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“Maybe if you stopped maxing out your credit cards, you wouldn’t have to be working two jobs.”
Her jaw tightens, hands forming fists like she’s imagining punching me in the nose.
“You’d have more time with your daughter, but you what? Sacrifice it for clothes? Shoes? Designer handbags?”
“Are you for real right now?” she growls as she walks over and pulls open the closet door.
She yanks the string to the light so hard the cord comes off in her hand.
“Does it look like I have designer anything?” she screams as she throws the now useless cord to the floor.
Something I can’t pinpoint starts to roil inside my gut.
She crosses the room, yanking the paperwork from my hand. “I haven’t used that damn credit card once.”
Flashes of what I know about the woman take over. The issue with her car. The shifts at the bar. The sadness that’s always in her eyes. Her claim that she hasn’t used the credit card is the magnet that puts it altogether.
That motherfucker.
Huxley died and left her with his debt.
I pull in a deep breath, but there’s nothing that can prepare me for the gut-wrenching pain in her eyes when they start to shimmer with tears.
Her hand clutches the paperwork, the crinkle of it in her fist the only sound in the room before her first sob.
I step closer to her as her chest heaves, but she glares at me. As much as I want to comfort her right now, I know this isn’t the right time, considering I’m the one who made her cry.
“Claire,” I whisper.
She dashes at her tears with the back of her hand as if it pisses her off even more that this is the way her body has decided to deal with the anger.
“He’s a complete piece of shit,” I say instead. “How can a man in love leave his pregnant wife in that kind of debt?”
My late Grandma June would roll over in her grave if she knew I was speaking ill of the dead, but facts are facts.
“He didn’t love me!” she yells, her face growing redder as her tears show no sign of slowing.
She walks past me and drops down to sit on the end of the bed.
“I know it feels like that right now,” I say, having no clue why I’m defending his ass in this moment.
“You don’t understand. We didn’t get married because we were in love.”
I tilt my head to the side at hearing her confession.
Finding out that Huxley Kennedy was married never made much sense to me when the rumors were whispered around town, but when I saw Claire in town for the first time, it made so much sense. I was attracted to her that very first day, and those feelings grew with every additional time I saw her, be it walking down the street, at one of the town festivals, or as she walked up and down the aisle at the grocery store.
“Because you were pregnant,” I surmise.
She dips her head. “Classic, right? Girl gets pregnant after a one-night stand and she marries the guy without even knowing hardly anything about him.”
My cheeks fill with air, my face swelling briefly before it slips past my lips.
This is a lot of information to process. I know better than to think that she’s confiding in me for any other reason than she’s met her limit of people being in her business. I’m just one more person who has been nosy in her life, and I hate that I’ve put her in the position to confess when this secret wasn’t mine to have. It’s not something, had I not pushed, that she ever would’ve spoken out loud, and that makes me as big of a piece of shit as Hux.
“I’m sorry,” I say, my apology encapsulating so many things.
She shakes her head. “It’s not your fault. He put me on his account in case I needed anything. I really think he was trying his best to be the good guy. It’s not like he planned on dying, but I bet you have opinions about that as well. Go ahead and call me a whore so you can get it out of your system. I’d like to get dressed and go pick up Larkin. I’m already running late.”
