Page 6 of Captivated By Danger

“Mom, hey. Grams.” I leaned over and kissed the top of her head.

“Hey, Grey. Have a seat.”

I sat across from my mom, catty-cornered to my grams.

“What’s so urgent?”

“You know tonight is the engagement party, and—”

“Grams, no.”

“—have you thought about attending?” she finished her sentence like she hadn’t heard me tell her no.

“No, I haven’t thought about attending. Why would I go to my ex-husband’s engagement party to…my…cousin,” I asked calmly.

I tried to take Elle’s advice and stand up for myself.

“Baby,” she grabbed my hand. “At the end of the day, she’s your family. Your first cousin, I think you should come. It’s been a long time now.”

“No. No, it hasn’t. Not for me. It’s a daily thing for me.”

“Well, I think…”

My mom grabbed my other hand. “Baby, I think you should go, so you can see that this is happening. That this is real. So, you can stop moping around in your room all day when you’re not working at that school, barely making enough to drive to and from there. It’s been two or three years and you hadn’t been on one date. You’re letting them kill you, while they go on with their lives.”

My eyes watered and my cheeks burned from anger. There were so many words in my throat that I just couldn’t bring myself to say. I wanted to tell her had she not thrown me off on Kyle when I turned eighteen, I’d probably have saved myself the heartache, stress, and pain. The suffering in silence would have never happened. I couldn’t believe—well, I could—that my grandma wants me to get over her other daughter’s daughter hurting me.

“Grey, and I need to be honest…” my grandma started.

Every time my grandma justneeded to be honest,it always ended with my feelings being hurt.

“You made it so easy for him to… you know. With the depression… and the weight gain. I don’t mean to be unkind, dear. You know I love you.”

See.

“Yes, Grams. I know you love me.”

I pulled my hand away from her and wiped at my tears. She talked as if I just woke up and became depressed. I carried a child to term and lost it. That would make anyone depressed. Depression wasn’t an excuse for him to plow into my cousin.

“Grey, just show them that you are the bigger person. They probably love that you are sitting around here hurt. Once you move on, you’ll get back to normal.”

“This is my normal, Mom.”

“Just say you’ll come.”

“Of course, Grams. I’ll come.”

Later that evening…

For the last ten minutes, I’d been staring at myself in the mirror. This was the sixth dress that I’d tried on and hated. It was one of the biggest dresses that I had, and it still sunk in every roll and dent on my body. Nothing fit me anymore. At least nothing fit the way I wanted it to fit. My grams were right about the weight gain. Well, I hadn’t ever been a size two, but I wasn’t near about as big as I was now. After high school, I was probably a size fourteen, but then getting married, becoming a homebody, and the loss of my child, and then my husband, I’d ballooned to a size twenty-two. Being five foot seven and knocking on the door of three hundred pounds, I looked and felt sicker than I’d ever been. In an effort to try and win my husband back from my cousin, I’d gotten in the gym, nearly starving myself, and dropped down to a eighteen. Elle wasn’t wrong about being a shapely two liter because my weight was distributed more evenly than it was three sizes ago. The knocks on the door got my attention.

“You decent?” my dad said from outside the door.

“Yeah, I guess.”

The door opened and my dad eased inside, dressed in his usual special occasion attire, black slacks and a button-down white shirt, and a pair of black Stacy Adams.

He looked around the room, noticing the clothes all over the place, before sitting on the bed. “You okay, hun?”

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