by Cara Dee
The Guy in the Window
Cara Dee
Copyright © 2019 by Cara Dee
All rights reserved
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment and may not be reproduced in any way without documented permission of the author, not including brief quotes with links and/or credit to the source. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction and all references to historical events, persons living or dead, and locations are used in a fictional manner. Any other names, characters, incidents, and places are derived from the author’s imagination. The author acknowledges the trademark status and owners of any wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction. Characters portrayed in sexual situations are 18 or older.
Edited by Silently Correcting Your Grammar, LLC.
Formatted by Eliza Rae Services.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Epilogue
More from Cara
About Cara
One
Everett
“Everett!” Melinda yelled from downstairs. “Do you want that hideous green vase in the dining room? I think it was a wedding present from your grandmother.”
I blew out a breath and scrubbed my hands over my face.
Number one reason people got divorced: marriage.
Marriage was also the reason I’d have more silver in my hair than brown soon.
“Throw it out!” I called back, resuming my efforts in my study. I had hundreds of blueprints Melinda couldn’t wait to get out of her sight.
“I’ll sell it,” I heard her mutter.
Sure, she could sell it.
Once upon a time, she’d gushed over the presents my family had given us at our wedding. But over the course of our twenty-five-year-long marriage, the gifts must’ve lost their shine. Now everything was hideous, awful, ugly, and atrocious.
I was fairly certain she’d looked up the last word in a dictionary.
That’s the bitterness talking again.
I cringed and slumped down in the chair behind my desk, and I dropped my face into my hands. How had we ended up here? Perhaps the fire had died out, but people our age didn’t get divorced for that. They suffered in silence and at least had someone to come home to at the end of the day. They gathered for holidays and put on smiles for their children. What was so wrong with that? It was easy. It was comfortable.
Don’t marry a redhead, a friend once warned me.
I was paying for it now, with this iniquitous affair of divorce and dividing a life into two, in which, oddly enough, I was constantly the villain.
Deciding to check the listings for apartments and condos again, I powered up my computer and logged in. It’d only been a week since Melinda told me she was “done,” but a week was long enough. I had to get out of here soon.
“Everett!” Melinda hollered. “The Xbox—”
“You don’t touch that,” I snapped. It was the one thing I had left that I could share with Grace. When she came home for holidays, she’d teach me some new game, and everything was great for a few hours. My heart hurt just thinking about it.
“Jeesh, you need to relax,” Melinda replied.
I rubbed at my chest in an attempt to ease the pressure and glanced at the picture of Grace and me on my desk. It wasn’t my favorite photo. Taken by Melinda at Grace’s high school graduation. My girl had been over the moon. She’d graduated with straight A’s and was on her way to the West Coast, so far away from Chicago, which explained why my smile in the picture was a bit more subdued.
Where was my favorite picture?
Grace had insisted I put this one on my desk this summer when she’d been home.
I opened my drawers one by one and finally found what I was looking for.
I sighed and leaned back in my seat, and I brushed the pad of my thumb over her hair. She was only seven in this photo. A perfect blend of Melinda and me. Grace’s hair wasn’t red, but it wasn’t brown either. Dark copper, to go with the blue eyes she’d inherited from me. And the cutest nose that looked less like a button now and more like the slightly pointy nose Melinda had.
Grace pulled it off better, in my…well, I wasn’t sure if my opinion was fueled by bitterness or honesty, to be frank. Perhaps a combination of both. Grace didn’t stick her nose in the air in the haughty way Melinda did.
Goddamn, how I missed my daughter’s smiles. When she was little and I was her world, those freckles and that dimpled grin owned me.
My computer dinged with an alert, and I moved the cursor to open Facebook. The only reason I had an account was because Grace sent messages through there. Unfortunately, my two friends from high school also enjoyed tagging me in bullshit, which happened way more often than I received messages from Grace. But since she’d learned about her mother’s and my divorce, she’d texted a few times, and my heart skipped a beat when I saw an unread message.
I clicked the icon, only to frown.
Someone with my last name, who definitely wasn’t my daughter, had messaged. Who the hell was Adam Scott?
Grabbing my reading glasses off the desk, I leaned closer and read the message. Two of them, actually. The last one popped up just then.
Hi. I think you’re my dad’s brother. Would you like to get to know me?
(I know that sounds weird, but it was better than the five-page novella I wrote and deleted before.)
“Adam…” I tested the name and rubbed my mouth absently. Adam, Adam, Adam. Could it be? Christ, I hadn’t seen Adam since he was…five? Six? My brother and his wife had adopted him when he was four; I remembered that much.
I shook my head to myself and closed the window.
No, I couldn’t say I wished to get to know my nephew. Adopted or not, he was still the son of my late brother, and I doubted we’d have anything in common. Melinda and I hadn’t even been invited to Kane’s funeral. I hadn’t been sure I’d wanted to attend, but we probably would have—out of duty—if we’d had the option.
Why on earth had the boy reached out to me?
Boy.
I supposed he was in his midtwenties now.
It didn’t matter, though. His side of the family was no longer my own.
Melinda let out a scream of frustration. “I can’t decide what to do with this fucking house!”
I left the kitchen and joined her in the living room. “Food will be here in twenty minutes.” I scanned the room that looked nothing like it had a little over a week ago. All the pictures had come off the walls. The big floor-to-ceiling bookcase had been emptied. Stacks of boxes took up much of the space.
“I don’t care about the fucking food, Everett,” she spat angrily. “God—this is you in a nutshell, always so passive about everything. I hate it!”
I clenched my jaw. “Don’t confuse passive for shutting down. I don’t have to take your tantrums anymore, and I couldn’t care less about whether you’re going to stay here and remodel or get a new place. Now, spare me the goddamn drama and let me remind you that you wanted me to call and order Chinese.” I turned around and left the room again, and I jogged up the stairs to hide out in my study.
It was essentially what I’d been doing the past several days.
What else could I do? I’d disassembled some furniture. Otherwise, as I’d come to realize, not much in this house was mine. It was too early to pack up my clothes since I didn’t have a place yet. Photos would have to wait until we’d made copies of everything, a
nd Grace was coming home next week to go through her room.
I’d taken my work items to my office, leaving my home study mostly bare. I had my desk, my computer, my chair, a picture of Grace and me, and a black plastic bag of trash.
I opened the second drawer.
And I had a bottle of Tullamore.
Perhaps I should ask Mick and Shawn if we should go out for a beer. I checked my Facebook to see if they were online, and my mouth twitched in mild amusement at the game invitations that flooded Mick’s timeline. He was currently a bored stay-at-home dad while his wife adjusted to a life out of the house. She’d made him agree when their fifth was born that she was going to return to work part time. So now Mick played Facebook games and took care of their youngest until his wife came home around two. I also knew that he had an office at home and was supposed to spend whatever time he could working—not playing FarmVille.
Shawn was easier. His construction company was a well-oiled machine that could survive without him here and there, and his two boys were in high school.
I clicked on my messages to send one to Shawn, but I paused when I saw the one I’d received from Adam two days ago.
I’d managed to ignore that he’d reached out in the first place. I had plenty to keep my mind occupied. Though, I couldn’t deny there was a sliver of curiosity.
Going to his profile, I saw it was open to the public, and I did a quick scroll through his feed. Huh. He had a child. I rested my chin in my hand and studied a photo of Adam and a little girl. The Scott genes didn’t travel through Adam, and yet he had brown hair and blue eyes—which, Christ, wasn’t weird at all. It was undoubtedly one of the most common combinations in the Western world.
The little girl looked to be around four or five, and she had starker features, darker hair, crystal-clear green eyes, pale skin, but she shared the same crooked smirk as her father. She was very cute.
I scrolled up again and eyed Adam’s info. Twenty-seven years old, Chicago, male—of course he’d gone to Northwestern. As had my brother and our father.
I’d escaped Illinois and done my undergrad at Cornell, not a popular choice in my family, before I’d moved to the West Coast for my master’s at Berkeley. It was where I’d met Melinda, another Chicagoan on the run. How we’d ended up back here was a mystery.
Grace was starting fourth grade by the time we bought our house in Evanston, and if I could go back and do it over again, I wouldn’t. Moving back because Melinda wanted to take care of her ailing grandmother hadn’t been enough.
I sat back and rubbed at my temples, and I struggled to remember how we’d handled the move. Everything felt hazy and unresolved. Melinda had always been a force, one of the reasons I’d fallen for her, and she had an opinion about everything. I was far from that way, but it didn’t mean I didn’t stand my ground when I felt strongly about something. Which I’d done about living in the Bay Area.
It was an architect’s dream.
Grace had loved it there too.
Tenting my fingers in front of my mouth, I peered at the computer screen again and stared at Adam’s profile photo. He had an infectious and charming smile, one that reached his eyes, and he was a young man who knew more about my family than I did. They were his family, in fact. Not mine. He didn’t have my last name. I had his.
The doorbell rang downstairs, so I let out a breath and got out of my chair.
Two days later, I came from work to find Melinda drunk in the living room.
She’d started sorting through pictures on the floor, and she was surrounded by boxes of photo albums and wine bottles.
I set down my briefcase in the doorway and frowned.
Melinda offered me a bleary-eyed look and a fake smile. “We were happy once.” She hiccupped and held up a photo. “Look. Look at us, Everett.”
I sighed and walked closer, then squatted down near her and picked up the picture. We did look happy. “Where’s this from?” I didn’t remember the restaurant—or why we had tans.
She snorted and wiped her fingers under her eyes. Someone had gotten a manicure today. Her nails were an inch longer and dark red. “You don’t even know.” She laughed, even though it wasn’t truly a laugh. “It was the year after we moved back here. We spent a weekend on the lake.”
“Oh.” The memory was blurry at best. I felt like I should remember, though. It was what, nine years ago?
Melinda snatched the photo from me and tore it in half.
My forehead creased, and I glanced at the countless photos spread out on the floor. Sorted in stacks, most of them, with a dated note.
“Have you ever cheated on me?” she asked in a small voice.
I looked to her sharply, insulted by the mere idea. “Of course not. Why would you ask such a thing?”
Tears spilled over, and she guzzled her wine. “Because it would explain why you’ve been unreachable to me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I stood up, irritated and confused. “My life has been about this family. I’ve worked my ass off to get to where I am today, to pay off our loans, and to make sure Grace could go to a good school. All the vacations—never missed a damn recital.”
She nodded slowly and looked up at me. “What about me? You mention your career, Grace, paying for stuff… What about you and me? When was the last time you rushed home because you wanted to spend time with me?”
I furrowed my brow. “We took those vacations together, didn’t we? It was you I shared a bed with, you I went out to dinner with—”
“No.” She stood up abruptly and wobbled, her wineglass nearly empty in her hand. “No, you didn’t, Everett. You stopped.” She waved a hand in the air, referring to something I had no clue about. “At some point, you left the building. We talked but never really talked. You came home from work, but you weren’t really here. There’s—” She gestured at her face, then my face, and I lifted a brow. “There’s this mask or wall or…something. Nothing gets through.” Anger lit up in her eyes, and she shoved at my chest. “Nothing gets through!”
“Watch it,” I snapped. “What’s wrong with you? I’ve been right fucking here!”
“Liar!” she cried. “You’re so full of shit, Everett!”
I glared and opened my mouth to reply…when I realized I had absolutely nothing to say.
She let out a cackle. “See? This is what I’m talking about! You’ve got nothing. Nothing.” She flipped to seething and jabbed a sharp finger against my chest. “You are nothing. You’re dead. Fuck our fucking pictures. You’re not in them anyway.”
I stared at her, bewildered, and waited for the fury—or the urge to defend myself. She was calling me dead, and I…I acted the part. Where was my anger? My hurt? She had asked for this divorce, not me. She was the one leaving. Me? I was just… I was just tired.
Melinda bent down to pour another glass, and she sniffled and shook her head. “Would you even care if I said I’d had an affair?”
That one did it. I was actually thankful. The knife of betrayal lodged itself in my chest, threatening to cut me open. “Have you?”
She averted her gaze to the floor and drank more of her wine.
The knife pressed deeper. “Melinda. Did you cheat during our marriage?”
“Technically, no,” she spat out. “I met some guys—”
“As in fucking plural?” I yelled.
“I never acted on it!” she shouted back. “It was just texting and dinners!”
“Oh, just that?” I widened my arms and stared at her incredulously. “You actually went out to dinner with other men while you were married to me?” I pushed my fingers into my hair and tugged at the ends, unable to grasp any of the emotions that surged through me. Disbelief, anger, more bitterness—oh fucking God, how bitter I felt.
“I never slept with anyone,” she said quickly. “Not even a freaking kiss.”
I chuckled darkly and shook my head, and I took a couple steps back. Then a few more, until I decided I was plain done. I picke
d up my briefcase and headed upstairs.
I leaned back in my chair and swirled the amber liquid in my glass, mesmerized by how the light from my computer glinted in the whiskey. Like little balls of blue embers jumping across the fiery surface.
Taking a swig, I continued browsing the public listings and was unimpressed by everything. No, I sure as hell had no desire to live in Englewood or Washington Park. Suburbia held very little appeal too, so I’d excluded that from my search.
“Fuckin’ hell.” I drained my glass, depressed by the results, and made a mental note to call a Realtor tomorrow. Finding a place without professional help was like fishing without a pole.
I switched tabs to Facebook and clicked on Grace’s profile.
She’d been out with friends for breakfast today. Another status update was a complaint about an essay.
Having been told, awkwardly and formally, that she preferred that her mother and I contacted her in private as opposed to commenting on her posts, I went to our messages and typed something quickly.
Thinking about you, darling. Remember to rest and not study in panic right before your essay is due. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help. Love, Dad.
To my surprise, she was online and responding before I could leave the chat window.
I’ll be fine. How’s everything at home?
I loved the question but despised the reason behind it. I assumed most teenagers went through phases where parents were the last people on their minds, though I’d hoped Grace would come out of her very long phase for years now. She was only asking because we’d told her we were getting divorced.
Grace and I hadn’t been close in nearly a decade, and it pained me every day.
