“Can you please clean up your mess in the morning? I know you’re busy but that’s no excuse for clutter.”
Or maybe he’d say. “Did you leave in a hurry this morning because when I got home the bathroom was a mess?”
Or some other equally condescending comment.
Ava shuddered at the memory as she grabbed the tube to put it in the medicine cabinet. When she did, she realized that she’d organized everything to Ian’s very particular specifications.
Her toothpaste and floss sat side by side on the first shelf. Her face wash, toner, and moisturizer were all lined up by height on the second shelf. And her birth control and deodorant were on the third.
Now she did actually feel like Julia’s character in Sleeping with the Enemy. She knew that Ian would never lay a hand on her, or any woman for that matter. But it was nice to be out from under his very controlling, very particular ways.
She’d always hated keeping her birth control in the medicine cabinet. She wanted to keep it in her nightstand. But for some reason Ian wanted her to keep it in the medicine cabinet.
Ava was pretty sure that he did that so he could check to make sure that she took it.
They say hindsight is twenty-twenty and it was amazing now that she was removed from the relationship just how clearly she was seeing it.
Ian was controlling. Self-centered. Egotistical. And she’d put up with it.
She was drying her hands when she heard her phone beep in the front room.
“You got a text!” Viv called out Love Island style.
Viv had gotten her hooked on the dating show when Ava had come out to look at venue spots last summer. They’d binged watched four seasons of the UK version and she’d been able to do it guilt-free because Ian and his judgmental looks of disapproval and passive aggressive, “Are you really watching that?” weren’t looming over her shoulder.
For her entire adult life she’d given up her greatest guilty pleasure because of Ian’s disdain for what he referred to as “trash TV.”
“Who is it?” Ava asked as she stepped out of the bathroom and saw her sister holding her phone. Ian had been messaging her almost daily asking to talk, but she’d been ignoring his requests.
Viv didn’t answer as her thumbs typed on the screen.
“Viv,” Ava said expecting her sister to immediately put the phone down and look appropriately ashamed for getting caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
But she didn’t do that. In fact, she didn’t even stop typing.
“Viv, give me my phone,” Ava said in no uncertain terms.
“One sec.”
“Viv!” Ava reached for the phone but Viv scooted across the bed.
“And send.” Viv said with finality as she tapped her thumb on the screen.
Ava’s stomach sank thinking about what Viv could have just sent from her phone. If it was Ian that had texted, Ava was fairly certain that Viv would share some of her thoughts on the situation and might even have threatened to do the things that Blake had heard her say, but it would look like it was coming from Ava, not Viv.
“What did you do?” Ava snatched her phone back.
“I did what had to be done,” Viv spoke with heartfelt sincerity. “Something you would never have had the balls to do.”
Ava looked down and saw that it wasn’t Ian who had texted. It was Asher. He’d said that the results from Ava’s lab work had come in and that she could contact him if she wanted to go over it.
Then, Viv posing as Ava, had typed back that she’d love to go over the results and asked if she could take him to dinner as a thank you for saving her life, they could discuss it there. It wasn’t even an open-ended invitation. She’d asked to take him to The Castaway tonight. In one hour.
Ava slapped her hand over her mouth. This was worse than a death threat. She’d just asked Asher on a date hours after Blake had confessed to her that she’d caught her step-dad sleeping with her mom’s best friend.
Even though she knew that the two were not related, it still felt very wrong.
“Delete it!” Ava tried to shove her phone back to her sister, who held her hands up, palms facing her.
