Lahat ng Kabanata ng Step Daddy's Lakeside Sin : Kabanata 11 - Kabanata 20

Millie POVSoon enough the moon was already shining bright. It was late already. Adrianna told us at dinner. She always tells us at dinner. The dining-room table has become her personal podium. She gets this little breath before she announces something. A shortness of breath that means she's already rehearsed the reaction she wants from it. She doesn't get the reaction she wants from me tonight.“Girls' trip,” she says. “Four days. Tahoe. With Marcy and Dee and my cousin Pippa. You remember Pippa right, she's the one who…”“Four days?” I said.“Five if you count the drive down. We've rented this gorgeous little…”I cut in politely. “When?”“Monday, baby. We leave Monday morning.” She saidI stared at her. She did not notice I was staring because she was already on her phone showing Richard a photo of the cabin.“Look at the little porch, Richard, look at the pinecones they put on every windowsill, isn't that darling,” and Richard was smiling at the phone the way Richard smiled at ever

Millie POVHe used the wrong word. I keep coming back to this. I keep chewing on the corner of my thumbnail in the upstairs bathroom of my own house, looking at my own face in the mirror, and I keep coming back to this. He said should. He said “this is what it should be.” Should. As if the life we have been stealing in garages and pantries and kitchen counters and on the grass of a lake we don't own was the correct arrangement of the universe, and my mother, three hundred miles south, was the incorrect one. I want to be wrong about what he meant. I want the sentence to mean something smaller than what I think it means. I want it to mean I like today I want it to mean this is what I would have wanted a Tuesday to look like. I want it to mean nothing I have to do anything about. But I watched his face when he said it, and his face was not a face that is saying something small. His face was the same face that said this is my house now when his hand lifted me onto the counter this morning.

Millie POVI watched her from the upstairs window for forty-five minutes.Forty-five minutes of a woman watering her own garden in her own front yard in her own town at six in the evening on a Tuesday when she had supposedly already dropped by. She had been watering the hostas. The hostas did not need watering. I knew because my mother had hosted a Halbrook cocktail party every spring for nine years, and I had learned, through endurance more than interest, that hostas should never be watered in the evening because the wet leaves invited rot, and the Halbrooks had lost three of theirs to rot in 2019, and Mrs. Halbrook had written a small column about it in the “Garden & Grounds” newsletter she self-published.Mrs. Halbrook knew better. Mrs. Halbrook was watering her hostas at six in the evening because Mrs. Halbrook was watching my house. I sat on the window seat in Richard's shirt with my knees pulled to my chest, and I looked at her across the street through the gap in the blinds. The

Millie POVThe pause lived in my chest for two days.“There's no her,” he had said. “There's no her.”But he had not said “there was never a her.” He had said something smaller, slower, more careful, and the space between “no her now” and “never a her” was the space I had begun to live in. It was a small, ugly furnished room of a space, and I had moved my things into it without deciding to. Adrianna was back. Friday at sundown, pink suitcase, perfume cloud, three new stories about Marcy and Dee and cousin Pippa that I would not remember by Sunday. The cab dropped her at the curb. Richard kissed her in the driveway. Long. Loud. The little practiced sound.“How was Tahoe, baby?” “Divine, just divine, you have to see this cabin, Richard, this… Richard, did you water the ferns? Millie's birthday gift… of course, the closet… of course.”I watched her unpack her suitcase in the master bedroom down the hall and I stood in the doorway of my own bedroom and I knew exactly what she had packed

Millie POVMercury Cafe on a Wednesday morning is a thing I have learned to love. I sit at the corner table by the window and I order the same thing every time. A lavender latte and a piece of toast I do not finish, because Mercury is the only place in town where my mother has never once in my life walked in and asked for the check. Mercury is Adrianna-safe. Mercury is mine. I was on my second lavender latte when the woman sat down at the table next to mine. I did not look up. I do not look up at strangers at Mercury. I look up at Adriannas and Richards and Mrs. Halbrooks and the friendly checkout kid at the bookstore who will not stop making eye contact with me because I am, in his peripheral vision, possibly the twenty-three-year-old woman of his dreams. I do not look up at strange women. But the strange woman was looking at me. I know this because I was holding my toast at the angle that you hold toast when you are cutting it with a knife to make it easier to butter, and I was look