CHAPTER 27
BERNICE
ALLIE: Update please! It’s been almost a week since you decided to move to Vegas. How’s O2 handling everything? Olivia’s saying she hasn’t heard from you either. Please, let us know you’re both okay!
I close my eyes after reading Allie’s message and try to figure out how to answer her.
I mean, what is there to say? No, I’m not okay? I’m still trying to figure out how, after recommitting so thoroughly to being Boring Bernice, I somehow ended up headlining my own nighttime soap? And my mind’s still reeling from my final decision to agree in full to Griffin Latham’s second offer?
Telling Allie the truth would only upset her. And besides, it wouldn’t change anything. I’m in this now.
Griffin told me exactly what he wanted me to do—the terrible things he expected me to agree to. Then he warned me that I still only had forty—no, less than thirty minutes now to decide.
“If I walk out of this room with a no from you on both my official and verbal offers, you’ll leave with nothing,” he informed me. “Then, I will make you fight me tooth and nail for every minute with her. And believe me when I tell you this, Red. I always win in a fight.”
He’s a liar, and a monster. But I believed him when he told me that.
He’d proven himself stronger than me and my friend arsenal, and I’d already been apart from my daughter for over twenty-four hours. I couldn’t bear to spend one more minute apart from her—not to mention the days to weeks to possibly months it would take to get her remanded back to my custody.
I hover my thumbs over the phone's keyboard. I’m so sick of secrets and lies, but I text:
Everything's fine. Going to meet her grandfather for the first time now. O2’s really excited.
After typing out that load of partial lies, I drop the phone back into my clutch without waiting for Allie’s reply. I’m too sick to my stomach to read it anyway.
Which puts me in marked contrast with O2. She’s happily chatting with Griffin, who’s sitting on the other side of the car seat in the limo ferrying us to his father’s house in Kingsbridge, a gated luxury community in West Vegas.
I’m still furious that he basically lied to her and told her they were going on a mom-approved trip across state lines. But, thank goodness, she didn’t seem the least bit traumatized when I finally reunited with her in the Benton Grand Suite she’d been staying in with that blonde I’d seen in both Kentucky and Tennessee.
O2 was full of stories about all the cool places Jenni had taken her to—like the fountains at the Bellagio, some dolphin exhibit at The Mirage, and what sounded like every gelato stand in every hotel on the Strip.
After our reunion, Griffin left us alone in that Benton hotel suite with a 24/7 guard posted at the door—for our protection, he told O2. But I knew it was really so I wouldn’t try to run away with her and go back on our deal.
I told him once that when I made a decision it was done. I always keep my promises. But I guess he didn’t believe me—then or now. Trust is still something Griffin Latham doesn’t fuck with.
Anyway, that was the last I heard from him for a week until a hotel employee dropped off a bag with the name of some store I never heard of scrawled across the front in elegant cursive.
Inside I found a bunch of accessories, along with an emerald-green satin floral-print maxidress for me and a darling, long, pastel-pink seersucker dress for O2. It was the kind of winsome little girl dress I would have admired in a department store—then passed right up because I knew O2 would have it covered in dirt and food stains before I could even get a good picture for my social media.
“Do I really get to wear that dress?” O2 asked, her eyes saucer-wide.
Apparently. Another team showed up this morning to do our hair and paint our nails, which O2 really got a kick out of—almost as much as she loved being picked up by an actual white limo outside our hotel.
“I feel like a princess!” she cried when Griffin, who decided to revert to his charming “I’m not a total monster” act, got out and opened the door for her himself.
And now she was sitting on her car seat throne between us and asking Griffin, “Will there be cupcakes at Grandpa’s party?”
The party you didn’t bother to tell either of us about until you had us in the car, I resentfully mutter to myself.
“Dial your expectations down to light finger foods, followed by a real boring three- to four-course dinner,” Griffin suggests with a frank look.
“Aw…” O2’s shoulders sink. “So no pizza?”