“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You don’t need me there when Sven is there to hold your hand.”

“Why would he….” I didn’t know what to say to that.

“He said you were still together.”

“That’s not true. I told you we broke up, months ago. I think he, I don’t know, what’s going on with him,” I finally said.

“He said you were always breaking up and making up.”

I was stunned into silence. I hardly knew what to say.

“Is that true?”

“That we’ve broken up before?”

“Yes!” Michael said.

“I’ve been trying to break up with him for years. I always felt sorry for him, but…”

“You lied to me!” Michael said in a low voice, seething with anger.

“I didn’t lie to you,” I said quickly.

I saw my father come in with a doctor.

“I have to go…”

“Don’t go, we have to talk..” Michael said quickly.

“I’ll call you later,” I said.

I was already moving the phone away to end the call. I just heard him warn me, “If you end the call now, it’s over between us…”

Chapter 24

Michael

I was in the foulest of foul moods.

It began the moment I opened my eyes and refused to look at my phone, to check for messages, even though it was all I could think of. I logged onto my laptop from home, to see if there were updates from Seth about the game. There was a bug he was supposed to fix but it looked like he hadn’t done it yet.

I called Seth, who clearly, wasn’t awake yet.

I barked at him, “The arrow still isn’t moving the way it should.”

He sighed. “Yeah, I’m going to look at that today.”

“What were you doing last night?”

“Uhm… sleeping?”

I had to control my temper because I knew I was going to lose it. But I didn’t want to take it out on Seth. He’d been working hard these past few months and there had been many sleepless nights. There was no reason he had to work on this particular issue overnight.

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Talk to you later.”

I gave in and checked my phone. There were messages from Belle. She’d tried calling too. I glanced over the messages. She was sorry, blah-blah, she and Sven weren’t together blah-blah.