My Life in Shambles(73)

“Okay,” he says after a moment, when he seems to visibly calm. “Okay.” He gets up and slips on his pajama pants, heading around the bed to the door.

“Hey,” I cry out, leaning across the bed and grabbing him by the pant leg, holding him in place. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?” he asks cagily, avoiding my eyes.

“This. Leave. You’re avoiding me, you’re avoiding this. We need to talk about this. I need you to be able to look at me and not feel ashamed. Communication is the only way we’re going to be able to get through it all together. Right?”

He stares at the wall and nods.

“No, Padraig, please look at me.”

He looks down and meets my eyes.

I give him a small smile. “I don’t want you for a second to think this changes anything between us. I don’t think anything less of you, I don’t think you’re weaker or any sicker and I certainly don’t think you’re less of a man because I know what that beautiful cock can do to me and I know you’ll continue to do it well. You need to be easy on yourself, okay? This is just life. Right now, it’s life. Let’s just move on from it but let’s move on together. Okay?”

He nods sheepishly. “Okay.”

“I love you,” I tell him emphatically.

“I love you, too.”

“Then come back to bed and let’s go to sleep.”

He rubs his lips together for a moment and then climbs back under the covers beside me.

I turn out the light.





19





Valerie





“Valerie, do ye mind going into the kitchen and telling Gail that Colin will be joining us for supper,” Agnes says as I head to the dining room table where Padraig and Major are already seated. She’s standing by the back door, talking to Margaret, Colin’s nurse.

“Sure,” I say and head into the kitchen.

Gail has her head in the pantry, searching for something, while food is bubbling over on the stove.

I quickly go and turn down one of the burners just as she pulls back and sees me.

“What are ye doing?” she snaps.

“Sorry, it was boiling over,” I tell her.

“That’s my problem to worry about, not yours,” she says and god, it’s crazy how much this bitch hates me. The other day, Padraig and I were at the pub and Alistair let it slip that he thinks Gail is a “hoor” and ever since then that’s all I can say in my head.

“Why are ye here?” she adds, hand on her hip.

“Agnes says Colin is joining us for dinner. I guess he feels well enough. You don’t need to make him anything separate.” … you hoor, I finish in my head, giving her a polite smile.

I turn to leave and am almost out the door when she says, “I know you’re faking it.”

My blood runs cold.

I stop.

I don’t turn around.

Keep walking, don’t engage, this hoor doesn’t know shit.

“I know you’re not his fiancé, I don’t even think you’re his girlfriend,” she says confidently.

No. No.

How can she know?

What do I do?

Play dumb.

I slowly turn around to look at her and put on my smug face. “You know, Gail, I had a feeling you didn’t like me from the start. I couldn’t figure out why. Now I know. You’re his ex. He broke your heart. And now I have his heart. You’re just jealous of me. Well, you need to get over yourself, it’s not becoming.”

What the hell was that? That was not playing dumb!

She laughs sharply. “I am not jealous of ye, you wagon.”

Wagon?

I have a feeling it doesn’t mean something good.

She pulls out her phone and keeps talking. “Believe me, what Padraig and I had was a long time ago and anyway, even if I did harbor something for him, it’s nothing more than resentment. He was a little shite back then, ye know that? But it doesn’t matter anyway because I know the truth. You’re both fecking liars.”

She holds out her phone and it’s a link to all my articles at Upward.

“You were a journalist based in New York City, writing for this online news magazine,” she says.

“I wrote those remotely.”

“Uh huh,” she says and flips the screen to something else. This time it’s a Google search. “I knew there was something off about ye both. I knew that it was timed a little too well for Padraig to bring home a fiancé that no one had heard of, just in time to say goodbye to his dad. I grew up with him. I know their relationship. I know that Padraig would do what he could to seem like he had his life together, to win him over.”

She taps on a link and a picture of Cole comes up, an article he was featured in Entrepreneur Magazine just before we broke up.

My heart sinks, past my knees and to the floor.

I can’t even think.

She goes on. “So I was suspicious. And then the other day at dinner, during your so-called engagement party, when he proposed, I heard what ye said. That ye couldn’t do this anymore. It didn’t seem right to me. So I did some more searching and I found this article with your name in it. Valerie Stephens. Says that you were engaged to Cole Masters as of December.” She pauses and gives me a triumphant smile. “Bit curious isn’t it, how you and Padraig apparently started dating in March, yet this article places you as living in New York.”