For as perfect as the day was, the evening is… not. We eat an early dinner, per Jen’s request, which peeves Ethan, which peeves Alex, who suffers through cooking with him, even though Ethan is a shadow of the cook Alex is.
Mia has an after-dinner meltdown about not wanting to go tobed, which means she desperately needs to go to bed, and not even two requested verses of “I Am Here” help her settle. I step out of her and Jen’s room, where Mia’s cuddled up in her twin bed with Alex, who seems to maybe finally be getting through to her, stroking her hair, doing something silly with her fingers that makes her laugh sleepily.
Just as I’m closing the door, I hear her say, “Apricate.”
I smile as I close it with a click, and then my smile immediately dissolves. Down below, in Ethan’s douche den, I catch voices. Yelling voices.
I hear the white-noise machine in Mia’s room go up in volume. Which means Alex heard them, too, and he’s trying to cover them up.
I jog into our bedroom and unplugmywhite-noise machine, then plug it into an outlet in the living room, right by Mia’s door, twisting the lid until it’s as loud as possible, its soothing roar so like the ocean, I haven’t used it since I unpacked it, when I had the real thing right outside my window.
The yelling doesn’t stop, but thankfully, it doesn’t get louder.
I pass the time, nervous, by deep cleaning the kitchen. Not because I give a shit about making things nice for Ethan or his ancestral beach home. But because tomorrow Alex will cook here, tomorrow Mia will scrounge around for breakfast and snacks, twirling across the tiles. I can make it nice forthem.
For half an hour, Alex doesn’t come out of Mia’s room. And neither Jen nor Ethan come up from Ethan’s douche den. Finally, the yelling stops, dipping to murmured voices. I try not to hold my breath, to worry, to fill in the blanks. I keep on cleaning.
I’ve just finished scrubbing the floors, the last task I could thinkof, when I hear a car engine roar to life, the squeal of tires peeling out across gravel.
Then the slow, light tread of footsteps up the stairs. The door from the douche den swings open.
Jen stands at the top of the stairs, wide-eyed, looking a little shaken. Lauren was right. She really does look like Tinkerbell. Beautiful and pint-sized, a determined glint in those big blue eyes.
She looks at me on my hands and knees in the kitchen, the yellow rubber gloves I’m still wearing, and sighs. “No use doing that,” she says, shutting the door behind her. “Ethan’s gone.”
I spring up, tugging off the gloves, chucking them in the bucket, then follow her out onto the deck.
Jen’s staring out at the ocean, her back to me, still, silent. No sign of crying or emotion. I thought watching her break down in sobs outside The Bookshop was unnerving. This is much worse.
Slowly, I walk up to her. “Jen?”
“Hmm?” She dabs her nose with the back of her hand.
I come close enough so that we’re nearly shoulder to shoulder. “What happened?”
“I told you, he left.”
“Why?” I ask carefully.
She huffs an empty laugh. “Because I called him out on what he’d said to you, told him that I was tired of playing these games where it’s me and him versus you and Alex, that I wanted to get past that and focus on Mia, and, because he’s a manbaby, he told me he wasn’t going to do that, that I had to choose. Him or her. Mydaughter.”
She shakes her head, sneering at the deep-blue horizon. “That fucker actually thought I’d need a moment to decide.
“And when I told him ‘Mia’—that it was always going to beMia—he didn’t like that. So I told him he could leave.” She peers over at me, eyes wide, triumphant. “I kicked him out of his own house.”
“Badass, Jen,” I say honestly.
“Was it?” she asks.
“You stood up to him more than I ever did.”
“That’s because you’re nicer than me,” she says. “And you were with him for pure reasons. I was not.”
I feel a little unsteady, clutching the deck railing. “What?”
“It was a rebound fling. He was hot, I was angry and hurt. I could tell he was a selfish boy in a lot of ways. But he was also doting and spent time with me. We liked doing the same things, so, for a while, I enjoyed that. And then… you and Alex, you weren’t a fling, either. And I was jealous. Not because I wanted Alex back, but because… I could tell, even when I’d blown up his life, he was still happier with you, more himself with you, than he’d ever been with me. And I wanted to punish you both for that.
“But then… I started to like you, started noticing the things Mia had learned when she was with you, the curiosity she brought home after being with you and Alex, the smart words she’d picked up, the books she was tearing through, the… joy she had. I started to see why Mia loves you, why Alex does. And I thought, maybe, we could make something better, the four of us, than we’d had before, a sort of odd, but good, adult blended family. I focused on what I liked about Ethan, told myself it could work, that there were enough things I liked about him that outweighed the things I couldn’t stand. Until…”