Finlay Donovan Is Killing It(Finlay Donovan #1)(10)

Steven cringed. “I left it at the house this morning. Along with his paci.” Which was clearly why he had wanted me to rush out here so fast. I stopped bouncing to gape at him. Zach arched in my arms and started wailing again. “Here.” Flustered, Steven fished around in his pocket and unhooked a house key from his key ring. “You can stop by my place and get it. Just leave the key under the mat, and for god’s sake don’t tell Theresa I let you in.” He took me by the arm and began shuffling us toward the van.

I planted my feet and set Zach on the ground. The crying abruptly stopped, and he gleefully took off running. Steven failed to catch him as Zach waddled full tilt for the field.

I cupped a hand over my eyes, shielding out the afternoon sun as I watched Zach toddle off. “It was a long drive out here and I’m low on gas. All I’ve got with me is a twenty. Do you mind?” I held out a hand. If he wanted us to go that badly, the least he could do was cover the trip.

Jaw clenched, Steven reluctantly pulled his attention from Zach. “Twenty is plenty to get you home. It’s not that far.” He smiled tightly. Probably so he wouldn’t look like a total asshole in front of Delia.

I reached down and put a hand on our daughter’s head, plucking off her cap. A few chunks of loose hair came away with it. Steven’s face fell. His eyes darted back to the gravel road behind us as he peeled a twenty from the wad in his pocket and shoved it in my hand. Delia snatched her hat back, repeatedly failing to pull it over her head. I ran to fetch Zach before he could climb the bright yellow tractor that had captured his attention.

“Thanks for watching Zach this morning,” I said when he was finally writhing and whining in my arms. “Guess we’ll be going.”

Dust kicked up behind two approaching cars. The glistening Mercedes came to a stop behind the phallus on the rear window of my minivan, and I’m pretty sure Steven had never looked so relieved as he did the moment I buckled the kids into their car seats and shut the doors.

“It’ll be faster if you go out the back way,” he said, opening my door for me in a gesture that probably looked chivalrous from a distance. “Follow the gravel road to the end. It connects with the rural route behind the farm. Make a right, then another right, and follow the signs back to the highway.” Steven waved good-bye and rushed off to greet his clients, whose cars were now blocking the road we came in on.

I started the engine and rolled down the windows. A cool breeze blew over the acres upon acres of new grass, rippling them like the surface of a huge green sea. As we drove through it, I couldn’t help but admire what Steven had built here. Planting, growing, harvesting. Seeing something he’d started and stuck with, all the way through. Tractors turned over the rich dark earth on either side of me, spreading fresh seed into the trenches behind them. Others cut long, crisp strands of dense sod that looked like they could resurface a golf course. And still others pried up long stretches of turf, rolling them into tubes and stacking them onto flatbeds.

Three hundred acres. I couldn’t even finish three hundred pages. Couldn’t keep one little girl’s hair cut as neatly as Steven kept up all these fields.

I left exactly the way Steven wanted me to, out the back where no one would see me, past the fallow field at the end of his farm, the last few acres of dirt he hadn’t yet gotten around to covering over with something new.





CHAPTER 5





I wedged Steven’s key in the lock with one hand while Zach whimpered on my hip. Delia trailed in after me, slipped off her sneakers, and headed straight for her room. Theresa’s house was a no-shoes zone. The wide plank wood floors and pristine white carpets smelled strongly of lemon Lysol, as if Theresa had drenched the entire house in it after my kids had left that morning.

I kept my sneakers on, trailing in some of the sod farm with me as I climbed the stairs to the children’s rooms. Zach’s was sterile and bland—white carpets, white blinds, and stark pricey furniture with sharp angles and clean lines. Zach’s blanket, covered with brightly colored stains and faded puppies, was draped over the changing table beside his chewed-up paci. Zach jammed it into his mouth. He tucked the pilled flannel under his chin, his head resting against my shoulder as he made contented soft sucking sounds. I called for Delia as I descended the stairs but, as usual, she was reluctant to come. This house was still new to her, novel and different with frilly new princess bedding and shiny new Barbie playthings. She never played with Barbies at home. And she didn’t much care for princesses. But this was her daddy’s world, and she was perfectly content to play dress-up in it.

I stood in Steven’s foyer, amid the countless posed portraits of Steven and Theresa that ran from the landing all the way to the front door. Their bedroom was probably covered in them, too. Every inch of his place was a reminder of why he was here and who he was attached to, lest he forget, like he did before with me when Theresa came along.

When Steven and I had lived together, less than a handful of framed photos of the two of us had dotted the walls—a candid from our college formal taken by friends we hadn’t talked to since the divorce, our engagement photo with my parents, and one of us stuffing cake in each other’s faces at our wedding were the only ones I could recall. Maybe that was where I’d gone wrong. Maybe I hadn’t memorialized us enough. Maybe I’d failed to remind him of what we had, or what he stood to lose. Or maybe none of that would have made a difference at all. He wasn’t exactly Old Faithful; just because Bree-from-the-sod-farm wasn’t caught in the frame of any of Theresa’s pictures didn’t mean she wasn’t in the background somewhere.