My Fiancé Chose His Ex, So I Chose Myself novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Access Denied
Locked out for the fourth time, Edie finds Clint at his ex-wife's condo in his socks; he stays, she hands Shayla her ring, and Shayla's fiancé steps off the elevator.
When my fiancé's ex-wife wiped my fingerprint off our front door for the fourth time, I was finished with that house.
I pressed my thumb to the pad again.
ACCESS DENIED.
The little red light blinked at me across the wet boards of the porch.
It was 11:10 on a Thursday night in October, and the rain in Tacoma was coming sideways.
I had a garment bag over one arm and a bride's veil in a box under the other.
I set them both down on the porch swing and called Clint.
He picked up on the fifth ring.
"What's going on?" I said.
"Hey. Hey, babe." His good-guy voice. "Are you home?"
"I'm on the porch. The lock doesn't know me again."
He sighed.
"Okay. Don't freak out."
"I'm not freaking out. I'm wet."
"She doesn't mean anything by it, Edie. You know the app confuses her. It's still on her email from before, and she gets in there and taps stuff."
"She tapped my thumb out of the house in June."
"I know."
"And August. And three weeks ago."
"I know, I know. She's fragile right now. Her dad's birthday is this month."
"Where are you?"
A pause.
That pause was the whole answer, but I waited for the words anyway.
"I'm at Shayla's. Her garbage disposal flooded the whole kitchen. She called me crying."
Behind him, a woman laughed.
It was a big bright laugh, a laugh at a party.
"Is that the seamstress?" Shayla called out. "Tell her the guest code is my birthday."
Clint covered the phone, badly.
"Shay, don't."
I looked through the glass of the front door.
I could see straight down the hall to the kitchen I had paid for.
White oak cabinets. A deep farmhouse sink. Forty-eight thousand dollars of my mother's life insurance, turned into drawers that closed themselves softly.
Past it, the glass sunroom, where my mother's old black Singer sat under a lamp I had left on that morning.
I was standing outside all of it in the rain.
"Edie? You still there? Just go to Bonnie's tonight. I'll fix it in the morning."
"No," I said. "I'll come get you."
I hung up before he could tell me not to.
Shayla's condo was on Ruston Way, right on the water, ten minutes away.
The night doorman was asleep in his chair with a crossword on his chest.
I rode the elevator to the sixth floor with rain dripping off my hair onto the carpet.
I knocked on 6C.
Shayla opened the door in a cream silk robe.
Over the robe she was wearing Clint's red flannel shirt, the one I bought him last Christmas.
Her blond hair was blown out smooth, at eleven-thirty at night, for a flooded disposal.
"Oh, honey," she said. "You drove? In this?"
Clint stood in the hall behind her.
He was in his jeans and his undershirt.
He was in his socks.
His boots were by her door, side by side, lined up neat.
"Edie," he said. "It's not what it looks like."
"What does it look like, Clint?"
He didn't answer.
Shayla leaned on the door frame.
"You want to know why I deleted you?" she said. "You put your dress dummies in my sunroom."
"Your sunroom."
"I picked that tile. Italian. I picked the paint in the hall. I picked that house." She smiled. "You just live in it."
"I paid for the sunroom."
"And it's lovely, honey. It'd be lovelier without six headless women in it."
I looked past her at Clint.
"Get your boots," I said. "Come home with me right now, or stay here. You pick."
He rubbed the back of his neck.
That was his tell, every time a waiter brought the wrong order and he ate it anyway.
"Edie, come on. She can't be alone tonight. You saw her face."
"I'm looking at her face."
"It's one night. We'll talk tomorrow. I'll come home first thing and fix the lock."
Shayla tilted her head at me, sweet as pie.
She had won, and she wanted me to watch her know it.
I took off my ring.
It was a cushion-cut diamond on a thin gold band.
I'd hemmed four hundred wedding dresses since he put it on me, and I'd never once taken it off to work.
I took Shayla's hand, turned it over, and put the ring in her palm.
"You picked the tile," I said. "Pick him too."
Her mouth opened.
For one second she had nothing to say, and I wanted to frame that second.
"Edie," Clint said. "Edie, don't do this here."
Down the hall, the elevator chimed.
The doors slid open.
A big man stepped out in a waxed canvas coat, rain on his shoulders, a wool cap in one hand.
In the other hand he was holding a bunch of grocery-store tulips, still in the plastic.
I knew him from a framed photo on Clint's desk at work.
Hugh Meade. Clint's boss. The man who owned every tugboat on the Tacoma tideflats.
Shayla's fiancé.
He stopped three steps from the door and looked at all of us.
At Shayla in her silk and the flannel.
At my ring in her hand.
At me, dripping on his carpet.
Then he looked at Clint's feet.
"Clint," he said, very slowly. "Why are you in your socks?"
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