The Perfect Homecoming (Pine River #3)

As she spoke, the bathroom door opened and her father had walked out wearing nothing but a towel, and Emma’s whole world had turned upside down, tumbling over itself, splintering and shattering into shards of rose-colored glass. That day, everything Emma thought she knew, everything she thought she understood, went flying out that twelfth-floor window. She’d been so stunned, so repulsed, so hurt, that she’d fled Las Vegas, throwing her things in the leather tote that was now under her bed up at the ranch, hitching a ride to the airport. She’d called her mother from there, begging for a ticket home.

Laura had followed her a week later. Her arrival home was marked by a lot of shouting and crying, and in the end, Laura was deemed the ruined one, the used one. She’d been the victim of big, bad Grant Tyler, a terrible, horrible man. The catastrophe in Emma’s world became all about Laura, and the pain of Laura and Grant’s betrayal was insignificant to anyone but her. Laura had been cruelly used! Emma had merely been hurt. Was there really any comparison? No one seemed to care what Laura and Grant together had done to Emma. What they’d done to her all summer long.

When Emma couldn’t speak civilly to Laura or sit at the dinner table with her, when she couldn’t swallow the betrayal and move on as commanded by her parents, her mother had lost patience with her.

“You think you’re the only one hurt by this? Think about Laura! Think what that bastard must have said, how he must have lured her in. She’s humiliated, and the fact that you won’t forgive her just makes it that much worse!”

“Forgive her?” Emma had cried. “She was sleeping with my father!”

“Don’t say that,” her mother had said angrily. “Never let me hear you say that out loud!”

“But it’s true, Mom!” Emma had insisted. “They were having sex in his bed while I was in my room reading a stupid book.”

Her mother had sighed and pressed her fingers to the base of her jaw and made little circular motions. “Why do you always do this? Why do you always make things so goddamn hard? This situation is bad enough as it is, and you’re just making it so much harder, Emma! You’re selfish! Why does everything have to be about you? Are you jealous of Laura? Is that it? Look, I can completely understand it if you are, but you don’t need to kick her when she’s down, don’t you get that?”

“You have to be kidding,” Emma had said flatly.

“I’m not! I can’t understand why you make such a big deal out of something that happened to Laura!”

Emma was stunned. How could her own mother not see what had happened to her? “She betrayed me, Mom! She ruined my chance to know my dad, and he betrayed me, too! He came for me, and she stole him!”

“Oh, Emma,” her mother had said, and with a sigh, she’d tucked in a stray wisp of Emma’s blond hair. “You’e so na?ve. Do you really think Grant came here for you? He came here for me. I’ve told you, he’s always been crazy about me. He came to see if I would leave Wes for him now that he’s got money, and save him the child-support hassle.”

Emma had been so stunned she could scarcely speak. “That . . . that’s not true,” she’d stammered. “He said he came for me.”

“Whatever,” her mother had said, and had smiled sadly. “I’m sorry, baby,” she said, patting Emma’s leg. “But that’s what he wanted, and when he couldn’t have me, I guess he used Laura to hurt me. You know the only reason I agreed to let you go to Vegas with him was because I thought it would be good for you to see something other than Southern California. I should have known you wouldn’t see anything but despicable behavior.” Her mother had gone on to say some other things that all boiled down to how Emma needed to get over her hurt because Laura was na?ve, too, and hadn’t known what she was doing, had been lured in by the big bad wolf, bless her heart.

Emma wished she could will it all away and forget that summer had happened. She wished she could simply forget how painful it was, and how twisted it was that she ached over Laura’s betrayal. She’d never told anyone, but it somehow felt as if her father had cheated on her, had picked Laura over her.

It was sick, so sick, to be jealous of what had happened with Laura. Not what she’d done with Emma’s father—that was disgusting. But in some twisted way, her father had preferred Laura over her. Emma was jealous, and that pain had turned into her secret, her dark, awful secret.