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“Perfect.”
The front door was open when I arrived at Vicki’s house sometime before six. The same house we’d bought together even before our engagement. Funny, how certain we were about each other back then, how sure we were that things would work out . . . no matter what.
Funny, how we could be so wrong.
I parked Sam’s pickup truck—Sam was a fellow orthopod, one of my best friends, and an admirer of huge cars, the bigger the better—in the driveway behind Vicki’s Jeep. I walked along the stone path, up the two steps to the front door, and was just about to walk inside when I leaned back to take in the house instead.
It was a two-story, three-bedroom house with a gabled roof, wood siding painted olive green, and stone accents around the base and columns. At the back of the house, French stack doors led out onto a big deck with a huge garden sprawling under the shade of a coastal live oak.
A dream house.
The perfect place for a family.
Vicki rushed into the foyer as I entered, her bare feet thumping on the honey oak floors, wearing jeans ripped at the knees and the same light blue blouse she’d worn a million times hanging loosely around her short frame.
She halted, as if she’d seen a ghost in her periphery, and then snapped her head in my direction. “Alex,” she said, her brows furrowed, her lips curled down instead of up.
Vicki was known for her smile. Big and toothy with dimples digging into each cheek and her roundish face brightening up like the sun. But that smile was nowhere in sight. “You came.”
“You summoned me, didn’t you?”
She rolled her eyes, shook her head, and carried on to the living room, pointing to the couch even though I knew exactly where it stood and what it looked like. “It’s too big. I don’t even know why you got such a massive couch in the first place.” “You know why.”
Her gaze latched onto mine, holding it so fiercely I couldn’t blink.
The staring match continued for a few seconds and ended when Vicki looked away, taking a deep breath. “I don’t know how you’re going to fit it in Sam’s truck.”
“It’ll fit,” I said sharply.
She pressed her lips thin, placed her hands on her hips, and walked to the center of the living room, where large casement windows brought in tons of sunlight. “Do you think you could take the coffee table as well, Alex? It’s not quite the right style.”
“That thing?” I pointed to our engagement gift from Vicki’s father—a solid walnut coffee table with floral motifs around the edges. The thing weighed like 120 pounds.
“Yes,” replied Vicki without hesitation.
“Fine,” I succumbed. Putting up a fight would get us nowhere but onto a path of anger. “I’ll put it in the truck first. Might have to make another trip. How’s the house?” I asked, walking over to the coffee table, trying to remember that day when Chris dropped it off. He had two men carry it in the living room.
“Great,” said Vicki. She then bit at her lip and shifted her weight onto her left foot while she scratched her shin with the other. Her balance was impeccable. She could stand like that for hours. “You know you could’ve kept it, Alex. You paid up most ofthe house. You could’ve lived here and done the trip to Los Osos every day. Or we could’ve sold it—”
“I wanted you to have it,” I said, glancing back at her. It was like the tennis rackets.
Whatever I once had of this life, I no longer wanted.
“Bend your knees, Alex,” said Vicki, shifting the conversation. “When you pick it up, alright? Otherwise, you’re going to hurt your back.” “Oh, how very caring of you.”
She shot me a look.
I chuckled and then bent down, not nearly squatting enough in the legs—probably just to irritate her—before I gripped the edges of the table, felt the solid weight of the walnut, and heaved with every ounce of my strength.
The question wasn’t whether I could lift it off the ground, but rather how the hell I was going to get it into the back of Sam’s pickup truck when I could barely manage to lift it an inch off the floor.
“Alex, you need to bend your knees more,” Vicki said again, watching me with her hands on her soft hips and a frown lining her forehead, clustering all the freckles together.
“Why don’t you help me?” I shot back, beginning the shuffle toward the foyer. Just when I started to believe that I might actually be able to pull it off, a sharp, stabbing pain shot through my lower back.
“Ah fuck!” I yelped, dropping the table with a loud thud, missing my feet by mere inches.
Clutching my back, I tried to straighten, but the pain radiated up my spine like an electric shock. Vicki was at my side in a flash. She slipped in beside me, wrapped her arm around my waist, and helped me to the couch.
