Meeting His Match (Single In the City 1)

Shoving a handful of popcorn into her mouth, Marti mindlessly watched a movie, pretending like her father’s wedding wasn’t in an hour and she had nowhere to be. She needed to get up, wash her hair, and get ready. She knew that, yet the only thing that had motivated her to move from her spot on the couch in the last few hours was her bladder and an empty bowl.

Her doorbell rang and she sighed. “Whoever it is, you’re going to have to bust the door down to talk to me. I’m not coming out.”

A key scraped in the lock. Marti whipped her head toward the sound, and a piece of popcorn fell from her gaping mouth.

The only person who had to a key to her place was . . . “Mom?” she asked when the door opened with a bang.

Her gaze slid over Marti, quickly assessing her current state of existence.

“What are you doing here?” Marti sat up, straightening the throw pillows beside her and shoving a couple dozen candy wrappers under the cushion.

Her eyes self-consciously flitted over the empty takeout boxes on the counter and she grimaced.

Whatever her mother wanted must be important. She hated coming into the city. Since the divorce, she’d moved to Jersey after Marti graduated high school and avoided it like the plague.

“You called me, remember?” Her mother grinned.

“I did?” A fuzzy memory pierced the edges of Marti’s subconscious. It involved a bag of Cheetos and downing half a carton of boxed wine.

Marti winced.

“Yeah, it was bad,” her mother said, confirming what Marti expected. “So I came to stage an intervention.” Her mother breezed through Marti’s kitchen and rummaged through her cupboards until she found the coffee, then started to make a pot.

Crap, her mom knew about the boxed wine.

“An intervention?” Marti asked like she’d never heard of one.

“I hope you plan on showering before the wedding.” Her mother arched a brow at her haggard appearance.

Marti lifted her shirt to her nose. It wasn’t that bad. “Ugh, the wedding.” Marti groaned. “Do I have to go?” She sank farther into the cushions. With any luck, the soft upholstery would swallow her whole.

After a moment, the sputtering of the coffee pot started, and Marti felt the cushion sink beside her as her mother took a seat. “I know this has to do with Logan.” It was the first time her mother had spoken of him, and Marti eyed her suspiciously. She knew her mother read her column, but still . . .

“It doesn’t,” Marti started protest, then snapped her mouth shut. A memory flickered and she caught a glimpse of herself cramming Cheetos into her mouth while relaying every single event of the last six weeks to her mother in excruciating, minute detail. How mortifying.

“I should have had this talk with you years ago,” her mother said. “But I couldn’t bring myself to do it.” She ran a hand through her short, auburn crop, then adjusted the collar of her shirt and straightened. She was fidgeting. It was how Marti knew that whatever she’d come here to say wasn’t easy.

“Your father hurt me. Badly.”

“Mom, I know all of this.”

“No. You don’t know everything.” She set her jaw as she reached out and grabbed Marti’s hand. “I was partly to blame. I was obsessed with my job when I returned to work after being a stay-at-home-mom. I had been away from my career for a long time, and so when I went back, I jumped in headfirst. I lost all balance and gave everything I had to my work, but it was the wrong thing.”

“Mom, please, can we not do this?” Marti shook her head. “There’s no excuse for what he did.”

“I know that,” her mother said, her eyes fierce. “Cheating is always wrong. It crushed me, but my marriage suffered for a lot of reasons, and I was one of them. I neglected our relationship. Time and time again, I chose work over your father. We grew apart and started fighting. He resented the attention I gave my career, so he pushed me to work less. But the more he pushed, the more I pushed back. It was a domino effect. Each one of us reacting to the other, stacking the bitterness between us until it was all we had left.”

Marti stood. She didn’t want to listen to this.

“Marti, wait.”

“What are you trying to say, Mom?” Marti swallowed. Whatever this was, she was over it. “Just say it.”

Her mother reached out and squeezed her hand. “What I’m trying to say is that while your father was wrong, I wasn’t entirely innocent. It took me years to recognize my role in the failure of our marriage. And though there’s no excusing his actions, I have to shoulder a portion of the blame for pushing him away.”

Marti wrenched her hand away. “No. I don’t believe that.”

Why was she doing this? Making excuses for him? “He hurt you. He hurt us. And he left, Mom. Or are you forgetting that part? The part where he was just gone.”