Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 131459 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131459 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
And, before their conversation degenerated any further, finished with what he had to say, Tom walked out of her white adobe, got into his car and drove away.
CHAPTER 5
THE CALL
Mika
I was fiddling in my studio.
Not working.
Fiddling.
I’d immersed myself in a project I knew would go nowhere. I didn’t even know why I was doing it.
It began with starting to write when I’d heard Tom Pierce and Imogen Swan were getting a divorce. Free-form thoughts. Essays.
This was around the time it hit me that soon, my daughter would be finishing school and deciding what was next for her life.
Not long later, I’d begun to organize the pictures. Categorize them. Put them with the pieces I was writing. The musings. The poems.
Then came Elsa Cohen’s interview with Samantha Wheeler, and something broke in me.
The project shifted, took a different shape.
And I’d gone into overdrive, leaving Cadence at home with the oversight of Nora and a couple of Cadence’s best friends’ parents, heading to Arizona for large chunks of time, going out for long walks on my property, spending hours photographing a single wildflower.
I glanced down at the workbench, caught sight of the picture of that wildflower, and right beside it, the photo I took of Rollo on his back on my couch with his big hands wrapped around my cat Bow’s belly.
Rollo’s fingers were so long, they ran up her sides all the way to her spine. She was kneading his chest. His bearded chin was dipped into his throat. They were staring at each other eye to eye.
Christ, my man could thrash a drum, but his touch was so fucking gentle.
Unable to sit with that thought for long, I shifted my attention to Bow.
She’d adored him. He’d stolen her from me the first time he’d come over. I’d left the bed to go to the bathroom after we’d made love, and when I came back, she was curled into him, his fingers massaging her neck, her eyes were slits, and she was purring.
On his side, wide, furry chest exposed, head in his hand, Rollo had looked up at me with those dancing brown eyes and said, “I like your cat.”
It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
Maybe that was when I fell in love with him.
Before he came into my life, I’d had Bow for five years.
When he didn’t come home, a few days later, she darted out the door. She’d never done that. Not in five years.
I knew she took off to find him.
I searched desperately. Asked everyone I knew to help me. Put up fliers. Called shelters.
But I never saw her again.
In my heart I knew she was still searching.
But eventually, she found him.
As the ache started to form, my phone went, and that was indication of how off I was.
When I worked, I put it on do not disturb without fail. Unless Cadence was out and I needed to be able to get a call if she needed me, there were no exceptions to the do not disturb rule.
Now, Cadence was home, not in her bedroom. Unless she was going to school, she did hours like me, up when she was up, sleeping when she was tired, and she had her own area outside her room. She called it her “space.” It was part study room, part game room, part music room and part art room.
That night, I purposefully had not activated the do not disturb on my phone.
I was waiting for Tom to call.
No, I was hoping he’d call.
Why?
Because I was too proud to call him. Something I should do since I’d been a bitch.
He was correct, his life was none of my business and it was me who’d made it that way. I didn’t have a right to be angry or disappointed. I also didn’t have a right to call him unexpectedly, ask him to come all the way out to my home (which wasn’t far from Phoenix, but it wasn’t close), and when he got here, be a bitch to him.
Furthermore, for my own peace of mind I’d cut ties with him way back in the day, but I still considered him a friend. And if a female friend had a marriage end because she’d had an affair, and she’d shared with me about it, I would have listened at first without judgment. I might not have agreed with her course of action, but I would have listened. And if there was a deeper issue behind it, and she was hurt, even if she’d done that to herself, I would have commiserated.
I knew all this.
I still couldn’t get past my stubborn pride in order to phone him and apologize.
A failing.
The call wasn’t from Tom.
It was Nora.
I picked up the phone and saw she wanted FaceTime.
I gave it to her and greeted her with, “It’s one in the morning there.”