Chapter Nine

Ethan

I get up early to see Lara off, hoping against hope that Riley will stay asleep. I’d decided the night before that I needed to get myself and my daughter out from under Nathan’s roof as quickly as possible after my sister-in-law leaves. It’s clear to me that in spite of his insistence that Riley and I stay for a few days, Nathan’s still no fan of me.

“Are you seriously putting together a full breakfast for everyone?”

Lara looks up from the stove and gives me a weak smile. Her father isn’t even awake yet.

“I figured that would make everything easier,” she says with a shrug. She frowns slightly. “What are you doing up?”

“I think I’m going to head out a few hours after you leave,” I say.

Lara thinks about this for a moment and then nods. “That makes sense,” she says.

“You’re sure that you’re really okay with this,” I say, almost making it a question. There’s so much that’s gone unspoken between the two of us for the past few days, and I don’t even know how to get on the right topic. I don’t even know how to feel about the woman currently standing in my father-in-law’s kitchen stirring a pan of scrambled eggs.

“I’m really okay with this,” Lara says, not quite looking at me. I can’t believe that neither Alexis nor I really thought about the burden that we were going to be putting on Lara, asking her to be part of Riley’s life in the event that Alexis died. Of course, we thought that there was no real chance of it ever coming up, it was supposed to almost be symbolic.

“I know you don’t really want to have anything to do with me, but we’re going to have to talk to each other a lot to make this work,” I point out, taking a seat at the breakfast bar.

Lara nods her head slightly from side to side, her back to me.

“I know,” Lara says quietly. The nightgown she has on falls to her knees, and her dark hair is pulled back into a neat little bun, and it reminds me of the way she was in high school. That was her no-nonsense hair style, the way she wore her hair when she was going for a big study-binge or trying to write a paper, so it wouldn’t get in her way.

“Maybe we should talk about our…” I can’t make myself finish the sentence.

Lara turns around and looks me dead in the eye, and shakes her head.

“No, we shouldn’t talk about it at all,” she says.

“Why not?”

Lara sighs. “Because right now you’re hurting, I’m hurting, and the only thing that matters is making sure Riley gets through this without being like, permanently scarred or something. At least as much as we can,” Lara says.

“But if things are tense between us, how is that going to help her?”

Lara shakes her head and turns her back on me once more, presiding over the stove. I can see a plate of pan-fried sausage patties on the counter next to her, and I wonder just how long she’s been awake.

“We need to just… forget the whole situation. We need to not talk about it,” Lara says, barely glancing over her shoulder at me.

“Are you even able to do that?” I don’t even know if I’m able to. I don’t know if I can ever forgive the fact that Lara pushed Alexis out of her life.

“It’ll be a lot easier to do now,” Lara says with a voice so dry a desert would envy it.

“Are you glad?” The idea of it brings up a wave of shocked anger and I almost want to take back whatever it was that Alexis wanted, I almost want to go to the probate lawyer and tell him that we need to undo the will.

“No, I’m not glad,” Lara says.

“What, then?”

I hear her take a deep breath and exhale on a sigh, see her shoulders rise and fall with it.

“Whatever the issue is between us, it’s in the past, and Riley should never, ever, know about it,” Lara says quietly.

“I guess that makes sense,” I say.

“She shouldn’t even know we ever had a relationship,” Lara tells me and looks over her shoulder at me.

“Why not?”

Lara rolls her eyes. “Because that will just make everything a hundred times more complicated, once she’s old enough to understand it,” she explains. “It’s just better to pretend that it never happened, and it’ll be easier to pretend that it never happened if we never talk about it again.”

I can see her point, but at the same time, I can’t see any way for us to move forward without at least addressing the situation, without ever hashing out everything that happened. On the other hand, what possible good will it do either of us right now? Everything is still so raw, everything hurts so much, that there’s no way that either of us can have a good conversation about it.

Before I can argue the point any more, I hear Nathan coming out of the master bedroom and down the stairs, and I know better than to try to keep going at Lara with him in the room. I start thinking about how I can get my daughter and myself out of my father-in-law’s house without sounding rude.