My Fiancé Chose His Ex, So I Chose Myself novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: My Sunroom

Shayla lies and Clint backs her, but Edie tells Hugh the truth; by morning Shayla has told eleven thousand Tacoma brides that Edie is a stalker.

Nobody moved.

The tulips crackled in their plastic.

Then Shayla laughed, the bright party laugh, and closed her fist around my ring.

"Hugh! You're early. You said Saturday."

"I said I'd try for tonight." He didn't look at her. He was still looking at Clint's socks.

"Well, you walked into a circus." She waved her free hand at the hall. "My disposal exploded. Water everywhere. I called Clint because he's the only person who knows where my shutoff is. Then Edie came to pick him up, and we were all about to have a nightcap."

She said it smoothly.

Maybe she had.

"Right, Clint?"

Clint cleared his throat.

"Right. The disposal. It's handled now."

Hugh turned his head and looked at me.

Of the four of us, I was the only one he hadn't heard from.

I could have nodded.

It would have been so easy. Everybody in that hallway wanted me to nod.

"Her kitchen isn't wet," I said.

Shayla's smile stayed on her face, but her eyes went flat.

"Excuse me?"

"I can see it from here. The floor's dry. There's a candle lit on the counter." I looked at Hugh. "My fingerprint got deleted from Clint's front door tonight. It's the fourth time since June. The lock's app is still on her email. Every time it happens, he's here."

"Edie," Clint said.

"In June he said her pipes froze. In August her car wouldn't start. In September she had a migraine." I kept my voice level, like I was telling a bride where her hem would fall. "Tonight it's the disposal."

Hugh didn't say anything.

He just listened.

"Oh my God," Shayla said. "Hugh, she's obsessed with me. She's been obsessed with me since the day she moved in. She wears my perfume. She sleeps in my bed."

"It's Clint's bed," I said.

"I bought that bed!"

Her voice cracked up into a shriek. Down the hall a door opened, and an old man in pajamas peered out.

"I picked every single thing in that house, and she just walked in and put her ugly sewing junk all over it. And now she's at my door at midnight, accusing me in front of my fiancé?" She held up my ring between two fingers like it was something she'd found in a drain. "She threw this at me. Who does that? That's unwell."

"I didn't throw it," I said. "I handed it to you. You took it."

The old man in pajamas said, "Keep it down," and shut his door.

Hugh finally moved.

He set the tulips on the little table by Shayla's door, carefully, like they might bruise.

Then he looked at Clint.

"How many nights?"

Clint's face went through about five expressions.

"What? None. Never, Hugh. I swear to God. I'm here because of the disposal."

"Never," Hugh said.

"Never."

Hugh nodded slowly.

"The garage downstairs counts cars," he said. "In and out. It prints a log every month for the building. My grandmother's company owns the building."

Clint went white.

Shayla said, "Hugh, sweetheart, that's insane. You're going to believe a seamstress over me?"

Hugh didn't answer that.

He pulled his wool cap back on.

"Go home, Clint," he said.

Then he turned to me. "Where are you sleeping tonight?"

"Not your problem."

"It's raining."

"I noticed. I'm the wettest person here."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. It wasn't quite a smile.

"Fair," he said.

I took the stairs instead of the elevator, all six floors, because I didn't want to stand in a box with any of them.

I slept at the shop.

Lansing Alterations was on 6th Avenue, between a tattoo parlor and a pho place that closed at nine.

My mother ran it for twenty-six years. She died three years ago, and I still hadn't changed the sign.

In the back fitting room there was an old velvet daybed where brides sat to cry about their mothers-in-law.

I lay down on it in my wet coat and stared at the ceiling.

At 12:40 the back door banged open.

"I brought wine and a crowbar," Bonnie said. "Pick one."

Bonnie Tull had been my best friend since tenth grade and my best seamstress for five years.

She was five foot one, and skated roller derby on Saturdays.

She had bruises on both knees and a bottle of red under her arm.

"You read my text," I said.

"You texted me 'I gave her the ring.' That's not a text, that's a movie trailer." She sat on the end of the daybed and handed me the bottle. "We don't have glasses. Drink like a pirate."

I drank like a pirate.

Then I told her all of it.

The socks. The flannel. The tile.

Bonnie listened with her jaw getting tighter and tighter.

"She said Italian," Bonnie said. "She bragged about the tile being Italian."

"She did."

"I'm going to kill her with a seam ripper. Slowly. One stitch at a time."

That made me laugh, and laughing made me cry, and Bonnie just held the bottle and let me.

When I was done she got a notepad off the cutting table.

"Okay. What's in that house that's yours?"

"My clothes. My dress forms."

She wrote it down.

"Mom's Singer." My voice wobbled. "Her wedding dress. The pearl earrings. They're in the blue box on the dresser."

"And forty-eight grand of kitchen."

"I can't carry a kitchen out, Bon."

"Not yet," she said, and underlined it twice.

I fell asleep somewhere after two, with her derby hoodie over my feet.

My phone woke me at 7:50.

Then again. Then again.

It was buzzing so hard it walked itself off the cutting table and onto the floor.

Bonnie picked it up, read the screen, and said a word my mother would have washed out of her mouth.

She turned it so I could see.

It was a post in Tacoma Brides, the group where half my customers found me. Eleven thousand members.

Shayla had posted a still from her doorbell camera.

It was me in her hallway at midnight, soaking wet, my hair plastered to my face.

Under it she'd written:

"This seamstress stalks engaged women. She showed up at my door at midnight and threatened me in front of my fiancé. Ask me how I know. Ladies, if your gown is at Lansing Alterations, get it out while you can."

It had four hundred comments.

The top one said, "Omg I have my fitting there Friday."

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