These Tangled Vines(41)

SLOANE


Sloane dressed for dinner, then unscrewed the cap of her mascara and leaned forward over the sink, closer to the mirror. She was about to touch the brush to her lashes when Chloe screamed from the bedroom. Sloane jumped and nearly gouged out her eyeball with the mascara brush.

“Chloe, don’t scream like that!” She leaned forward again and whispered under her breath, “That child is going to put me in an early grave.”

Chloe howled and sobbed. “Mom!”

Taking her daughter’s cries more seriously the second time around, Sloane dropped the mascara brush into the sink and ran out of the bathroom. “What’s wrong?”

Chloe scrambled off the bed and held out her phone. “Why did Daddy send me this?”

Evan walked in with his hand buried in a bag of potato chips. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know yet.” Sloane snatched the phone from her daughter. She looked at the picture on the screen and sucked in a breath. “Oh my God. What is this?”

“I don’t know!” Chloe sobbed and wrapped her arms around Sloane’s waist.

Focusing closely on the image, Sloane recognized her husband’s private parts along with a text message. Hey baby, are you in the mood for this tonight?

Sloane’s heart dropped like a stone with stomach-churning speed. Almost immediately, her cell phone vibrated in her pocket. It startled her, but she knew who was calling. She pulled it out and checked the display.

“It’s your father,” she explained to Chloe, fighting to remain calm and in control when her heart was pounding like a sledgehammer and she had no idea how she was going to manage her temper over the next few minutes. “I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation for this, sweetheart,” she said, stroking Chloe’s shiny blonde hair. “I’m going to keep your phone for a minute and go talk to Daddy.” Sloane pointed at Evan and snapped her fingers. “Put on a movie for her, will you? Hurry up.”

While Evan dashed to the television, Sloane went into the bathroom, shut the door, and answered her husband’s call.

“Alan, what the hell?”

He spoke in a panic. “Are you with Chloe? Is she on her phone right now?”

“Not anymore,” Sloane replied.

“Shit. Did the text come through? Did she see it?”

Sloane cupped her forehead in a hand and sat down on the edge of the bathtub. Always, with Alan and his many indiscretions, she felt heartbreak, sadness, emptiness, and most of all humiliation. She had become rather adept at keeping her chin up and pasting on a happy smile while hiding her anguish and turning a blind eye. Today, however, she felt something entirely different. Something new.

“Yes, she saw it, you idiot. What is wrong with you? I feel like I’m going to throw up right now.”

“It was an accident,” he insisted. “I swear I didn’t mean to send it to her.”

“No?” Sloane’s blood began to boil hard and bubble over. “Well then, that makes it totally fine. Who did you mean to send it to? Never mind, I don’t want to know the answer to that question.”

Sloane pressed a hand to her belly. She felt completely emptied out of patience and tolerance toward her husband. Those feelings had been replaced by a mother’s rage that her daughter had been exposed to such a horrible image. At the same time, she was furious with herself for giving her heart to a man like Alan and believing that he could make her happy and be a good father.

Glancing at the bathroom door, where Chloe’s pink bathrobe hung on a hook, Sloane felt a muscle twitch at her jaw. “Wait a second. Yes, I do want to know. Is it the nanny?”

“Come on, Sloane. Of course not.”

She hated it when he used that tone—as if she were being irrational and unreasonable. Whenever he spoke to her like that, she backed down—rather pathetically, she now realized—but tonight she didn’t care what he thought. She was fit to be tied.

“Excuse me for asking,” she replied, sarcastically. “So if it’s not the nanny, who is it?”

“No one you know.” He spoke with impatience.

His sense of entitlement was unimaginable.

When Sloane didn’t respond, the silence gained weight, and eventually he spoke in a more appeasing tone, almost as if he were trying to charm her or flirt with her. “Relax, will you?” he added. “It’s nothing.”

“Nothing? You’re telling me it’s nothing.” She looked at Chloe’s pink bathrobe again. “If that’s the way you’re going to play it, fine. I need to hang up now.”

“Wait a second. Listen . . .”

“No, you listen, Alan. Right now, I need to figure out how I’m going to explain to my seven-year-old daughter that her father didn’t mean to send her a dick pic. That he meant to send it to someone else. Think about that.”

Alan was quiet for a moment. “Wait, Sloane. Look . . . I’m sorry. I was rushed. It was stupid of me.”

“And there we have it,” she said. “Now I know for sure that you’re a moron. I don’t even know what to say to you right now.”

“Sloane, stop.”

“No, Alan. You stop. I can’t do this anymore.”

“You can’t do what?”