Southern Storms (Compass 1)

“Sounds good to me.”

Before he left, he kissed me goodbye, and the butterflies that hit me almost sent me backward. I was prepared to ride a wave of happiness for the remainder of the day—then my phone started ringing and Penn’s name appeared on the screen.

He hadn’t called me once since I’d left. He hadn’t said a word to me, except for the few text messages that said he missed me. Now he was calling me, and I didn’t know what to do, so I let it go to voicemail.

When it began to ring again, my stomach knotted up, and I swallowed hard, answering it just in case something was seriously wrong.

“Hello?” I said.

“Kennedy, hey. How are you?” he asked. He seemed calm as ever, which was concerning after the way he’d handled our relationship before.

“How am I?” I asked, confused. “What do you want, Penn?”

“I, uh, I guess I deserve that tone after the way I handled things between us. I could’ve dealt with everything a little bit better.”

I huffed. “You don’t say. Why are you calling?”

“To tell you to come home now. It’s been a few weeks, and I could really use you back here, Kennedy. I miss you. People are asking about you. They’re noticing you aren’t around.”

“Isn’t that what you wanted? Didn’t you want me to stop making scenes in front of people?”

“You were grieving…and I get that. I mean, hell, I was grieving, too, and I didn’t handle anything well. I’ve been thinking about going to therapy, you know, to work on my anger issues…to help fix our marriage.”

“We don’t have a marriage, Penn. You kicked me out. You threw money at me like I was a pathetic whore. You said you wished I had an abortion. I want nothing to do with you ever again.”

“Baby,” he said, sniffling. Is he crying? Seriously? I hadn’t heard Penn cry a single tear since the accident. “I need you. Remember that dinner we went to the night everything went sideways? Remember that older lady, Laura Smith?”

The one who’d told me to run? Yes, I remembered her. “What about her?”

“Well, she’s looking to purchase some big property, and I mean big, Kennedy—the kind of money that would change our lives forever.”

“You mean your life, Penn. It would change your life.”

He went quiet for a moment. “Yeah, I mean…it’s an amazing opportunity.”

Had he called me to gloat? To tell me how wonderfully things were going for him? Because I wasn’t interested in hearing it, that was for sure.

“Good for you. Listen, if you don’t have anything else to say—”

“She won’t work with me without you,” he cut in.

“What?”

“She said the only way she’ll make a deal with me is if she gets to have a dinner out with you.”

I laughed out loud. “Are you joking?”

“No. Those were her guidelines. I don’t know why. I don’t get why she’d want to meet with you. You don’t seem important enough for anything she could need.”

And there it was.

One of Penn’s trademark backhanded insults that later he’d call me too emotional for getting offended by.

“Goodbye, Penn.”

“Wait, Kennedy, dammit!” He groaned into the phone. “Why do you have to be so difficult all the time? I’ve been nothing but a goddamn saint to you after you killed my little girl, and this is how you repay me? This is—”

I hung up.

His words sent chills down my spine as my phone slipped from my hand and hit the floor.

You killed my little girl.

That knife dug deep into my core and twisted inside me. He hadn’t called me because he missed me. He’d called because he needed me. He’d called because without me, he would lose out on a huge profit. It had nothing to do with his love for me. He didn’t truly want me to come home to him. He wanted to use me then toss me out like an old rag doll.

A stupid part of me had almost believed his words. Therapy? Yeah right. The moment I’d mentioned to Penn that I was thinking about going to therapy after the accident, he had told me it was a waste of my time. He said therapists were frauds who didn’t help people get better, just stole their money, and now he was going to therapy to fix himself? To fix his issues?

Words—that was all he was giving me. Empty, meaningless words to try to pull me back into his web of destruction. Truthfully, I was tired of it all. I was tired of him belittling me, tired of him hurting me.

A part of me figured Laura had told Penn that to work as karma. She knew I would be gone and that he therefore had no way of getting a commission from her. It felt like a slight ‘girl power’ moment, and I wished I could’ve hugged her for it.