I Woke Up Married to My Worst Enemy novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Officer, I've Been Scammed
Hattie wakes on a curb with a boy calling her Mommy and reports him to the police as a scammer. Her worst enemy walks in and says he's her husband, and the fridge at home carries her own handwriting: Dad (worst enemy).
"Officer, I'd like to report a scam, and the scammer is six years old."
The officer behind the desk set down his coffee.
The boy holding my hand looked up at him very seriously.
"My mom hit her head," he said. "Now she says I'm a scammer."
"He keeps calling me Mom," I said.
"She keeps saying she's not."
The officer looked at me, then at the boy, then at me again.
"So she says you're not her son," he said to the boy. "And you say you're not his mother, ma'am."
The boy and I nodded at the same moment.
I let go of his hand to cross my arms. He took it back.
Ten minutes earlier, I had woken up on the curb outside a hardware store on Main Street with a Coke bottle in my mouth.
I had thanked the kid holding it. Low blood sugar, I figured. Nice little guy.
Then he asked if I remembered his name.
I did not. I had never seen him in my life.
The last thing I remembered was the state science fair, in April of my senior year.
I was eighteen. I had braids and a retainer.
Now my hands had short, scrubbed nails and a gold ring I had never bought.
"Ma'am, do you have any ID?" the officer asked.
I pulled a wallet out of a jacket I didn't recognize and handed him the license.
He read it and turned it toward me.
Harriet Vikstrom Brannigan. Age twenty-eight.
The woman in the photo had a ponytail and my mother's chin.
"That's forged," I said.
"Ma'am, I renewed that license myself at the clerk's window last spring."
"Then you're in on it."
The boy patted my sleeve. "Mom, he's not in on it. He's the crossing guard cop."
I took my hand back. He took it again.
In the jacket's other pocket there was a small spiral notebook and a pen.
I opened it to write down the boy's Coke, because I do not take things from people for free.
The first page was already full.
It was my handwriting, in columns. Gus: coffee. Gus: oil change. Gus: drove Milo to school. Gus: Tuesday dinner.
Someone had kept a tab on a man named Gus for years.
Good. I wrote at the bottom: 1 Coke (the kid), and I turned to a clean page.
The station door banged open.
A man came in with sawdust on his green apron and his chest going up and down.
He was bigger than I remembered, but the chipped front tooth was the same.
"Hatt," he said. "Are you okay?"
I stood up so fast the chair fell over.
"Gus Brannigan."
"Hey, Dad," the boy said, perfectly calm.
"You," I said.
"Hey, buddy," Gus said to the boy. His eyes didn't leave me.
"Officer, arrest this man," I said.
The officer sighed in a way that suggested he'd been planning a quiet morning.
"On what charge, ma'am?"
"He's my worst enemy."
"That's right," the boy told the officer. "That's Dad."
The officer slowly turned his head and looked at the boy for a long time.
"Ma'am," he said to me, "this man is your husband."
I laughed.
Nobody else did.
Gus pulled off his work glove and held up his left hand.
He wore the same gold ring I did.
"I'll explain," he said. "Hatt, you fell off the loading dock at the store. You hit your head."
"You know exactly what you did at the science fair."
"I do," Gus said.
I waited for the denial. For the speech about how he'd never touched my dam.
He just stood there with his glove in his hand and let me say it.
"You smashed my project and let me take the blame."
"I know," he said.
"You took my scholarship."
"Hatt."
"Don't Hatt me. I'm eighteen years old, and you are not allowed to look sad about it."
"You're twenty-eight," Gus said gently. "I'm sorry. You are."
The officer cleared his throat.
"Mr. Brannigan, is she in any danger?"
"Only from me, apparently," Gus said.
My head hurt. My handwriting was in a notebook I had never owned.
The ring had left a tan line under it. The tan line was years old.
I had two choices. I could stay at the station until the whole town came to look at me, or I could find out who had forged my life.
The forger had an address, because the license had one.
So I went home with my worst enemy.
The house had a green door and a porch swing, and the hallway smelled like coffee and cut wood.
Milo ran ahead and dropped his backpack beside the stairs.
I walked into the kitchen with my arms crossed and read the family chore chart on the fridge.
Trash, Tuesday. Milo, teeth. Dishes, me.
Under Thursday, in my own handwriting, someone had written: Pick up Milo, Gus (worst enemy).
Beside it, in the same pen, was a tiny heart.
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