Page 95 of The Grump I Loathe

Connor

“Hey,” I said as Grace got into the car, slamming the door harder than necessary. “How was Grandma’s?”

She shrugged, buckling her seatbelt. “Fine.”

“Fine,” I mumbled under my breath. Everything wasfinelately. “That’s all?”

“Yep.”

I waved out the open window to where Mom stood on the front porch. I knew if I got out of the car, she’d ask if I’d talked to Eddie yet, and I wasn’t in the mood to be cross-examinedagain. I’d already spent theafternoon indulging Max on another one of his outings. Since the wedding debacle, he’d doubled down on his efforts because apparently I was sulking. Which was a lie. I was alsofine.

“What’d you two do?” I asked as I pulled away from the curb.

Grace looked out the window. “Nothing really.”

Silence swallowed us up for the rest of the ride, slowly eating away at me. By the time we got home, I was itching to say something, but I had no idea where to start. Things had been off since the wedding. Since Italy. I thought the Juni Protocol might be the bridge back together, but Grace hadn’t been interested in playingShadowwith me.

She dropped her bag at the foot of the stairs when we got inside, then went to crash in the living room.

“Hang on,” I called. “It’s almost time for your call with Mom.”

She turned on her heel, holding her hand out for my phone. While she darted off to call Ali, I parked myself at the kitchen island and opened my laptop to put the finishing touches on the custody arrangement I’d promised my lawyer.

It had been radio silence on Ali’s end since the wedding, but I was hopeful once an actual arrangement was on the table, her lawyer would come back with a counter proposal at the very least. We needed a starting point.

Grace came back into the kitchen, holding the phone out to me.

“You get a hold of her?” I asked, only then noticing that the call was still connected.

“She wants to talk to you,” Grace said, avoiding my eye.

I put the phone to my ear. “Hello?”

“What is your problem?” Ali snapped.

I rubbed my eyes. God, would anything ever be easy with her? “Now what did I do?”

“You mean besides screwing with my wedding and pestering my lawyer about custody?”

I stiffened, striding over into a side room and closing the door firmly to keep Grace from overhearing. “I didn’t screw with your wedding,” I said. “I’m sorry the lawyer called at a bad moment, butyourlawyer is to blame for the call as much as mine. I forgot to tell Ben to wait until the next business day, and you apparently didn’t tell Carlotta you weren’t available for calls either. That’s on both of us.”

Ali scoffed. “And knocking over the cocktails?”

“I wasn’t eventherewhen that happened. And from what I’ve heard, it was the result of Grace getting fed up with you browbeating her for not jumping to take a scrap of attention from you after you’d been ignoring her all night.”

“I wasnotignoring her all night!” Ali screeched.

“Oh, give me a fucking break. You absolutely were. Isawher come over and try to get your attention and you literally brushed her aside so you could keep talking to the Wilders.”

There was a beat of silence. “I…I did?” she asked, her voice a lot smaller than it had been a minute before.

I huffed out a sigh. “Yeah,” I said, my voice quieter, too. “You did.”

“I didn’t mean—You know how I get. When I’m caught up in something, I just?—”

“I know.” I breathed in slowly, held it for a beat, then let it out again. “I know. But Grace isn’t some project you can put down and pick up again when you remember it exists. She loves you and she wants to spend time with you, but if you keep brushing her off—cancelingyour plans with her at the last minute, forgetting to call, treating her like an afterthought—then her saying no to the mother-daughter dance is going to be the least of your problems.”

“It’s just the wedding that took up so much of my time?—”