Elizabeth picked up on the first ring, like she always did. Being my twin, she somehow had always been able to sense when I was calling.
“What happened?” she asked, knowing immediately that something was terribly wrong.
“Will was in an accident…”
Before I could even finish telling her the rest of it, she cut me off. “I’ll be right over.” She hung up with a fast click.
I fell back on the couch and let my mind wander. How the hell did this happen? What was I going to tell Mia? I closed my eyes tightly as panic started to creep through my body. I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew, Elizabeth was sitting next to me on the couch, gently touching my shoulder. I had given her a set of keys years ago, so I was not startled by her presence. I moved my body over on the couch and fell lightly into her open arms.
“Maybe it’s for the… best,” she sighed. As the last word escaped her mouth, she avoided my eyes. I had always known that Elizabeth never liked Will. In the past several years, when his drinking spun out of control, it became harder for her to keep that to herself. Our marriage had originally started out as a happy one. We were high school sweethearts that fell in love and then got married when we found out that Mia was on the way. At the time, everything seemed so simple and perfect. Until it wasn’t, and everything fell apart.
I felt numb, not sad or confused—just numb. Still, I was convinced that I would wake up at some point and realize this was all one big nightmare.
Elizabeth had always been the more sensible one of the two of us. She did not get married young like I did, and she practically lived in some mansion looking after a billionaire family as their personal assistant. She had her own studio apartment, but due to her work schedule, she might as well have had her own room at their office. I sometimes asked her what it was like, and she’d tell me that the Johnson family was wealthy, but seemed very unhappy.
I looked around my small house and wondered what would become of it. Will stopped earning a salary a long time ago. His company had given him a second chance with the office job, but he’d ended up fucking it up. His drinking problem caught up with him and it started to affect his performance at work. Since then, I’d been paying the bills and the mortgage for months now, working as both a teacher and a waitress to cover our expenses. I took a long gulp as I realized I would have to quit the job at the restaurant now that Will wasn’t here to look after Mia in the evenings. My mom was still working, and I couldn’t ask her to take on looking after Mia. The numbness took over my body completely, to the point where I no longer felt like myself.
I squeezed my eyes shut and leaned my head back onto the beat-up leather sofa that Mom bought for us when we first got the house. This sofa had been the subject of so much abuse. I couldn’t even try and count the number of times Will punched the damn thing. Sure, he had never been violent with me or Mia, but Mom was always quick to suggest that it was only a matter of time.
People would tell me it was because Will had lost his job. Or the fact I got pregnant before we were supposed to get married. I had always hated thinking that, because Mia was the best thing that ever happened to us. I could never blame her for causing all of this pain. Will was the one that destroyed us. Not Mia.
All of those years of studying and trying to do something with my life… Teaching had always been a passion of mine. I knew from a young age that I wanted do it. However, when I graduated from college, new teaching positions were hard to come by. It had been a point of contention between Will and I for months about what I would do and how we would pay our bills. After several weeks of searching, I finally found a position as a teaching aide for a second grade class. It barely paid minimum wage, but I saw it as a foot in the door. Will saw it as a roadblock. He was the one that forced me to get a job at the restaurant, claiming that my first one wasn’t enough to support us. With Will’s job and the two of mine, we were finally starting to save.
Some months were good, and there would be no need for me to go to the restaurant to work. Will would spend within our means and not splurge on crap we didn’t need. He would actually do things around the house, like look after Mia more so I could Will papers and do some chores. Those were the golden days. They felt so distant now.
Then, after Will lost his job, he started to lash out, which was why nearly every bathroom door in the house had a dent, and almost every glass was broken. I remembered my mom looking for a glass in the closet one day, and she shook her head, not being able to find one that wasn’t chipped in some way. I could tell then that she knew why we’d started using plastic.
“Someone’s at the door,” Elizabeth said. She slowly took my hand and led me over to it. “Take a deep breath,” she instructed.
I opened the door with a shaking hand, revealing a short, stubby man with a look of remorse on his face. He had a hat, which he must have been wearing to keep the summer heat off his forehead, and next to him was a bubbly, too-skinny blonde. They looked at me and stared for a moment. I turn back to glance at Elizabeth, who shook her head. She seemed more distressed than I felt.
“Mrs. Emma Harris?” the man asked.
I nodded, feeling like this was déjà vu from last night all over again.
“We are here to serve you notice. You have twenty-four hours to evacuate the premises. The notice expired today. However, your sister had informed us earlier about the death of your husband. Under the circumstances, we will give you an extra day to handle your business.”
What notice? I shot a hard glance over to Elizabeth.
A cold chill came over me, and I realized Will must have known all along. “That fucking bastard,” I whispered under my breath.
CHAPTER 4
Emma
“The fucking bastard!” I screamed at the top of my lungs as I packed one of the last boxes in the kitchen. I’d said it many times over the past few hours. I thrust open the cabinet doors and started to pile dishes in to a box. Once the cabinet was empty, I slammed the door shut. My mom entered the kitchen, and I imagined she was going to stop me, but instead she rushed up and wrapped her arms around me.
“Let out another scream. It’ll help get your anger out.”
I let out another loud scream and to my surprise, she joined in as well. Elizabeth rushed into the kitchen, confused at the commotion.
“What the hell are you yelling about?”
I slumped down to the floor. “I know I should be upset about Will’s death, but I am so angry at him for doing this to us.”
“I know, dear.” My mom lowered herself next to me on the ground. “You are allowed to feel however you want. Be angry and be sad. But know that your sister, brother, and I are always here for you.”
I rested my head on her shoulder. Despite all of the hell that had broken loose over the last few months, my family had stuck by my side and I could never thank them enough.
As I loaded the last few boxes into Elizabeth’s car and strapped Mia into her car seat, I said a silent goodbye to my old life. I was sad to leave it behind, but deep down, I knew that things would finally start to get better. As much as I loved Will when we were younger, our love had begun to fade over the last few years. The alcohol had changed him, and he was no longer the same witty guy I fell in love with. He became cold and paranoid, with a very short fuse. It was only a matter of time before his fuse exploded, and as much I wished that I could have helped him, I know that him being gone gave Mia a better chance at having a more normal life.
From the strain of our marriage and working two jobs, I had been too exhausted to pay attention to what had been going on around me. I was too worried about what Will was doing and if he would be drunk when he got home. I was too wrapped up in protecting that side of Will from her that I wasn’t being the best mother I could be for Mia.
When the stubby man from the bank had issued the notice, I had wracked my brain to figure out where this was coming from. As the dust settled, all of the pieces started to fall into place. I used to
ask Will where he got the money to do all his drinking, because I certainly wasn’t able to afford it on my paychecks. He’d tell me that he’d gotten some construction work to help pay our bills. At the time, I believed him, but now I realized how much of a lie that really was. Will never got any construction jobs. Instead he had gotten into gambling, and that was where his extra cash was coming from. The bastard had used our house as security for his debts, and now the people he was in debt to wanted him to pay up. Mia and I were now left to clean up his mess.
I should have left his sorry ass a long time ago. Even in death, he was somehow punishing me. The plan was for Mia and I to move in with Mom for a while until I saved up enough to stand on my own two feet.
With no one to watch Mia at night, I had to quit working at the restaurant. It was a cut to my paycheck, but I wasn’t going to have my mom babysit when we were already taking up another room in her house. My teacher’s aide position barely brought in enough money for food, but without a house or apartment, I could slowly start to save up while I found something that would be more stable.
I got into the front seat of Elizabeth’s car and she smiled at me.
“I know this is rough, Emma, but we’ll figure it out.”
I turned back to Mia and she was already fast asleep. Elizabeth pulled out of our small driveway and looked up at my small house through the back window. I sucked in a breath. Things would get better. They sure as hell couldn’t get any worse.
CHAPTER 5
Emma
“I can’t believe we finally got a chance to do this,” I said as I shared my first lunch in a long time with a dear friend, Maggie. After weeks of sitting on the couch, moping around Mom’s house, I knew I needed to get out and be around other people besides family. Maggie and I had known each other since high school, and I knew that no matter how much time had passed since we had last seen each other, each time that we got back together, it was like we never left.
“Emma, you need this. You really do. I’m just glad you called. It seemed that even before Will’s death, you started to shut everyone out,” she said while passing me the ketchup. I’d agreed to meet her in my favorite diner, Peggy Sue’s. I hadn’t been there for months. There were too many memories associated with this place. This was the diner that Will proposed in, and every time I walked past it, all the memories of that night came into play, and it felt too painful.
I had my usual hamburger and fries followed by their famous vanilla float. The float had chocolate, ice cream, and marshmallows on a plate. It was guaranteed to put some inches on my hips simply by looking at it, let alone tasting it, which I didn’t mind. I enjoyed my curves and hated missing out on great food because I was watching my weight.
We were young, and I had just found out I was pregnant, and Will had put the ring in my vanilla float. I nearly choked on the damn thing.
Years later we laughed about it, but at the time, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that he nearly killed me with the ring he planned to propose with. I mean, what happened to getting on one knee and proposing in privacy? I was wondering if I should be thinking about marrying a man who nearly killed me in my favorite diner.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Maggie said while waving her hand up and down in front of me. I looked down to see my vanilla float, and for the first time ever, I didn’t feel like drinking it.
“You should have ordered something else,” she said as I pushed the float away from me on the table. “You need to be the girl who I went to high school with, the fun one, the one that loved life. Not the one you’ve turned into. I just know that something will pull you out of this funk and you’ll start being her again.”
“Are you sure? I’m starting to think that girl from high school is lost somewhere.”
“She is only lost if you want her to be. Stop finding excuses to not bring her back.”
I sighed as I thought about what she said, what she believed, and I wished I believed it too. When our moms would get fed up with us, they used to bring us here. We could whine for hours about going to Peggy Sue’s. I supposed we watched Grease one too many times, because that was exactly how the diner was set up. The same uncomfortable chairs and the noise so loud that you couldn’t hear yourself speak. It was a teenager joint; every cool kid in the school would hang out at the diner, and we loved watching them.
We would talk about how cool they all looked, hanging out, trying to eavesdrop on their conversation. Who was doing who? Who was doing what? We loved it. We were young and we loved the idea of being in the know, without actually knowing what was going on.
She put her hand on my arm as I stared around the diner at the memories, wondering if they were ever going to change their uniform: the same pink tutu with the white blouse and over-the-top hairstyles.
“Will they ever change their uniform?”
“No,” we said in unison, after calculating that for the ten years we had been going there, they hadn’t changed it, so why would they change it now?
We laughed, and I got up and gave her a hug for being the only friend who tried to call me, tried to stay in contact, and most of all, who was always there when I needed a shoulder to cry on.
She was happily married to a guy she met in college, and soon there would be plans to have a baby—if it wasn’t on the agenda, it soon would be.
“So, hey, I didn’t bring you here for doom and gloom. I’m pregnant!” she screamed, and everyone in the diner heard and jumped up. Peggy Sue and the other waitresses came over and gave her a kiss, congratulating her on the inevitable, eternal happiness. Maybe she was right. I would think about how great it was that she was having a baby and beg for her to make me the godmother. I needed to get Emma Jackson back in mind, body, and soul.
CHAPTER 6
Emma
“His sister has agreed to meet with you,” Elizabeth said quietly while we watched re-runs of Desperate Housewives with our mother. For the first time in a long time, watching the show was making me depressed.
“Why are we whispering, and whose sister are we discussing?”
“My boss, Mason Johnson,” she replied quickly, flicking her hair back and making sure Mom wasn’t listening. What was going on? Had Mom asked her to figure out a way to get rid of me?
Mom and I weren’t exactly getting along, partly because Mom had gotten used to having her own space. Sure, my brother lived at home, but he spent most of his time at college. It was easy to forget he lived in the house, but Mia and I were constantly in Mom’s space.
I never thought I would end up back here. For the last several months, I had been searching for a more stable teaching position, but there hadn’t been anything that had become available. I was still working as a teacher’s aide, but I wasn’t earning enough there to rent an apartment, let alone a house. It felt like all my dreams were slowly going down the drain. It had been a rough time for me. I still struggled with being angry with Will for what he did to us. Every time I would look into Mia’s eyes, I would see so much of him in there. It was a constant reminder of the man I could not save, and wouldn’t have wanted me to save him if I tried.
Elizabeth told me that I need to move my life in a new direction. I knew she was right, and it probably was time for me to leave Mom’s house.
“Just going to the bathroom, pause it for me a minute,” Mom said as she got up off the couch. A minute, more like an hour. We both knew Mom’s bathroom breaks took forever.
“Great,” Elizabeth blurted out as she put down the popcorn and looked me in the eye. Okay, so it was going to be one of those conversations.
She rested her hands on top of mine. “You need to leave.”
So, my baby sister was telling me to go. Or maybe Mom was asking me to leave through Elizabeth. I felt my body deflate as I sank back into the couch. I hated that I put my mom in this position, but I had nowhere else to go.
I nodded. Elizabeth pushed her glasses higher up on her nose. “You’re both miserable for different reasons. Mom h
asn’t told you. But between the funeral, which wasn’t cheap…”
I was about to interject and acknowledge that I knew this—of course I did—when she lifted her finger to her lip so she could finish saying her piece. It was something we used to do as kids. We were always in competition with each other, so Mom had taught us a way to communicate without interrupting each other.
I was feeling defensive and depressed. My husband had died, and I had no plans for the future. I was afraid to even go out in case I met anyone. The last thing I wanted was to start a new relationship, since I was pretty sure I could never trust another man. Will had stolen more than just my money; he had taken away my spirit.
“Like I said, I told Mr. Johnson’s sister about your situation. Their last tutor retired, so she said you could probably have the job. She just wants to meet you to make sure you’d be happy with it. I can’t think of a reason why you wouldn’t be.”
I put my hands on top of hers as I tried to absorb what she was telling me. I looked into her eyes to see if she was being genuine. A tutor? I never considered tutoring.
“Well, it’s more tutor and part time liv-in nanny,” she said quickly and shifted her eyes away from mine. This had to be a joke. How could I be a nanny when I had my own child to look after?
“Seriously, a live-in nanny? For the Johnsons?” I asked, trying to absorb her message. “Is that even safe for Mia and me, given their situation?”
It was pretty well known that the Johnson family was a mess. They were the wealthiest family in town, having created a real estate firm years ago. The firm was started by Martin Johnson. He started as a simple commercial real estate owner, and then grew his business into a property group that now owned practically every mall in America. As their finances grew, so did the Johnson family drama. After Martin passed away a few years ago, all anyone knew around town was the gossip of the Johnson family as the fought amongst one another for the family fortune. Major legal battles had ensued and it was no surprise that the family was now divided and bitter at one another. Now with the possibility of living with them, I was not too sure it was a good idea to put my daughter near that situation.
Hunter (The Bad Disciples MC Book 2) Page 16
