“It doesn’t have to be like that,” my father says. His tone is so monotone it’s just as irritating as when I was eighteen and he spoke to me. His voice never rises, ever. “Son.”
“Don’t son me,” I say, putting my hands on my hips and feeling all these emotions run through me. I’m angry that she just left. I’m pissed that she’s sad, and I’m irritated that I couldn’t just say what it was about.
“Okay, fine,” he says, leaning forward and putting his elbows on the table. “I’ll just say this. That woman”—he motions with his chin toward the door she just walked out of—“deserves a man who is going to make her happy. Like really happy.” He looks over at my mother, and she smiles at him. “She deserves a man who will take care of her and spoil her, and for the first time in her life, she needs to be put first before anything else.” I want to say that all that is me, but is it really? “Actually, now that I think of it, you aren’t that man.” I glare at him. “If you were that man, there is no way you would still be here having this conversation when you should be running after her. But instead, you stand here with your head up your ass.” My mother just laughs, and I turn to look at her.
“Dumb ass,” she says. For the first time in her life, she’s called me a dumb ass. “She does deserve better.”
I don’t even know what to say to any of this. There are so many things I want to say, but all of them lead to the same thing. I’m not the man for her, and my father is right. She deserves all that and more. She deserves a man who’ll make her smile. She deserves a man who will hold her at night and wake her up with coffee in bed. She deserves to have a whole house full of children, and just the thought of her having a child with someone else cuts me to the core. Especially knowing that I can’t give her any of that, and that’s what cuts me the most. I shake my head. “You don’t know,” I say, and he just looks at me. “She’s never going to be happy living here on the farm.”
“You ask her that?” my mother asks, and I just look at her.
“She screams high-class city girl,” I say, and then I shake my head.
“You won’t know until you ask her,” my father says, and I don’t want to think about it. Right now, I think about the woman who just walked out of my parents’ house and stormed over to mine, and I think about the man who was watching my house.
Instead of answering his question, I turn and storm out of their house. Making my way over to my house, I jog most of the way. “Olivia!” I shout out her name and wait for her to answer me, and after five seconds, when she doesn’t answer me, I call her name again. “Olivia!” I walk toward her bedroom, and I see the door open and the bed made. “Olivia?” I say her name, looking into the room and seeing the bathroom door open. “Olivia,” I say a bit more frantic this time and run to my bedroom, seeing it not touched. My heart sinks when I run upstairs because I know she would never have gone up there after last time. My heart pounds so hard and loud that it’s the only thing I can hear along with my heavy breathing. After I check the whole house, my hands get so clammy and my stomach drops when it finally sinks in that she isn’t here.
I pull out my phone and call Derek, shouting at him when he answers. “Olivia is missing!”
Chapter Nineteen
Olivia
I can still hear his tone in my head while I walk out the door. I push away the hurt feelings that I have. My mother’s voice is coming in loud and clear.
“What did you expect, Olivia? You are nothing but a warm body and arm candy for these men.
No one needs someone smart on their side. They need someone who can make their stocks go up.”
I shake my head and try not to think about it. I try not to let my feelings get hurt, and most importantly, I try not to cry, but the tear comes out before I can fight it back.
It’s almost as if I can see my mother standing in front of me, holding her martini glass and laughing at me.
“Stupid, silly girl.”
I stop halfway to his house at the barn and decide to go see Lady M. I walk into the barn, and I see a couple of the workers who I’ve met over the past three weeks. I smile to a couple of them and then I see that one of them is mucking the stall that Lady M is in. “Hello there,” I say to him, and he looks over at me.