Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 111089 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 555(@200wpm)___ 444(@250wpm)___ 370(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 111089 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 555(@200wpm)___ 444(@250wpm)___ 370(@300wpm)
It was a strange remark. That wasn’t really possible since I hadn’t seen her SUV outside, but I thought maybe she was referring to the message she’d left earlier in the week.
“I was at the hospital, and—”
“With Kyle Forsythe. Yes, I know.”
I froze in place, my muscles stiff as my thoughts scrambled. Why the fuck did Sheila know any of this?
“May I sit down?” she asked, motioning to a chair at the table.
I couldn’t even reply before she helped herself.
“Oh, James… Would you tell me if you were in trouble?”
She looked at me, and I had to remind myself there was no way she could have known what Kyle and I had been doing. No way at all.
And yet, how could she even have known about Kyle?
“What have you done, James?”
The way she said it, tilting her head, disappointment in her tone, it left little room for skepticism.
My thoughts threw me back through the past. What had I done? Where had I fucked up? Why the hell would Sheila know any of this shit?
She reached into her purse and pulled out her cell.
“Sheila, what is going on?”
“I got a little paranoid after you told me you wanted the divorce this last time. You wouldn’t tell me who you were seeing, so I came over one night and—”
“What?”
She pulled up an image, taken through the blinds of one of the windowpanes at the front door—my lips on Kyle’s. To my fucking horror, she ran through a series of images.
“I expected you left me for another woman.”
“I was very clear about why I wanted to finally file.”
She was the one cheating on me. She was the one who was always cheating on me. There was no way she believed I’d left for someone else. This was bullshit.
“It was so out of the blue.”
“It’s over a year that I’ve wanted this.”
“We’d worked through so many other things. You can understand why it would have played on my mind.”
None of it was out of the blue. Her remarks about Kyle, about the past… I was so fucking confused.
“So you came to my home to spy on me?” I asked, the only question I could spit out as I tried to sort through it all.
“Yes. And apparently I had every reason to. As you can see, I have pictures of this student of yours, Kyle Forsythe, coming and going.”
“How did you even find out who he is?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Her countenance was stiff, as though she was working to prevent even the subtlest of twists in her expression from revealing how she’d discovered his name and that he was my student. I suspected she must’ve followed him, or perhaps hired a private investigator. At that point, I wouldn’t have put anything past her.
I thought about the clothes we were wearing in the last picture displayed on her phone. I recognized the polo I wore because I had agonized about what I’d wear that afternoon at the restaurant when I talked to her about filing. She had been over that night, had this information for all this time before telling me.
Like she’d been waiting for the right time. The worst fucking time.
“I obviously have these backed up to the cloud, and I don’t think you need to see any more.”
Backed up? There were more?
“I don’t want you to think I’m trying to make you feel worse than you must already feel.”
I did feel bad, but not for any of the reasons she was suggesting. She didn’t know us. She didn’t know anything about us, yet she knew too much.
She tilted her head, her eyes watering. “James, what have you done to yourself? To your career? To your life?”
“It’s not any of your business what I do with my life now. He’ll be nineteen in two months—”
“We both know that doesn’t mean very much in the eyes of the law.” For someone who had seemed so reasonable up to that point, I could now hear vindictiveness in her tone, letting me know she wasn’t there to help me, her poor, misguided husband.
“James, this is not you. This is wrong. Vile. Immoral. You know this. The man I married would have never done anything so disgusting.”
“The man you married couldn’t have done a lot of things,” I said all too bitterly as I looked at her phone. “What are you doing over here, showing me this?”
“I came to help my husband, who’s clearly in trouble. I’m worried about you. You’re sick in the head. Can’t you see it? Surely, you must see that what you’re doing to this kid is wrong.” She said it with such conviction, like someone morally repulsed by something she knew nothing about.
“What the fuck do you know about what we’re doing?” Kyle asked, stepping in from the living room.
Fuck. As if this wasn’t already a shitshow.