Chapter 2 Get To The Point

~Ryan~

I’m late.

Eleven minutes, to be exact, and I can feel every one of them as I push through the glass door of Mira’s Diner. The bell overhead announces me before I even have a chance to brace myself, and I spot Jenna immediately – she’s in the yellow booth by the window, phone in hand, wearing that a look that’s half annoyed and half something else.

I slide in across from her before she can say anything and immediately wish I’d checked a mirror before walking in here.

“Wow.” Her brow knits together. “You look like absolute shit.”

I drag my hand across my jaw. The stubble there is longer than I’d normally allow it to get. “Nice to see you, too.”

“Sorry,” she winces. “It’s just… I’ve never seen you like this.”

I don’t answer. I just reach for the menu I have no intention of reading and hold it in front of me like a shield.

I can feel her staring and I make the mistake of setting the menu back down and find her eyes on me. They’re wide, searching, shifting from mildly annoyed to something that makes the back of my throat tighten.

“What’s going on? Are you okay?”

I pull in a slow breath through my nose. The diner smells like bacon grease and burnt coffee and something sickeningly sweet – maple syrup, maybe – and I focus on that smell instead of the way my hands feel sitting on top of this table. Like they don’t quite belong to me.

“Vanessa got out of rehab.”

Jenna’s expression is relieved. “Well, that’s great, Ryan. How is sh–”

“She’s sober.” I interrupt, forcing the words out. “She’s sober and clean and she can go home and start her life over.” I stop. The laminate surface of the table has a small scratch near the corner. I stare at it. “Except she… um… except she doesn’t want to start her life over with me. She handed me divorce papers when I went to pick her up.”

There’s silence for a moment as Jenna processes what I just said.

Then her hand slides across the table toward mine. “Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”

I pull back before she can reach me and shake my head. If she touches me right now I genuinely do not know what would happen, and I’m not prepared to find out in the middle of a diner at noon on a Tuesday.

“She said I’d always be a reminder of her lowest point in life. That I always made her feel like she had to live up to some standard she couldn’t measure up to.” I can hear my own voice going unsteady and I hate it. I fucking hate it. “Like it’s my fault she got hooked on heroin. As if I’m the one who put that needle in her fucking arm.”

“I’m sure that’s not how she meant it.”

“Doesn’t matter.” I say. “None of it matters now. It’s over. Ten years of marriage is just over just like that.”

I hear Jenna exhale slowly beside me. A moment later she’s slid out of her booth and into mine, her hand settling against my back in slow, careful circles. I let her. I set my elbows on the table and drop my head into my hands and I let her, as I sit there staring down at the checkered floor between my feet.

I was fifteen years old when I first saw Vanessa across a parking lot and thought I was going to be sick from how pretty she was. I was eighteen when I came back from basic and married her in the backyard of her mother’s house in the rain because we couldn’t afford to postpone the ceremony. We’ve moved seven times. Survived two tours. Buried her father and my mother and one of my partners. We didn’t know how to be adults without each other. I’m not sure I still do.

“That’s not even the worst part of all this, Jen.” I sit up and force myself straight, trying to manufacture something close enough to my regular voice and hope that maybe she won’t notice the difference. “I didn’t just lose Vanessa. I’ve lost everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“The house… our savings. It’s gone. All of it.”

“But–” Her voice sharpens. “How is it all gone? What judge in the world would give all that to Vanessa after everything she put you through?”

“It’s not that.” I look somewhere past her shoulder. “There’s nothing to give. Nothing to fight over. She drained our savings when she first ran off over a year ago.”

“And the house?”

My jaw tightens. “I took out a second mortgage to send her to the best treatment facility there was.”

“Ryan…”

“I know.” I put my hands up. “Okay? I know. It was stupid. Probably one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done. But I wanted my wife back. I needed to save her. I needed her. And right now, I don’t need a lecture.” I finally look at my sister. Really look at her, maybe for the first time since I walked through that door. “I just need my sister.”

She backs off immediately. “I’m sorry. I just… I wasn’t expecting any of this. Why didn’t you tell me?”

I give her a look and she seems to understand without me having to spell it out. We’ve been operating like polite strangers at holidays for the better part of a decade. A six year age-gap is a lot of distance when you’re young and going in opposite directions.

“I get it,” she says quietly. “But we’re family. You could’ve come to me.”

“You’re right,” I admit, because she is. “We haven’t been close in a long time, and a lot of that is probably on me. You’re six years younger, we’ve been in different worlds for most of it and even if we weren’t.” I stop. “I’m the older brother. I’m not supposed to come to you with my problems. You’re supposed to be able to come to me.”

“No,” she says, and her voice has that stubborn edge to it she’s had since she was about six years old. “We should be able to come to each other.”

I look at her. “I’m coming to you now, aren’t I?”

Something softens in her expression.

“Yeah. You are.” She squeezes my arm. “So tell me what you need. How can I help?”

I swipe a hand over my face again and stare at the table. I’ve run this particular calculation probably sixty times in the last week, turning over every option, holding it up to the light, looking for another way out.

“I wouldn’t be asking this if I had any other option… and believe me, I thought about ALL the other options. But, Detective Maya Torres and Donovan have the new baby at home and Elena and Wesley just got engaged and I don’t want to intrude on their new life together. So then that left Smitty, and I was going to go with Smitty, but then–”

I shudder involuntarily at the memory.

“Get to the point, Ryan,” Jenna says, and the corner of her mouth twitches. “It’s not like you to ramble.”

I groan and fold my arms on the table.

“I need a place to live,” I mutter.

A beat of quiet. “You mean you want to move in with us?”

“I don’t want to.” I don’t quite manage to keep the misery out of my voice. “I need to. Just for a little while. Just until I get back on my feet. Six months, tops.”

“Of course!” she says, and I can hear that she means it. “We have the extra room since Marcus moved out, and I’d love to have you for a while, I just…” She winces slightly. “I do need to run it by Lila first.”

“Lila.” I groan. “As in your aggressively cheerful, talks-at-the-speed-of-light, bounces-when-she-walks friend? That Lila?”

Jenna gives me a long, flat look. “Being positive, friendly, sweet and talkative are qualities most normal people appreciate in a person.”

I roll my eyes and say nothing as I turn and flag down the nearest waiter.

“Coffee,” I tell him. “Black. Give me the strongest thing you’ve got.” I pause. “I’m going to be needing a lot of it.”