I swallow down my distaste. “Yes.”
“I know it will take time, but I’ll be different.” She’s talking as if it’s a given she’s leaving this place.
So many words sit on the tip of my tongue as I think back to the marriage we lived through. I don’t dare speak them, though. I doubt I will ever say them to her because the minute I can give up this charade is the minute I’m wiping Jolene completely from my life. I don’t care that she’s the mother of my child; I’ll do everything in my power to stop her poison from touching him.
I sit through another twenty minutes of hell before I finally tell her I have to get back to Sean. It’s not until I’m sitting in my car that I realise she didn’t once ask about her son.
Two hours later, I knock on Callie’s front door and lean against the doorjamb. My gut swirls with apprehension. I was a bastard to her this morning, and I need to make it right between us.
The door flings open, and I’m met with a gust of Taylor Swift and Callie dressed in yoga pants and a tight, flimsy T-shirt. She lifts her face to mine with a smile. “Luke.”
I take a deep breath. I’ve been mentally preparing myself for this over the last two hours. I’m sure I’ll never be able to prepare myself enough to revisit the past, but I know Callie, and she’ll push until she gets what she wants. “All I ever wanted in life was to be an architect and to build the family I never had. I thought I had both, and now I have neither. And as much as my wife lied to me the whole time we were together, I lied to myself just as much about our marriage. Sometimes, the past isn’t worth going back over, Callie, but if it’s what you need, I’ll give it to you.”
“I don’t need it all at once, Luke. We can do this at your pace.”
“If we do that you’ll never get anything.”
She sucks her bottom lip in and bites it. “Let me turn Taylor off and we can talk,” she says as she steps aside for me to enter.
I follow her into the lounge room and wait for her to switch the music off. Once we’re in silence, she sits on the couch, and I join her.
Smiling, she asks, “Why did you want to be an architect?”
“Some of my favourite memories growing up are of when Tyler and I had this one particular nanny. She had this love of bridges. I was about nine, and I remember her taking us to different bridges and her pointing out the things she loved about them. She also loved architecture, and we spent hours looking at books of different buildings. She’s the reason.”
“I love that. I wish I’d had someone like that in my life—someone who introduced me to things.”
I frown. “Your parents didn’t?”
“No, Dad was always working, and Mum tended to give her attention to my sister more than me. It’s why I turned to writing. I discovered I could make up my own world and give my characters the happiness I wanted in my own life.” She pauses and then with a cheeky grin, adds, “That, and I could also hurt the ones I wanted.”
“So, you used words to channel your pain,” I murmur.
She nods. “Yeah. I still do.”
“I understand that because I escaped into a world of design to deal with mine. The hours I spend drawing help me forget all the bullshit.”
“Do you do much these days?”
“Not really. I don’t have a lot of spare time between the bar and Sean. I landscaped the backyard, and I’m in the middle of designing a granny flat for a friend, but other than that, I haven’t worked on any other project since I left work.”
She cocks her head. “Do you think you’ll ever go back to that work? I realise the bar might hamper that, but it sounds like you really love designing.”
“I will one day. I’m planning on that, but it feels like there’s a lot of hurdles in my life I need to clear before that can happen.” I lean close to her so I can move a strand of hair out of her eyes. “I didn’t get a chance to ask you how your first day at the new job went.”
“It was okay. I think I may get a little bored with it, to be honest. They’ve got me covering local events and social stuff. Ugh.”
“Can you work your way into what you really want to do?”
She shrugs. “Maybe. But for now, this is money, right?”
“Absolutely.”
Guilt rears its ugly head as I sit with Callie discussing our lives. Keeping the truth from her of what’s currently happening with Jolene is eating into me. I almost tell her twice during the conversation, but in the end, I continue to keep it from her. All I can hope is she never finds out that I wasn’t completely honest with her. In my experience, women hold that shit against you, even if you’ve done it to protect them. And that never leads to a good place.
“Barry, I need to know what’s happening with the cops. Have you found anything yet?”
My lawyer has been evasive over the last few days every time I call him to ask this question. Today, however, he gives me some hope. “I’m in discussions with the detective, Luke. He’s assuring me that if you give him the information he wants, he’ll drop your involvement. Did you manage to get anything out of her today?”