Page 1 of Right the Wrongs (Broken Vows #5)

Chapter One

Griffin - Present

I drag myself into work a bit later than usual. Sleep has been a fickle bitch lately. Not only do Wren and I have four kids from twelve to under one, but there’s a cloud of anxiety following me around lately.

Charlie shoves a mug of coffee in front of my face. “Baby keeping you up late?”

I yawn in response and accept the coffee. “Elisa is almost eight months old and still isn’t sleeping through the night.”

“You’ve got to let her cry it out a bit,” he says.

I take a sip of the coffee, burning the roof of my mouth. “You know I can’t let my princess cry.”

“You’re going to get hurt trying to fix cars this tired,” he cautions me.

Another yawn escapes. “Speaking of getting hurt at work, does Liam seem off to you?” A few weeks ago, he wrenched his back while replacing an engine in a classic Mustang.

Injuries are a part of this job. My hands are scarred from getting cut on tools and car parts.

Charlie isn’t wrong that this isn’t a job you should do impaired.

Even when you’re at the top of your game, shit happens, but for Charlie and I we can take meds to get through it.

Liam can’t take anything stronger than an ibuprofen without possibly triggering a relapse.

Charlie shrugs. “I thought he seemed on edge at family dinner last week, but I chalked it up to having to sit through the greatest hits of all his biggest mistakes. Hearing how you’ve fucked up over and over has to mess with your head.”

I exhale my tension. “I really thought we were all doing better than when everything first happened.”

“When you started having an affair with your son’s wife, you mean,” he corrects me.

I turn my head and glare at him. “You know damn well she’d already left him before anything started with us.

But, yeah, it was still hard no matter what the timeline was.

I don’t regret being with her, no matter how fucked up our relationship began.

I do hate being the cause of any of his hurt, and I know that I was.

His hurting her first doesn’t absolve me of shit.

I just thought that we got all of that sorted out in group therapy when he was getting sober. ”

It’s said that the first year of marriage is hard.

I think that is doubly true when you marry your son’s ex-wife on the heels of her getting over the betrayal of finding out he cheated on her.

In truth, it’s a miracle we made it through that.

Love doesn’t always conquer all, and we had some moments that first year where I was truly afraid the strain would shatter what we were building.

We loved each other enough that we put in the work.

Now here we are over a decade later, stronger than ever.

All of the odds stacked up against us haven’t beaten us, not the fact that she’s nineteen years younger than me, or that she was once my daughter-in-law, and not all of the mundane struggles that challenge every marriage.

I thought that a friendship, or at least kinship, had been built between her and Liam.

Oddly, they act more like siblings most of the time than two people who used to be married.

But lately, there seems to be more of an edge to the squabbling they do, rather than the teasing nature it has been for years.

I guess it was too much to wish that we would be able to heal all the wounds enough to be a big, happy family.

I look around the shop and notice that he isn’t in yet. Considering I am also running behind, I want to give him some slack, but the last time that he started showing up late consistently was when he was using.

“Speaking of Liam, have you seen him today?“ I ask Charlie.

He shakes his head and continues to tighten some bolts on the engine he’s working on. “Nah, but he has a young one at home, too. I figured maybe baby Griffin is sick or something. He’s come in late a lot the last week or so.”

Charlie sets the wrench down on his work table, and I can tell he’s hesitating in asking me something.

“Will you just spit it out already? You’re making me nervous the way you’re just staring at me with that serious look on your face,” I say.

Charlie pinches the bridge of his nose, smearing grease on his face. “I don’t want to throw this out there because it’s probably nothing, but...”

My hand starts to shake, sloshing a little bit of the coffee onto my skin. Despite the time that we’ve been standing here talking, it’s still scalding hot and leaves a red patch of skin behind. I’m more concerned with what my gut is telling me than the scalding hot coffee on my hand.

“Just say it, Charlie,“ I beg. My voice is low and quiet because part of me is too afraid to really ask the question that I have been wondering about.

“I haven’t seen Claudia’s car in the driveway for several days now.

I know her family lives a couple of hours away, but it isn’t like her to just take off without saying something to our wives at least. And now Liam is late to work.

I know I said that he could have been up with baby Griffin, but I’m not even sure the kids are home. ”

I swallow down a lump in my throat. Each thing on its own isn’t concerning, but when you combine everything together, all the warning signs I ignored the first time are present.

I exhale. “I think he might be using again,” I say the words that I have been dreading admitting.

Charlie crosses his arms, smearing more grease across his overalls. “What are we going to do? We can’t just stand by and watch him spiral out of control like last time. I learned my lesson not saying anything when I found out he was cheating on Wren.”

Wren steps out of the office where she runs the business side of Hale and Storm Automotive. There’s a grim expression on her pretty face, one I had hoped I’d never see again.

“You have to go and talk to him. Don’t let him make excuses; make him face this head-on. It’s the only way.”

Looking at her, my mind slips back a decade, and I see all of the hurt and confusion on her face.

At least this time, she won’t be the one suffering for his choices.

I’m sure wherever Claudia is, she is struggling with whatever he might have done.

Maybe I’m an asshole, because she’s just as much my daughter-in-law as Wren once was, but I don’t care about her even a fraction of what I did for Wren before she became mine.

Griffin - Past

“Look at you, dearie! You have the most adorable bump. Maternity clothes are so fashionable nowadays. When I was having my kids, no one wanted to be reminded that people have sex, at least not women, so we wore these large mu’umu’u style dresses,” Dolores rambles on without taking a breath.

She loops her arm through Wren’s. “I’ve got one of your favorite muffins waiting for you, fresh out of the oven. How about you and I sit and catch up a bit?”

Wren leans down to speak closer to Dolores and says, “Make it two and you’ve got a deal.”

I start to follow them up the stairs, but before I make it inside, Dolores turns around and puts her hand on my chest. “Not you. We can’t have proper girl talk with a hunk of beef like you hanging around.”

“Hunk of beef?” I ask her, trying hard not to laugh.

She rolls her hazy eyes. Time may have dimmed her eyesight, but it has not done the same to her sassy attitude. “You know what you look like. You’ve always known, judging by the way you’ve strutted around town since you were a teenager.”

“What exactly do you expect me to do if I’m not coming in?” I could try to charm her, but Dolores has spent too much time babysitting me when I was a kid, then my son when my ex-wife left, to fall for my charms.

She reaches inside the door, grabs a list from the entry table, and hands it to me. “Be a doll and run some errands for me. My car needs an oil change, Patches needs to go to the vet, and I need my meds from Palmer’s Pharmacy.”

My mouth falls open. “Patches is our cat, of course, I’ll take her to the vet,” I agree.

Dolores insisted on keeping the cat while Wren is pregnant because of the risks of cat litter for pregnant women.

She knows full well that I will do whatever it takes to make my Baby Bird happy, even cleaning up cat shit.

Wren is the one who pushed me to agree with her, knowing that since she moved in with me that Dolores has been lonely.

We come to visit every week, and there are others who visit her as well, but it isn’t the same as having someone around every day.

My agreement is all she needs to hand me a cat carrier with the kitten Wren adopted after her split with Liam, her first act of rebellion.

My son hates cats and wouldn’t let Wren have one.

Of course, her second and most profound rebellion was hooking up with me.

At least we started out that way, but I don’t think she even thinks about Liam much anymore.

I hope she doesn’t, at least. I don’t know how I would handle it if I ever learned that she misses what they had.

It’s juvenile, but I like to think that what we have is the real thing.

They were children when they started dating, and barely adults when they got married.

Even then, they were only adults in the legal sense.

Looking at the rest of the list, I go back to the entry for her car. “Why does your oil need to be changed? Better yet, why do you even still have a car? You haven’t driven in like eight years,” I point out.

She waves me off with her bent and spotted hand. “I only take it down to the mailbox and back.”

I shake my head. “I’m getting you a golf cart,” I mumble.

She bobs her head, white curls bouncing with the gesture. “I’m going to hold you to that. My vision is bad, but my hearing is excellent,” she says, tapping her ear lobe.