Page 33 of New Hope, Old Grudges

“He had a forge in the backyard, it’s still there,” I offered.

“I know,” Brody nodded. “Been there.”

I clenched my fists. Again with the rage at his familiarity. The forge was Dad’s and my place.

Brody’s eyes flickered to my clenched fists. I watched him note the gesture like a cop might, but he didn’t say anything, just regained eye contact with me.

I took another deep breath. “He taught me about metal, about how it works, about how to shape it, turn something seemingly set in stone into something else entirely.”

It took a lot for me to say the words and not get lost in the memories.

“I had a jewelry brand,” I explained. “In L.A.” I swallowed my wine, resisting the urge to down the glass in one gulp. This story was so much more palatable if I was drunk. But if I got drunk, my inhibitions would be much too low, and I’d do something stupid like give in to my baser urges.

“It started slow,” I continued. “But it was doing well. Quite well, I guess.” I wasn’t sure why I was downplaying it. My jewelry brand had been the‘it’label for a time. Celebrities wore it. Maybe talking about just how far I’d fallen was too much.

“I had staff. And my, um, boyfriend … fiancé, I guess… Well, ex-fiancé gave up his job at a Fortune 500 company to take over as the CFO since the business grew so big so quickly, and I didn’t have experience on the business side. Or that’s what he said,” I scoffed. “That I should take care of the creative part, and he’d take care of the rest.” I shook my head, thinking about how stupid it sounded out loud. “I trusted him, why wouldn’t I?” I looked at the snow over Brody’s head. My heart hurt thinking of everything I’d built. “But I shouldn’t have trusted him. He, uh, he embezzled all the profits, made shitty deals with manufacturers, pretty much ruined my company and bankrupted me.” I didn’t mention that the reason I was bankrupt was because I chose to pay all of my staff redundancy packages rather than bailing out my company.

“It’s not an original story,” I threw up my hands. “I’m just another millennial coming home with her proverbial tail between her legs after life chewed her up and spit her out, leaving her failures for the world to see.”

It wasn’t until now that I looked at Brody. I’d been focusing on the snow over his head the entire time. I couldn’t look my high school bully in the eye while I recounted my fall from grace. It was just too much.

But I couldn’t keep my eyes off him for too long. He was magnetic; my body had been angling closer to him this entire time, constantly aware of his breathing, the subtle scent of him in the air. I caught every small movement he made out of the corner of my eye. And I’d noted he’d gotten tense during my story. I hadn’t noticed he looked furious, though.

“You didn’t fuckin’ fail, someone fucked you over,” Brody snarled.

Snarled.

Feral like.

I just blinked at the emotion. He looked pissed. Uber pissed. Not at me. At least I didn’t think so. He looked pissedforme.

It was … odd. And comforting. Though it shouldn’t have been. I’d never had someone feel murderous rage on my behalf. Although my mother had mentioned Geoff once since I’d been home, and it had been to wish ill on all his dreams.

“I gave someone the opportunity to fuck me over,” I corrected him. “I gave someone the power and control over my life because I thought that I could trust them. A hard lesson and one I shouldn’t have had to learn.” I sipped more wine. “It’s not original, Brody. Men fuck women over all the time. Women fuck over men. Humans are brutal to each other. As we well know.”

He flinched like I hit him.

“I didn’t mean—”

“No, I deserve it,” he interrupted. “For what I did to you. For forgetting about it.”

Again, he sounded utterly remorseful and regretful. I wanted to accept his apology. “We’re not talking about that anymore,” I reminded him.

His open mouth told me he wanted to push the issue, but he must’ve thought better of it.

“The fuck who was stupid enough to ensure he was never going to spend the rest of his life with you… Where is he?” he demanded.

I stared at him, confounded by the way he’d chosen to describe Geoff. There was so much passion there, anger. There was the insinuation that spending a lifetime with me was a gift.

“He, um, I don’t know,” I shrugged. “Nor does the US Government, but I’m sure they’d like to. He disappeared when everything started falling apart.”

I remembered it too clearly, though I wished that the trauma of it all had made it hazy. I woke up to an empty bed—not unusual since Geoff routinely went to the gym before work in the mornings. But he didn’t normally take all of his belongings with him.

I hadn’t cried. Hadn’t been upset when it was clear that he’d left me. I hadn’t felt much of anything. A red flag when the man you were supposed to be spending the rest of your life with leaves you and you’re not overly upset. Then again, anything that happened to me in the wake of my father’s death seemed mild. And I’d been second-guessing the entire relationship for a while. He was self-absorbed, he had no empathy for my grief over my father and he’d started commenting in a subtle but pointed way about my weight.

Yeah, an asshole.

He’d done me a favor by leaving so I didn’t have to navigate the awkwardness of ending an engagement. But when I’d arrived at my office, I’d encountered men with cheap suits and badges, questioning me about misappropriated funds.

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