Chapter 3

3: 3

3

The phone went back into my pocket, and my fingertips were still trembling.

Nathan wasn't wrong. No one understood the misery of a broken home better than I did.

The first time Nathan and I met was at the diner where I worked over the summer.

He was one of the college kids who came around to hang out.

Little by little, we got to know each other.

Nathan used to ask me why I pushed myself so hard, why I was busy in that diner from morning till night.

I'd just wipe down the tables and smile, saying nothing.

Until the day my birth father cornered me in a back alley.

He still had a half-drunk bottle in his hand, staring at me through bleary eyes.

"Heard you've been working here."

"How much are they paying you? Hand it over."

"I don't have money for your drinking."

I clenched the loose bills in my hand.

Two months. Four thousand eight hundred dollars. Exactly one year's tuition.

He backed me into the corner, step by step, and I thought there was no way I'd get out of it without a beating.

But then Nathan showed up at the mouth of the alley.

He grabbed my hand and we ran for it, running until we'd left the man far behind.

Nathan looked at the cigarette burns on my arm without a word, and finally said, "Don't be scared. I'll protect you, I promise."

And he kept that promise.

As an upperclassman at the same school, Nathan got me a financial aid grant for low-income students.

He even partitioned off a small room in the place he rented, so I'd have somewhere to rest when I got back late from my part-time shifts.

Nathan was like a little boat in the sea of misery my life had been.

He finally brought some light into all that darkness.

After that, my mother remarried, and my stepfather is good to me now.

But those old days still hung over me like a nightmare.

Before I had the baby, I developed prenatal anxiety.

I was always insecure, afraid Nathan and I would fall apart, terrified my baby would end up walking the same road I had.

It was Nathan who reassured me, again and again, slowly smoothing every last bit of that fear away.

And now here he was, tearing that wound back open, bloody and raw, for another woman.

Trying to use my past to force me into giving in.

The air went thin.

My chest kept heaving, and instinct pulled me toward the balcony for some fresh air, but I overheard my mother-in-law and her friend talking.

"Up on that stage just now, your son and Bonnie really made a perfect pair."

"Of course they did. Childhood sweethearts, the real thing."

There was pride in my mother-in-law's voice. "You know, the two families originally arranged for Nathan and Bonnie to marry."

"Then out of nowhere this Lois Fox shows up. I disliked her the moment I laid eyes on her!"

"And now look, she's gone and had a girl on top of it. A waste of money."

"How could she ever compare to Bonnie!"

"Good thing she's so easy to fool. Back when we were buying her wedding jewelry, I made an offhand remark, told her the stone in her bracelet had richer color and better quality than Bonnie's."

"And Lois Fox believed it."

"Truth is, hers is just a knockoff."

"Nathan knows, of course. They grew up together, after all. Anything that's good for Bonnie, he's going to turn a blind eye to."

All at once the bracelet on my wrist clamped down like a handcuff, biting into me.

Back then Nathan and my mother-in-law kept telling me how precious that bracelet was.

I'd always thought it was proof that they valued me, that they cared for me.

That they cherished me, carefully, every moment.

I never imagined that in their eyes, it was proof of how easily I could be fooled.

A marriage this full of holes couldn't go back, no matter how good it had once been.

When I looked back, up on the stage, Bonnie was straightening Nathan's tie like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Hunter stood beside them, pointed at Nathan, and called out "Daddy," and everyone there burst out laughing.

Since this family already had a father and a mother.

Then it was time for me, the outsider, to bow out.