? Little ones? I had no idea.
Which hikes could a sixty-five-year-old woman handle? Short ones maybe?
Was it too late in the season to go rafting? How should I know?
I had never felt so useless and dumb in my life. It was so bad that Clara had finally told me to work the register and run to the back if Jackie—a fifteen-year-old who was clearly more capable than me at everything—asked me to get anything from the storeroom.
And that was what I was doing, standing at the register, ready to check someone—anyone—out as Jackie handled some fishing rod rentals and Clara helped a family with some camping gear purchases—I’d been eavesdropping a ton and considering bringing a notebook with me to work to take notes I could go over at home—when my phone buzzed in my pocket. I took it out.
The notification wasn’t for a phone call or a text but for an email.
Then my hackles rose.
Because it wasn’t just some spam email or a newsletter from a company.
The name of the sender was K.D. Jones.
The man who had called me his wife in private and around loved ones.
The man who had promised to really marry me one day when his career was just right and a relationship wouldn’t hurt his wittle fanbase. “You understand, don’t you, beautiful?” he’d reasoned time after time.
That fucker.
Delete it, some part of my brain instantly said. Delete it and pretend you didn’t see it. Nothing he says is anything you want to hear.
Which was true.
His last email was an example.
There was literally nothing I needed to hear from him. Nothing that would benefit me. Nothing I wanted other than to possibly hear him admit that he had gotten to where he was, at least in part, thanks to me. But honestly, I would have gotten a hell of a lot more satisfaction hearing those words from his mom’s mouth than his.
Everything that needed to be said between us had been laid out almost a year ago.
I hadn’t heard from him until recently.
Fourteen years and he’d dropped me cold turkey from one day to the next.
But the nosey motherfucker that lived in my body said, Read it or you’re going to wonder what he wanted. Maybe someone had cast a curse on his dick that made him impotent and he wanted to see if it had been me so I could remove it. (I wouldn’t.)
Then the smug inner voice inside of me that had reveled in how poorly his last two albums had been reviewed, reared her pleased face up and said, Yeah, you know what he really wants. I knew damn well what the most important thing in his life was. The voice in my head had a point. I did know. I’d been imagining this happening, even while we’d still been together, when he had first started to pull away. When I was pretty sure his mom had decided to start phasing me out slowly.
They had no idea what they’d done, what they’d almost completely taken from me, even though I didn’t feel any grief over it.