Page 28 of Right the Wrongs (Broken Vows #5)

Chapter Nineteen

Wren - Present

“What did those potatoes do to you?” Bess asks, making me jump.

“I’m making mashed potatoes,” I say.

It’s been less than a week since Griffin and I faced his fears in the backyard of my childhood home. He’s been a lot lighter lately. I guess realizing his wife wasn’t longing for his son took a lot off his shoulders. I’m still dealing with the existential noise in my head.

Bess reaches across the bowl and pulls the masher out of my hand. “Mashed potatoes, not potato soup. How about we use our words instead of choosing violence?”

She takes the bowl away from me. “It’s not your fault, really. Griffin should have known better than to let you cook.”

The screen door bangs against the frame. “It was mashed potatoes. How could she mess that up?” Griffin asks as he comes in.

Bess grabs the bowl and holds it up for him to see. “It’s a mystery, yet here’s the proof.”

He shrugs unbothered. I tried to learn how to cook, but I could never maintain the interest, not to destroy most of what I’ve tried to make. But I’d been able to boil water, maybe make some pasta. It’s not a far jump from macaroni to potatoes, at least that’s what I thought.

Griffin might be feeling better about my feelings for Liam, but I’m not.

I don’t like hating him. I don’t like thinking about him at all.

Sometimes I even resent Griffin, because I can’t cut Liam out of my life.

I’m not sure I ever really dealt with this anger in the first place, to be honest. If I had, then Bess wouldn’t be holding up a bowl of potato soup.

Probably. To be fair, I am angry, but I also can’t cook.

She sets it to the side and gives me a knowing look. After a decade of friendship, she can read me better than almost anyone. The exception is Griffin, of course. With the exception of thinking I was in love with his son, he’s usually pretty perceptive.

Like any good bestie, she speaks up and says the things I’m too chicken shit to say out loud. She thinks at least. He knows I don’t want to be around Liam, and should know that I don’t want to be throwing a party to celebrate Liam’s current round of sobriety.

“So, Griff…You know, Liam wasn’t my favorite person all those years ago, but we’ve all mostly let all that go.

I mean, we’re not tight or anything. Let’s just say, if MySpace was still a thing, he wouldn’t make my top eight, feel me?

Still, until this slip-up, we’ve all been going about life on cruise control.

I think we’ve spent enough time covering up and racing past problems, don’t you? ”

Griffin looks past her at me and cocks an eyebrow. “Baby Bird, mind translating? Ten years and I still can’t understand pissed off pixie.”

I shrug. Truthfully, I don’t really know my own mind right now, let alone deciphering whatever weirdly insightful babble Bess just spewed out.

Yes, Griffin and I talked. Kinda. He knows now that I’m not pining after my ex-husband, and that, well, I kind of hate him again.

At least that means I’m not in love with him, which only comforts Griff because I already knew that.

I’m not sure what I actually feel, but I know that love isn’t what this is.

I don’t want to hate anyone, and I just don’t really know why this relapse is triggering me so badly.

“We’re all just tense. Claudia didn’t agree to come tonight, did she?”

I’m not sure I’m up for the game of pretending we’re all cool.

I have no reason to be upset with her. She wasn’t the one to have an affair with Liam when we were married.

That was all my former best friend. Still, something about her he finds easier to treat with kindness than he did me.

Although maybe she’s just really good at hiding things.

Lord knows there was a lot that I didn’t let the world see when I was married to him.

For a day, I thought that Griff was starting to see what was going on. I hoped at least that he knew I needed some space from Liam. Apparently, though, telling him that I hate his son means hosting another family dinner, so we have no choice except to play nice.

“She said she’d think about it when I called yesterday to follow up. If she’s not ready to see him, I won’t force her,” he replies.

“Lucky her,” I mumble under my breath.

“What was that?” he asks. His brow furrows, and I can see concern mounting.

A brittle smile pulls at my mouth. “Nothing important.” I gesture at my clothes. “I’m going to go change. I seem to have gotten some murdered potato all over myself.”

I can hear the peals of laughter from the open window. The party is in full swing by the time I decide I’ve hidden as long as I can. Everyone is already seated around the table when I go outside.

Griffin pushes my chair back without a word.

He knew I wouldn’t hide out the entire night.

I thought about it, but in the end, I decided I didn’t want Liam to think he still got to me.

Then I got pissed off at myself, knowing that some part of me would probably always be impacted by the years I spent with him.

It’s bad enough that I blew up at him last week.

There’s a petty part of me that wants him to think he was nothing to me, like I was nothing to him.

There is no way on this planet I could possibly love my husband more. He’s the light in my world that was previously darkness. I realize I didn’t know what love was until he came into my life and shook it up. But even with him being my gravity, Liam can still make me spin out.

Like I told Griffin, there aren’t any lingering feelings. Well, except for anger, irritation, and sometimes an occasional familial fondness. No positive emotion, though will ever override the bad when it comes to us. It’s like he etched pain onto my bones, and now it’ll always be a part of me.

Griffin studies me with an intensity that used to unnerve me. Still does sometimes, if I’m being honest. His forehead is creased, and the corner of his mouth is turned down. You’d think there were thought bubbles over my head giving away the direction of my thoughts.

I try to force a smile, but it feels more like a grimace.

I’m a shit liar. I can’t even fake emotions I’m not feeling.

It’s a wonder Liam didn’t catch on to how miserable I was when we were married.

Although that would have forced him to care about something more than his next high and getting his dick wet.

I hope for Claudia’s sake that at least the second one has changed.

Everyone else is giving me space. There’s the usual polite conversation, but no one is being their usual nosy selves and pushing me to spill my deepest secrets.

Family dinner actually proceeds just as it has for the last few months, only without Claudia and the kids.

We’re all pretending everything is normal.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. We are all pretending. We seem to do a lot of that. Most of all, me.

I pretended for years that it didn’t hurt that Hattie left me alone after my parents died.

I pretended that it didn’t hurt that Griffin rejected me every holiday Liam and I spent with him. Just because I know why now doesn’t take the sting from the memories.

Mostly, I pretended I wasn’t drowning when I was married to Liam. I had no one, and yet I put on a show for the world.

The clang of dishes snaps me back to the present.

Platters full of ribs, steak, and burgers are passed around.

There’s an energetic game of chase happening around the table with my twins and Bess’s son, Jack, chasing each other with squirt guns.

Bess and Hattie are preoccupied with Harlow’s belly since she’s likely less than a week away from having the baby.

The guys, of course, are starting a pool on whether it will be a boy or a girl. Basically, it’s loud.

Then it’s like the weather changes. The air feels heavier, and dark clouds have rolled in. The kids stop running, hands fall off of Harlow’s belly, and Charlie stops speaking mid-sentence. The only sound is a choked gasp coming from Liam.

“Claud?” he asks in a loud whisper, as if he’s afraid speaking louder will scare her off.

“Hey, Liam,” she says in a soft voice. “The kids wanted to see you.”

He nods. I can see his Adam’s apple bobbing as if he’s struggling to swallow. He holds his arms open, and Natalie runs straight into them. They cling to each other.

It’s heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time. Not because I miss him, or regret that he and I aren’t parents together. It’s that she’s now the same age her bio mom and I were when we became best friends. The older she gets, the more she looks exactly like Audrey.

Don’t get me wrong, I fucking hate her guts, but there’s a part of me that misses her too.

The part that remembers what it was like to lie on my bedroom floor, my walls covered with posters of pop stars I’d be embarrassed to admit ever liking now, and gossip about the latest drama at our middle school.

I guess maybe it’s not her so much as the time she occupies in my life, but even all the bad can’t erase the fact that there were good years in there.

Sure, eventually she grew jealous of me, and it led her to hate me. Maybe that was always the way it was going to be between us, or maybe Liam was the catalyst for yet another bad event in my life.

I’ve gotten better at looking at Natalie and not seeing the betrayal of the two most important people to me, but I’m not perfect at it.

Now, that is one emotion I am good at hiding.

So good, I manage to hide it from myself most of the time.

It helps that Claudia looks similar enough to Natalie that I am able to pretend she’s also biologically her mom, as she is in every other sense.