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Chapter Twelve
The entire officewas dark when Sera finally pulled herself away from the reports. Though she was close to done with them, her mind was done for the day. Taking Thursday off had been a mistake when she looked at her work piled up. It had been a bad idea, except she had loved every minute of it after the interview.
But there had been no way she was dragging herself in to do these reports after getting home from the bar at 7 a.m. Bars close way before that, unless your daughter is a bartender who doesn’t think rules apply to her. Or, more importantly, when everyone’s favorite bartender let them stay all night.
So, there was only one option, and that was calling in sick, then proceeding to actually spend most of the day sick. It had been years since she had been that hungover.
But the day had been spent with her four less responsible girls fighting for space on the couch and using the three bathrooms in the house. She had mostly lost the couch battle but had her own bathroom in her bedroom, so she let the others have the two more public bathrooms.
The reason she had drunk so much? Kylie Nash. Even Aspen hadn’t known if the woman was lying or not. If she was, she was very skilled in it because she acted innocent as hell. All big eyes and tears over what had happened. The empty promises and oh-so-heated exchanges.
Walking into the little apartment Kylie shared with her mom, Sera was struck by the fact that this could have been her, her and Emma. If she hadn’t made the mistake of marrying Bradford, she would have had to raise her alone, with possibly two years of college and nothing more.
A little two-bedroom on the second floor with little room to stretch out and even less privacy. Sera knew she wouldn’t have made it past entry-level jobs as she left her child with strangers just to work long hours.
After talking to the twenty-year-old, Sera had known that her dislike of Kylie was still evident and hadn’t improved because she had tried to hurt Harrison. He wasn’t hers, but she was starting to think of him as someone she needed to protect.
Her answers to the questions were in complete opposition of what Harrison had said. According to Kylie, the entire affair—a month’s long one—had taken place completely at the office. Not once had they met up after work; he had a girlfriend, and he didn’t want her to know about his office fling. It had ended right after Sera, herself, had talked to him about the conference room sex—which for sure happened, according to Kylie.
Harrison had denied it all; every fact that Kylie had laid out had been contradicted by him already. Sera had wondered if he would change his story, but since the beginning, he had stuck to the same one. She knew she would have to conduct another interview with him but was putting it off a week or so in case his story changed again.
What had made Sera question Kylie’s story, one she hadn’t told Aspen about, was that according to Kylie, they always had sex on the desk. Yes, she got all the details about it. Never the couch, which everyone knew was in his office. A lot of people commented on it being there.
So, Sera had actually asked because it would come up. The younger woman had said that Harrison never sat on it and that he disliked it.
Sadly, it was those words that had hurt Sera the most, not the stuff about having unprotected sex on the desk. It hurt to hear that he looked at the couch every day and disliked it because she got to look at the baby who had been conceived on that couch every day and loved her so much. Over the years, when she saw the couch, her mind would drift back to that night.
Locking her office door, she headed down the elevator to her Jeep. It had never bothered her to work late at the office; there were people around all the time, so she had never felt unsafe. Even now.
Down the street, she climbed into her Jeep and was happy she was heading home; her head was still a little dull from her birthday night. She knew she was too old to drink like that anymore.
This morning she had lied to Harrison about it being a friend’s birthday because she didn’t want the office to know it had been hers. Not because she had finally turned thirty-six, which felt old, but because she liked to not have the office make a fuss.
It had been Lucy and Harper who had demanded that she take the afternoon off, which she had happily done. The three of them had turned into five before school got out for the two little ones, and then even Maby had taken time from her schoolwork to head out for tacos.
So, she got to spend her birthday with all of her girls. They fought over this and that she watched them with her baby on her lap. It had been mere hours since she had seen Kylie Nash’s apartment and was reminded how this day had been so close to not happening.
If she hadn’t married Bradford, even if the marriage had been a fraud, she would have missed her girls. Even Emma, who was just staring at her phone and pretending not to pay attention to her older sisters, would be a different person today without them. Sera would’ve been different without her Lovely daughters because it was them that she had relied on every day since they came into her life. They had become her family when she had needed one the most.
Over the years, she had wondered if her parents would have gotten over what they felt was her failure if she hadn’t married Bradford. The day she had told them that she was marrying Bradford Lovely, a middle-aged college professor, they had not been impressed, and she hadn’t seen them since. They stopped answering calls, and she was not allowed in their house anymore. The money that was paying for her college was gone, and her bank account was suddenly empty.
From that day on, she had been on her own. They hadn’t even known she was pregnant; she hadn’t told them. So, when Emma was born, she didn’t call them. Nor when Violet was born years later. Nor did she tell them she was a single parent to teenagers who were wild. All of it, she did on her own.
And she did a great job. Though they seemed listless, and their dedication at times to jobs was nonexistent, they were all falling into professions that they loved and excelled at, all without her pushing in one way or another. “Hands completely off” had been her motto, though, with Emma and Violet, she used a little more direction. But to her defense, they were not Lovelys.
Someday, the five older girls would move on with their lives. It didn’t seem like it the next day, when all but Maby were hungover and at home all day. But today, they were all up and at it early. When she had left, Harper was already at work, and Lucy was up stuffing pork chops for a corporate event at noon. Buzz was eating breakfast with Maby and getting ready for work. Though Agatha was still sleeping, everyone knew she had been up all night working on her art, art that would take off one day in some direction no one was predicting.
On the drive home, she knew the house would be quiet when she got there. The older ones would be out on the town, except one or two who were happy to watch their baby sisters.
The wild and crazy kids she got when she got married were not what they seemed to be. They were still wild and crazy, but they were responsible and loved one another fiercely, making Sera love them all even more.
