Total pages in book: 39
Estimated words: 36689 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 183(@200wpm)___ 147(@250wpm)___ 122(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 36689 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 183(@200wpm)___ 147(@250wpm)___ 122(@300wpm)
I installed them two weeks ago after Molly needed emergency surgery because she ate one of my socks when I wasn’t home. She’s already on the mend, and the vet says she’s going to make a full recovery. But installing the cameras was my idea. If my baby ever starts acting like that again, I’ll have a way to see what she has been up to for the last few days.
But it’s not Molly or Milo that have activated the camera. It’s a different kind of dog, the kind I thought I was going to share my life with. I watch in shock as Stuart hurries into my bedroom, his arms wrapped around a skinny blonde with boobs that cannot possibly be real.
My mind spins, trying desperately to come up with a logical explanation for why he has a woman in lingerie in my bedroom. He’s already moved half of his boxes into my townhouse. We’re supposed to go house hunting together after the wedding. This doesn’t make sense.
They start touching each other, exchanging heated kisses before falling onto the bed. My bed. With the sheets I just freshly laundered yesterday.
I think I’m supposed to feel something. Anger or betrayal. But there’s only cold numbness washing over me.
I scramble for the earbuds at the bottom of my bag, stuffing them into my ears and pressing play on the sound icon. It’s over. All fifteen seconds of pasty humping because Stuart has never had much stamina. Hard to develop stamina when you play video games for eight hours a day.
“Well, how much longer until we can be together out in the open?” She’s pouting, the kind of pout that only happens when you’ve had too many rounds of lip filler, and your girl squad doesn’t love you enough to talk you out of them.
“All it’s going to take is the wedding. Baby, you know you’re the one I love,” Stuart says, tucking himself back into his pants. Truthfully, there’s not much to tuck. It’s more for show, but whatever. “After the wedding, her dad should finally croak from that brain tumor. I think he’s only holding on because of her fat ass.”
I make a noise of disgust. My dad had a brain tumor, but the surgery was successful and his prognosis is excellent. We were lucky that he’d been in a car accident and required a head scan. It caught the tumor before it became symptomatic. Most people just think he took a few weeks off and came back to the company. They have no idea that he went through major surgery and private man that he is, that’s the way my dad wants to keep it.
“Then you can divorce her and take half of her inheritance,” Pouty Blonde says.
“And we can finally go to Paris, just like I promised,” Stuart answers, leaning down to kiss her because why the fuck wouldn’t he be kissing another woman in my bed?
“There you are. You lost us,” Ronnie says then takes one look at my face. “Boys, you see the paint chips down there? Go pick a few. We need to repaint the treehouse.”
I watch them run halfway down the aisle, close enough to be visible but not able to overhear us discussing this.
“Sweetie, what’s going on?” Ronnie’s voice has the concerned note that it did the day I told her about my dad’s brain tumor. She was the first person I told. Not Stuart, Ronnie. “Is it--?”
“I don’t want to talk here,” I tell her. I need to be in private. I need time to think this through and figure out...what, I don’t know. All I know is that Ronnie will help me. We’ve been through so much together, and she’s the one person I can count on when my world is falling apart.
“I just kept feeling like something was wrong,” I admit in a small voice, hours later when I’m sitting at Ronnie’s kitchen table. The boys are outside playing in the sprinkler while the two of us talk.
Molly and Milo are curled up asleep on her lumpy couch. She stopped by my townhouse and picked up the dogs, so I didn’t have to go in there. I couldn’t swear I wouldn’t set my sheets on fire. Or Stuart, though he wasn’t around.
Ronnie nods and sips her tea. She’s sat with me for hours, digesting this news and listening to me process everything out loud.
“I don’t know what to do,” I tell her though I’ve thought about confronting him, keying his car, and destroying his video game collection. After all, he slept with another woman. In my bed. Three days before our wedding.
“Well, you don’t have to make any decisions today,” Ronnie reminds me gently, parroting my words from the night she discovered her ex-husband was cheating. I was there for her then. I never expected that one day I’d be on the opposite side of this conversation.