Hope
"Jordan was fired today," Annabelle announced when she marched into the kitchen. She dropped her purse on the counter and turned to glare at me.
I wasn’t surprised by her revelation.
He hadn't shown up for work since our huge fight and had consistently drank himself into a stupor every day since.
The alcohol that he continuously poured into his body each day had turned him into a mean drunk.
A stranger.
It was no wonder he'd been fired.
She and Ryder weren’t staying at the house anymore, either.
Heroin needles and broken bottles of whiskey weren't exactly the safest thing for a baby to be around.
Protecting her son from this sewer of malignance and pain was her only redeeming quality.
"And they've relieved him of his duties at the halfway house." She waited a beat for me to respond, and when I didn’t, she clicked her tongue in disgust. "Don’t you care?"
I shrugged in response, turning my attention back to the screen of my laptop.
I didn’t care.
About him.
Or her.
About any of them.
The last morsel of love and remorse I held in my heart for Jordan Porter shriveled and died in my chest that night. And whatever compassion I still felt for him, faded with every passing day.
As for her?
I hated this woman with the fire of a thousand suns.
She was what Teagan would call a C U Next Tuesday.
Personally, I thought that word was too kind of a description for her.
That gut feeling I always had about her – the one that told me she was a manipulative shrew – was one hundred percent on the money.
I felt stupid as hell for not seeing her for what she was from the get-go.
Watching her influence Jordan on a daily basis was disgusting.
The woman was toxic for him.
Coddling him and rushing to comfort him when what he needed was some cold, tough love.
I saw that now.
Problem was, I no longer felt the desire to care or intervene.
My feelings were void.
I was completely blank towards them.
My heart was back in Boulder, attached firmly to a man who was refusing to answer my calls.
For the past few weeks, every phone call, text message, and voicemail had gone unanswered, and it was killing me.
The concern I had for Hunter was so severe it drove me to the point of physical sickness. I had barfed on more than one occasion. I was going out of my mind with worry and need and pain and loneliness.
Being without him was crippling me.
The thought of the extensive prison sentence Hunter would serve if Jordan went to the police was the only reason I was still inside this house. I was completely committed to keeping him out of the state penitentiary.
The way in which I had to do it was crushing me, but I would suffer on.
To keep them both safe – the man I was in love with, and the boy I once cherished.
But I was so fucking disgusted with myself for staying.
For continuing to lie.
For not standing up and telling Hunter everything.
But most of all, I hated myself for still caring about Jordan. The way he had treated me these past two weeks was borderline abusive and I was fairly certain there were dogs on the street shown more respect than I had been shown.
I should have hated Jordan, and a huge part of me did, but I could never wholeheartedly hate him. Not when the memories of our life together still flashed behind those green eyes.
That was what tortured me the most.
Being weak.
I was trapped in this house.
With the exception of one hasty visit to urgent care, where I had lied through my teeth in order to get my stitches out and wound treated, and then a hasty trip to the pharmacy to pick up Plan B, I hadn't been outside the four walls of this house.
I missed the book signing in Aspen, which had cost me eighty plus readers and had blackened my professional name.
I hadn't seen Teagan, or Noah, or my brothers.
I was completely isolated.
My only saving grace was my phone.
Text messaging had become my best friend again, my connection to the outside world.
My parents were still in Vale with the twins, but they wouldn’t stay there forever.
Eventually they would come home, and then I would have to face my demons.
I knew from the countless texts and phone calls I received daily from Teagan that she knew something was up.
I'd spoken to my father several times on the phone, but I knew that once he got home, a phone call wouldn’t suffice.
I would have to figure this mess out.
I just… didn’t know how to tell them.
How to face them.
Everything that had happened had warped my mind.
I was scarred, and scared, and drowning in deceit.
There was only one person I needed, one person I knew could fix this.
And he was gone.
"This is all your fault," Annabelle spat, drawing me back to the present. "I hope you realize that. He's in this mess because of you."
"You've said," I replied flatly, not caring what she thought anymore.
"So why haven't you tried to do something about it?" she hissed, furious.
I had.
When I had broached the subject several weeks ago, I had been told to mind my own goddamn business, and when I had tried to intervene and take the bottle from him, I had narrowly avoided a glass bottle to the head when he threw it at the fireplace – that I had been standing in front of.
After that, I had given up and decided that Jordan could do whatever the hell he wanted to do.
It wasn’t down to me to save him anymore.
I had devoted too many years of my life to a man who didn’t want me to save him.
He just wanted me to be there.
Well, here wasn’t enough for me anymore, and if that made me a bad person, then so be it.
And if I truly was, as Annabelle had called me on countless occasions, a selfish, cold hearted bitch, then that's what I was.
Lying to myself, hiding who I truly was, and trying to please everyone in my life had gotten me into this damn mess in the first place.
"Hope!" Annabelle hissed, trying to gain my attention.
She couldn’t.
I was void.
Without a word, I popped my earphones attached to my laptop back in and pressed play, drowning myself in the lyrics of Damien Rice's Rootless Tree.