Page 1 of Safe Bet (The Final Offer Trilogy #1)
CHAPTER ONE
“You shouldn’t have broken up with him.”
I slouched in the passenger seat, fighting to keep my expression neutral.
I didn’t want to give her a reason to react.
Placing a self-soothing hand on the center of my stomach, I blew out a slow and controlled breath, only loud enough for me to hear. The shift in my breathing could be misconstrued as disrespect to my ma if I wasn’t careful, and blowing up on me was her favorite pastime. Well, second to picking fights with me for doing anything she hadn’t approved of first.
Like breaking up with the boyfriend she’d picked out.
“Belmira.” Nope. I wasn’t taking the bait.
Ma’s voice naturally held a brittle quality to it, but at the flip of a switch, she could replace that worn-out sound with the confidence of a small-city politician or the somberness of a nun.
After all, there was no bigger martyr in Fall River, Massachusetts than Matilda Tavares.
Her glower singed my profile. “Belmira.”
I had my avozinha’s —my grandmother's—name, which was funny, given how much my ma hadn’t liked my father’s mother. The feeling was mutual. My grandmother wore mourning clothes to my parents’ wedding and every time she saw my parents afterward.
Ma wore red for months when the old lady croaked.
She tried another angle. “Are you listening to me?” Unfortunately .
My name was the only thing she’d given my father almost twenty-one years ago. Otherwise, she’d had fifteen years of slowly breaking down the most passive man I knew until he’d gone on a solo trip to Portugal the summer of ’92 and never came back.
The hurt had melded into anger when I realized he’d left me behind to deal with her on my own. Ma was a lot on a good day, and good days were far and few between.
That’s why I knew better than to react when she provoked me.
The bright red traffic light we stopped at glowed against the dash of the car, and the hypnotic shadow of snowflakes falling from the heavy clouds set against the starless early January sky calmed my nerves, reminding me of the safety of a snow globe. From the corner of my eye, I caught Ma strangling the steering wheel, her chest hitching with sharp intakes.
Under the polished veneer of her heavily made-up face and her teased, short, layered hair was a wound-up, anxious mess. Ma got like this when we were going to spend time with my dad’s side of the family.
Most of the time, I didn’t blame her. It was hard sharing space with people who openly gossiped about your family dynamic, Ma’s vindictive self-righteousness and volatility, the husband she’d driven away, and me, their skittish daughter, constantly worried about a misstep.
Then again, it wasn’t gossip if it was true.
Still, Ma insisted we appear at all family functions and attend any events held within our tight-knit Portuguese community who could smile warmly and welcome you with open arms while simultaneously driving a sharp serrated blade into the middle of your back.
I didn’t know why we didn’t skip these things. They were going to talk regardless of whether we came or not.
I’d rather be watching Daria with the TV Guide on my lap, followed by Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman at eight p.m.
Clearly, I was living my best life.
“Belmira.” My name held a bitterness that time, and nerves flipped in my stomach.
I didn’t have the courage to give her the dopamine hit she was seeking in the form of a one-sided fight—not without crying, anyway—because the shot of aguardente she’d downed before we’d left the house hadn’t quite worked its way through her yet.
But if I was lucky, she’d be good by the time we arrived at our destination and even better by the time we left. As I understood, it was an open bar, and Ma was like a fly on shit when there was free alcohol involved.
“Bel—”
“I heard you!” I burst, regretting it immediately when her right hand peeled from the steering wheel. Shit. Now I’d done it. Cowering, I bought myself extra space by shifting closer to the passenger door.
Ma held her hand parallel to her left ear in warning, sandwiching her tongue between her teeth.
I was several months shy of my twenty-first birthday, but she wasn’t above correcting me through physical measures under the guise of, “you need to learn.”
Someone was always trying to teach me something.
So, while I’d heard her just fine, I didn’t agree.
After everything, how could I?
Martin Pinto was my first confirmed boyfriend, one she’d carefully selected from a tiny, limited pool of potential candidates she approved of. He made a pass at me on our first date by shoving his rough hand between my legs and remarking he wanted to test drive the car before he bought it.
It was a small price to pay for my newfound freedom. Dating him meant I could leave the house. I could tell Ma I’d see her later—stand in stunned silence when she acknowledged me, “Home by nine o’clock! Only whores stay out past nine.”
Attaching myself to Martin for life didn’t seem like the worst outcome.
I could get over his self-absorbed personality and toxic alpha male ego, grit my teeth through the way he fucked me dry twice a week in the backseat of his Lexus SC and how much it hurt—sex had always been anticlimactic for me—and smile politely when his ma sighed and made her own remarks about how he could do better than me.
But Martin had a temper that contended with Ma’s, and unlike her, he wasn’t careful about where he left bruises.
Last summer, I’d turned up home sweaty, a little sun-burned, dehydrated, and the lower half of my face stained with blood from the split lip he’d given me when he’d punched me. After the shock wore off, I got out of his car. He’d driven alongside me for miles, screaming at me to get back in the car, only giving up when I’d turned onto my street.
Horrified, Ma had done the fish-out-of-water routine for what felt like hours, pacing the parlor while I looked on from the couch with a wet cloth held to my mouth, rehearsing the story she would tell every single person who stepped through our family bakery. She needed to clear herself of any responsibility since she’d played matchmaker, and dignity and public perception were two things money couldn’t buy.
“He hit me,” I reminded her, my eyes flickering to her hand still suspended and trained in an attack pose.
Ma’s palm returned to its rightful place at three o’clock on the steering wheel. She stirred in her seat, her jaw working like she was chewing on the reminder again, and it had the crunchy texture of undercooked rice pudding.
I knew what this was really about. The lease on the bakery was up for renewal, and our unprogressive landlord was giving her a hard time. He didn’t want to write a new agreement with her name on it and not Dad’s.
Women shouldn’t be running businesses, Matilda. That’s a man’s job.
Ma didn’t have a financial backup plan if she lost the bakery. Marrying me off to Martin was the plan.
His continued grand gestures weren’t helping my case.
A song dedication on a local radio station, with the disc jockey urging me to give him another chance.
“It’ll never happen again.” I knew better than that. He’d just get smarter about where he did it next.
Flowers. So many flowers. If I never saw roses again, that day would come too soon.
Tickets to the Backstreet Boys Tour playing in Rhode Island at the end of the month. A band he hated. I gave them to my best friend, Cristina. Tina was taking her fiancé, Justin, so at least those weren’t going to waste.
Keys to a brand-new cherry-red ’98 soft-top Toyota Rav4 for my twentieth birthday. A car he’d teased me for wanting only months earlier.
The worst had been the ring at Christmas—a four-point Marquise diamond engagement ring set on an eighteen-karat gold band. I should have at least pawned it for the money rather than sending it back to him via Justin.
“You must have provoked him,” Ma accused on a trill, finding a new angle. “He still loves you. He’d take you back.”
Take me back? I flinched. “ M?e .” Mom.
It wasn’t the first time she’d gone down that road, but the stinging reminder of just how twisted and self-serving she could be never lessened.
My pain had always been invisible to her. Probably because she was the biggest source of it.
Her profile tensed, becoming an unreadable slate swathed in the harsh blaze of the stop light. I couldn’t figure out if she was stunned by her own accusation or if she had genuinely meant it.
It was hard to tell anymore.
Ma hadn’t even liked Martin.
She hated his spiked haircut and the frosted tips, the tiny piercings in both ears, and the oval sunglasses he wore like a knock-off version of AJ McLean from the Backstreet Boys. His dress shirts and khakis didn’t impress her, nor did the way he avoided almost all interactions with her, hammering on his car horn to summon me outside on date nights. The few times they had to share oxygen, he treated her like she was an inconvenience and not his potential future mother-in-law.
It was hard not to find humor in watching the scariest person I knew crumble under the bored indifference of a twenty-two-year-old boy, who was fully aware he had her by the proverbial balls and had zero interest in pretending he respected her.
She’d met her match in more ways than one. But she needed him—his family’s money, their connections, their reputation both here and from the island our families hailed from in Portugal—more than he needed her.
I was just a bartering tool.
Who cared what I wanted?
I was a high school graduate who had been working since I was eleven, but I had no money to my name. Not an exaggeration. Zilch. Nada. I didn’t have a piggy bank, never mind a bank account. Ma had been collecting my Christmas and birthday money from relatives for as long as I could remember. The one time I’d told her I was going to get a job elsewhere—I’d really wanted to order new clothes I’d seen in Tina’s dELiA’s catalog—Ma had cleared the kitchen of the staff and hurled me against the metal worktable in the kitchen, sending mixing bowls skittering to the floor and flour everywhere.
I’d assumed the fetal position while she hovered over me. “I dare you.”
Then she forced me up by the hair, told me to go fix my face, and serve the next customer.
I wasn’t stupid. Ma didn’t pay me, didn’t want me to have access to money, and limited my movements because if I left her, too, she’d look worse than she already did.
It was one thing for a husband to leave you. That was the character flaw of a weak man.
But if her only child left? People would talk.
The coercive control was how she kept her thumb on me. For years, I’d contemplated hiding at someone else’s house for a little while until I could find work elsewhere and save some money, but when integrity and optics were worth its weight in gold here, no one was taking a risk on helping me escape.
Not my best friend’s family.
Not my dad’s extended family.
There was a rampant and enduring belief that these sorts of issues were private.
She’d let me leave when she found me the perfect match. Someone who would tolerate her antics and make her life easier. Until then, I was her punching bag. Because if there was one thing I’d developed an unintentional affinity for, it was enduring people’s shit.
I just didn’t want to anymore, and I felt guilty about it. For resenting her. For wanting to escape. Those thoughts contended with the part of me who loved Ma more than I loved myself and didn’t want to hurt her because I saw her for what she truly was.
Scared. Lonely. Heartbroken.
I didn’t want to be another name on a list of people who’d let her down.
But it bothered me when she made her snarky remarks, regardless of how predictable they were or where they came from. If I married Martin, she wouldn’t have to worry about the next lease renewal. She could retire early. In her eyes, a little punch here and there wasn’t a big deal.
I knew better.
Explosive anger became fists. Fists became bruises. Bruises became broken bones. And broken bones sometimes became caskets. Where the son of a well-respected community man was concerned, the consequences would be a slap on the wrist, maybe a modest manslaughter charge.
He hadn’t meant it. He lost control. She pushed him.
My grave would serve as a landmark, a caution for other na?ve girls like me.
I’d rather stick to the devil I knew.
Ma refused to meet my stare, the steering wheel rubbing against the insides of her leather gloves. What would her precious community think if her true feelings got out? If the pity she’d corralled over my split lip was bullshit. Not that I’d dare to expose her, but the threat of what I could do always existed.
Some part of her recognized that, too. The regretful puckering of her lips was as close to an apology as I was going to get.
The word “sorry” didn’t exist in her vocabulary. I imagined her life would have gone much differently if it had.
The traffic light turned green, and she accelerated. I looked away, resuming counting down the minutes until we could leave the event we hadn’t even arrived at.
The nearly bald tires on our Buick Roadmaster skidded a little against the freshly fallen snow when she gently turned the station wagon onto Main Street, our destination making itself clear despite the thick flakes.
Vasco Da Gama was one of a handful of Portuguese cultural centers in Fall River. They named the historical facade after a Portuguese explorer. It was the preferred venue for the more upscale events, which, in this case, ground Ma’s gears to no end. It was extra salt in an infected, festering wound because the event we were attending tonight wasn’t just any event.
It was a celebration, a reminder.
A wedding anniversary.
Her arch-nemesis—her sister-in-law—was celebrating twenty-two years of marriage to my dad’s younger brother.
Tio Jo?o —Uncle John—was three years younger than my dad and hadn’t fled the country when the oil crisis occurred like Dad had. Uncle John and my tia Conceic?o —Aunt Connie—married two years after the Carnation Revolution, a military coup that overthrew the Estado Novo regime. While living in Portugal, they’d had two kids, my cousins Maria and Jo?o Jr., who went by Sean now, and tried to make life in Portugal work for another decade until they couldn’t and sold off everything they had and made the cross-Atlantic move.
But life wasn’t easier for them in the States, and my ma certainly hadn’t helped things. While my paternal grandmother had hated Ma, she’d loved Aunt Connie, and that had been a thorn in Ma’s side for years. So, what better way to get back at my grandmother than by making her favorite daughter-in-law’s life hell? Ma loved that she finally had my aunt Connie at her mercy, under her roof. She deliberately underpaid her when she gave her a job at the bakery while my uncle found work as a bricklayer. Ma ordered my aunt around at home and at work. Aunt Connie had either confused my ma’s harsh demeanor as guidance or knew exactly what she was doing and took it quietly, biding her time.
Someone who was very vocal about her disdain for the move was Maria, who was my age and struggled to acclimate. She resisted learning English at all costs, spending months on end crying. Kids were cruel to her, mocking her comprehension or lack thereof, but she didn’t have to understand the language for her to recognize she was the butt of every joke.
Sean’s challenges weren’t that far off, but he found easy companionship with my first childhood crush, Douglas Patterson. Dougie, as he preferred, put an end to any kind of bullying real quick by shoving a kid twice his size off the playground and uttering a warning that next time it would be worse.
For what it was worth, I genuinely enjoyed having my extended family around. I was an only child, and while Tina and I had been attached to the hip since we’d found ourselves in the same Communion Catechism classes on Monday nights, it was nice waking up to Maria sleeping in the bed opposite of me, kind of like having the sister I’d always wanted.
Maria and Tina butted heads, but they tolerated each other enough for us all to play together. With time and practice, Maria picked up the language, and the timid, constantly crying child was a thing of the past. What came out of her cocoon was a self-assured, often bossy preteen who refused to take shit from anyone. The boys who tugged on her training bra straps caught fists to the face, and the girls who accused her of stuffing her bra were told off in such an epic fashion, they were still licking their burn wounds a decade later.
Eventually, Uncle John scrounged up enough money to move out and make my aunt Connie a stay-at-home mother, which made my ma see red. Her plan had failed. They popped out two more daughters born in Massachusetts within a two-year window, and the rest was history. Well, mostly history because where Ma was practically born to compete, my dad hadn’t given a shit. He was the closest thing to elated when my extended family moved out.
He just wanted some peace. Peace Ma rarely offered him.
I thought my parents had loved each other once. But there was always something underlying that I could never put my finger on until it came out that the real reason he hadn’t come back from Portugal was because of a woman.
The one he’d really wanted all along.
It was the first and only time I’d seen Ma cry. It humiliated her. It still did.
No one wanted to be a placeholder, not even someone as resilient and thick-skinned as her. I didn’t have many memories of Ma staying in bed when she was sick, but that first month… the recollection reminded me that under the layers of anger, the cruel pummel of her hands and the viciousness of her tongue, was someone very fragile, desperate to be loved. It was the only time she sought comfort from me. The only time she’d allowed me to see her vulnerability.
Then she did what she always did. She picked herself back up and kept going, gathering sympathy from wherever she could get it.
Which was why we still attended these events. Why she still forced me to accompany her like an accessory, despite knowing how much I despised them. Plus, even though Dad had dumped her, she still had one thing over my aunt Connie.
While, to Ma’s knowledge, I remained an untouched, virginal flower—the loss of Maria’s hymen under a set of bleachers when she was fifteen had been the only thing that had gotten people off the subject of my father’s mistress and shifted the attention onto the other Tavares family. I still wasn’t sure how it had gotten back to Ma at all or by who, but once Ma had that piece of information… she ran with it, using it against my clueless aunt at the first opportunity.
Maria and I had been unwillingly subjected to a pissing contest between our mothers since she’d gotten her first period while they were still living with us. She’d become a woman before I had, biologically speaking anyway.
The roundness in her face melted into the Tavares family’s angular bone structure, her hips curving, her frame taking on something shapely, and the breasts she’d been accused of fabricating growing fuller with each passing year.
And mine… well, my body had done something, but it was underwhelming and forgettable next to my cousin’s more enviable curves, full figure, and classically beautiful facial features that turned heads. I swore Ma faulted me for it, as though I could control that I’d never grown as tall as Maria, that my breasts had made a hard stop at B-32, that one side of my waist was more pronounced than the other, or that my hips had failed to develop into something child-rearing worthy.
It hadn’t helped my case that Maria did better in school than I did, too.
But losing her virginity before her father had given her away… that was something Ma could weaponize.
As long as I kept my legs closed—or at least refrained from broadcasting I had opened them a little after my seventeenth birthday at a matinee showing of Interview with the Vampire in an empty theater—I’d won the battle of the daughters.
It was stupid. This whole thing. Their feud. The competition. Going to events we didn’t want to, regardless of how we felt.
I had a role to play tonight—the dutiful, obedient, virginal daughter, who sat through an agonizing dinner until Ma decided it was time to go, but not before reminding everyone she had to get up early to get the bread in the oven and how hard it was to do this all on her own.
The station wagon came to a stop in an open spot Ma had found between two cars on the street. She didn’t rush to turn the engine off. She wasn’t immune to the pressures this placed on her, either, despite how she behaved. We sat there for a few minutes in a heavy, uncomfortable silence. Her, trying to inflate her ego. Me, fantasizing about what it would be like to actually say everything I wanted to say to her without fear of her retribution.
I couldn’t even imagine it.
She turned off the ignition, motioning it was time to go with a jerk of her stiff chin.
Let’s get this over with.
I moved to eject my seatbelt, tensing when her gloved hand fell over mine. Was she collecting on my earlier insubordination now?
I lifted my fearful eyes, finding hers.
Please don’t hit me, I chanted inwardly. I’d cry and ruin my makeup.
Her dark lipstick had settled into the fine lines of her plump lips, and she leveled me with a look of warning. “Don’t do anything to embarrass me tonight.”
The comment was a sobering reminder I never did. If there was one thing I was terrified of the most in life, it was the woman who had reminded me she could take mine away on a whim.
My judge, jury, and executioner.
My mother.