Dread. Skin-crawling, stomach-dropping, run-while-you-can dread.
It was ridiculous.
Alexa was on the cusp of having everything she’d ever dreamed about. A beautiful home she could be proud of, a secure job that she loved, a man who wanted to be with her every moment he wasn’t working, and more money than she’d ever be able to spend. She wasn’t greedy; that wasn’t where her interest in money and a nice house came from. Instead, it came from the way she’d grown up. Her father leaving her and her brother with nothing but a seriously ill mother, how little she’d had as a kid, how terrible the conditions in the trailer she’d grown up in had been—against all of that, it was simply amazing to think about how much she had now.
And hard to believe. A lot of the time, she was sure she didn’t deserve it. And a part of her couldn’t quite accept that it would last. Grant was Armani suits and Ivy-League education and million-dollar bank accounts, while Alexa was mall clearance racks and part-time evening classes and life lived paycheck to paycheck. At least, that had been her before they’d gotten serious. She didn’t need Grant to tell her how lucky she was that he’d wanted her, although he did sometimes tell her just that.
Mostly, she was grateful beyond imagination. Grateful to be safe and secure. Grateful not to be ashamed and embarrassed of where she lived. Grateful to be able to afford to take care of her mom, who suffered from an array of mental health problems and needed all the help Alexa could give her, which had been more and more since her older brother, Tyler, died five years before. Alexa was grateful to Grant for making so much possible that she never would’ve been able to accomplish on her own.
Which made the dread seriously ridiculous.
It was just wedding jitters. Totally normal.
Sighing, she surveyed the beautiful dinner she’d managed to throw together. Given how scarce food had been when she was younger, Alexa absolutely hated to waste anything. Problem was, her appetite had been all over the place lately. Either she couldn’t stomach the thought of eating or she was binge-eating a bag of potato chips while Grant was at work.
Knock, knock.
The quick raps on the front door pulled Alexa from her thoughts. She crossed the dining room to the wide oval foyer framed by a grand curving staircase. A glittering chandelier hung from the ceiling, casting colorful prisms here and there from where it caught the late-day sun through the large picture window above the door. Out on the front porch, Alexa found a stack of packages. She gave a wave to the UPS driver as he pulled out of the end of their driveway.
With just over two weeks until the wedding, presents from the registry had been pouring in every day. Grant had so many friends, colleagues, and contacts that she’d never met, Alexa didn’t know who most of the gifts were from.
She carried in two smaller ones, then two medium ones, and then found herself struggling to move the large square box on the bottom. It was too deep to get her arms around and not easily pushed. What the heck could it be? She crouched behind it to try to gain leverage, and was just about to give up when a strong breeze blew her hair across her face, and she heard a soft click.
Her gaze cut to the front door.
“Oh, shit,” she said. Knowing what she was going to find, she tried the knob anyway. Locked.
She was locked out, and Grant was away until who knew what time. She couldn’t easily go anywhere because her purse, car keys, and phone were all inside. And she didn’t know her neighbors yet because she’d just moved in.
“Shit, shit, shit.”
So much for getting work done tonight.
She sat heavily on the stupid box and dropped her head into her hands. And burst into tears.
Not because of being locked out. But because being . . . trapped with no easy way out of the situation? Suddenly, that felt like a crazy accurate metaphor for her life.
If she was being honest with herself.
Which she really, really didn’t want to be.
“Stop it, Al,” she said in a rasping voice. “You’re not trapped. Stop thinking that.” Except, just then, she leaned her left cheek too heavily against her hand. She sucked in a breath at the smarting of the healing bruise there.
The one from the fight she and Grant had last week. The fight that had started with Alexa leaving a big mess in the foyer from where she’d been unboxing another delivery of packages and had escalated into a huge argument, culminating in Grant saying Alexa was just like her mother—something Grant knew cut her deep on so many levels. The fight had ended when Alexa told him he was being mean and he’d kicked a box at her. When she’d tried to duck out of the way, she tripped over another box on the floor and fell, hitting her head against the leg of a console table in the foyer, giving her some nasty bruises.