“Before, things with us were so… extreme. We either fought, fucked, or ignored each other.”
“That’s true. And the fucking is only a recent thing. For the past five years, we’ve basically been at each other’s throats or pretending the other doesn’t exist.”
“Exactly. I like that we’ve gotten a chance to get to know each other without all that shit in the way. No fighting, no anger. Just us.”
“I like it too.” He tentatively reached across the bed and took my hand in his, then laced our fingers together. “I wonder if we would have always gotten along. Like if we hadn’t gone into this hating each other?”
“Maybe.” I looked into his pretty brown eyes. “But I think we both had a lot to deal with. The divorce, the news about Riley, all the changes. I was a completely different person back then. I don’t think you would have liked me. Hell, most daysIdidn’t even like me.”
“How did you find out?” he asked softly.
“About what?”
“About the affair?”
“I overhead Mom and Dad fighting. She’d just told him that she’d found someone else and was leaving. He was yelling about how she wasn’t going to get a dime out of him and how she needed to take me with her. She started screaming that he was a deadbeat and it was his turn to be a father and I should stay with him. Nothing like hearing your parents fight about who would have to put up with you.”
“Shit. That’s horrible.”
“It didn’t feel great, that’s for damn sure.”
“And you ended up going with your mom?”
“She had a change of heart when she found out how much she could get out of him if she had custody. Guess that sweetened the pot and made me worth putting up with.”
“I’m sorry, Ash. That’s just so wrong.”
“What about you? How did you find out?”
“I came home from a school trip, and my mom was gone.”
“What do you mean?”
“I did one of those habitat trips. You know, the ones where you go to an underdeveloped place and build houses for a week.”
“I know the ones.”
“I thought it would look good on my college applications, so I did one in Haiti. I came home after a week and found that Dad had kicked Mom out. Five days later, you and Crystal moved in, and I was supposed to pretend like everything was normal and my entire life hadn’t just imploded.”
“Shit. No wonder you hated me.”
“The hardest part was knowing that my mom had to go through that alone. That she’d had to pack up and leave all by herself. That he’d deliberately chosen a time when I couldn’t be there for her.”
“You and your mom were close?”
He nodded, his eyes on the blankets between us. “Yeah,” he said thickly. “Really close.”
“Why did you live with Ken and not her?”
Jules sighed heavily, his eyes filling with tears. “You know she was a diabetic, right?”
I nodded.
“She also had depression. When Dad kicked her out, she lost everything and ended up on disability. Between her illness and how depressed she was, the courts deemed her unfit. She started having health problems because she was too sad to properly take care of herself, and she was all alone with no one, and she…”
His lips quivered as more tears spilled down his cheeks.
“She…”