Dad looks at me in surprise and I take the dishes from the table into the kitchen, gathering up my nerve and mentally rehearsing for a moment. I hate leaving Dad to do the dishes himself, but I have to get out of here.
“What do you mean?”
“If you can’t drop this thing about me needing to have full custody of Riley, or if you try to pull some kind of legal maneuvering to punish Ethan by taking his child out of his life, I will make sure that you have no contact with her, or with me,” I say firmly.
“What are you saying, Lara?”
“I’m saying that if you want to remain part of Riley’s life, and mine, you are going to have to learn to keep your mouth shut about how much Ethan is to blame. He’s not at all to blame in Alexis’ death, and he’s not the only one to blame in the falling out Alexis and I had.”
I lean in and kiss him on the forehead, and turn around. I grab my purse and hurry out to my car before Dad can come up with anything to say to try to make me stay. I have to get home. I have to think about what the hell my life has become.
Chapter Twenty
Ethan
I pull into the parking lot at Lara’s apartment building, still tense from my dinner with my parents. By the time I got home, about an hour before, she’d sent me another text, saying that her dad was apparently trying some kind of legal shenanigans. We definitely need to talk about that, and about my parents too.
I find a guest parking spot and get out of my car, heading up to Lara’s unit as quickly as I can. When I get to the door she answers almost as soon as I’m done knocking, looking flushed and almost flustered.
“What happened?” I follow Lara into the apartment and close the door behind me, locking it automatically. Lara goes into the kitchen and pours herself a glass of wine.
“Dad is off his rocker,” she says shortly. “Do you want some? Or a beer?”
“How much wine have you had?”
Lara rolls her eyes. “This is my first glass,” she says. She raises an eyebrow, silently repeating her first invitation.
“I’ll have a beer, thanks.”
She gets me one out of the fridge and hands it to me before taking a big sip of her glass of wine.
“Dad is still blaming you for the accident, first of all,” she says, walking in the direction of the living room. Lara sits down heavily and shakes her head in disbelief.
“I’d kind of gotten that impression,” I say. If I’m honest, I blame myself too, even if there’s no possible way I can think of to have avoided the accident, and Alexis’ death from it. The fact that I was driving haunts me still.
“And he’s apparently been talking to some kind of lawyer who thinks he has a case for me to get full custody of Riley, which, by the way, I still don’t even want,” she says, adding the second part quickly with a hasty look in my direction.
“I know you don’t,” I say, sitting down on the couch about a foot away from her. Lara sighs and half-throws herself backwards on the couch, looking for a moment exactly like she did when we were in high school together. In spite of being the good kid who got the great grades, Lara locked horns with her parents more than once, and seeing her in the middle of a fit of temper like the one she’s in right now is pretty damn familiar.
“I told him that if he can’t manage to keep his mouth shut about you, I’m going to keep Riley out of his life, and I’m going to be out of his life too,” Lara tells me. She sighs and takes another sip of her wine.
“That’s a pretty damn bold stance to take,” I say appreciatively. I think about my parents pressing me about Lara and Nathan and what they might be up to, what scheme they might have come up with, and I almost feel ashamed of them for thinking that Lara’s even capable of meditating a scheme like that.
“It’s the only stance I feel like I could take,” Lara says.
“I still appreciate it,” I tell her, raising my beer to her and taking a sip.
“There’s no reason for you to be out of Riley’s life,” Lara points out.
“I’m sure your dad just… he’s trying to work out how to feel about everything, you know?”
Lara raises an eyebrow at me and sips her wine. “How ironic is it that you’re the one arguing in his favor when he apparently hates you right now?”
I laugh. “I just guess I can see a little bit of what it’s like for him. He’s lost his wife, who died with her daughters still not speaking. Now he’s lost his elder daughter, too, and he’s alone, you know?”
Lara sighs. “I’ve been trying to give him the benefit of the doubt for that reason,” she says. She closes her eyes and shakes her head. “After tonight though, I think I need to be firm with him.”
“You really think he’s serious?” I hadn’t even really believed that, not when my parents brought it up and not even when Lara began texting me about her father going off the rails.
“He’s talking to lawyers. That’s serious enough,” Lara says firmly.
“As long as you’re not going along with it, it’s probably not going to go all that far,” I point out. We both sit there silently for a few moments, and I can almost visibly see Lara calming down.
“It’s just frustrating,” she says quietly.
“That I can totally get. I have to say I wouldn’t have expected you to call me, though.” Lara smiles wryly and looks down into her glass of wine, half
