All the Lies We Tell (Quarry Road #1)
Megan Hart
CHAPTER ONE
There might be worse things than looking out her kitchen window to watch her ex-husband smooching up on some tousle-haired blonde wearing last night’s outfit, but it sure wasn’t the first thing Alicia Stern wanted to see in the morning. Sipping her coffee with both hands warming on the mug, she leaned against the counter and listened to the soft plink-plink of her dripping faucet. Ilya had promised to fix it for her but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Of course. And no wonder, Alicia thought as the blonde drove off in a kicky little VW Bug with fake eyelashes decorating the headlights. He was too busy laying pipe to fix a leaking faucet.
Ilya waved after the car, put both hands on his hips, and arched his back. Then, with his arms flung wide, he twisted at the waist. He touched his toes. Did a couple of jumping jacks.
All in his leave-nothing-to-the-imagination boxer shorts.
Alicia’s coffee slipped down a little too fast, too hot, and she coughed. The neighbors were getting quite a show, she thought with a shrug and a shake of her head. It wasn’t any of her business what Ilya did in the mornings in his own front yard. She could no longer be held responsible for him or his helicoptering ding-dong.
She would be, though. That was part of the problem with living in a small town. Ilya could—and often did—bring home a different woman every night, but until he put a ring on one of their fingers, Alicia was still going to be the one everyone expected to keep him in line.
Her phone rang. The house line, which meant it was Dina Guttridge from the Cape Cod next door. The Guttridge family had moved in about eight years ago, their house a part of the new construction that had cropped up all along Quarry Street within the past ten years. At first, newlyweds Dina and Bill had been fine neighbors. Friendly without being overbearing. Then the children had come, one after the other, three in a row, and two years ago, a fourth. Bill Guttridge had taken a job driving long hauls.
Dina had started getting cranky.
Now she was the sort of neighbor who called about the lawn being too long on Alicia’s side, about late-night loud noises, and about the motion-detector lights being too bright. Once about the smell of the barbecue grill making her precious tots “too hungry” when it was past their bedtime. Alicia had lost her patience a while back with Dina’s constant nosiness and complaining, though she usually managed to keep her annoyances to herself in the name of keeping the neighborly peace.
“Dina. Hi,” she said before Dina could even identify herself.
“He’s almost naked! It’s January!”
Alicia bit back a chortle and peeked out her kitchen window again. From this angle she could see only Ilya’s driveway and not his front yard. Her answer wasn’t a lie. “I can’t see him, Dina.”
“But you knew who I was talking about right away, didn’t you?” Dina huffed and puffed.
Alicia imagined the other woman lifting a toddler onto her hip while she stared out of the gap between her living-room curtains. “I assumed. Yeah.”
“You’re going to have to say something to him. This is ridiculous. Go see what he’s doing!”
Alicia topped off her mug and cradled the phone between her ear and shoulder while she pulled open the fridge to find the creamer. Her parents had done some nice things to this house before moving permanently to Arizona, but they’d never upgraded their landline to a cordless model. She was tethered to the wall by the phone’s long, curling cord. So it was also not a lie when she said, “Can’t see him from here while I’m on the phone, Dina. The cord won’t stretch.”
“The cord won’t . . .” Dina huffed again. “He’s doing some sort of . . . yoga!”
Of course he was, in his own way. It looked like he’d learned from a contortionist with an extra arm, and once he got into downward dog, he pumped his pelvis against the ground a few times, probably because he suspected Dina might be watching. Alicia didn’t miss much about being married to Ilya, though occasionally—very occasionally, and usually only when she’d had a few glasses of wine—she did allow herself to remember fondly his flexibility and ability to control his breathing. “Look, Dina, if you’re so worked up about it, you call him. I can’t stop him from doing anything.”
“He’s your husband!”
“Ex-husband.” Alicia thought, and not for the first time, how simple it was to say. It made her sad, sometimes, how easily she’d been able to stop thinking of Ilya as her husband, even if nobody else seemed to manage. “We’ve been divorced for almost longer than we’ve been married, Dina.”
“So you don’t care that he was practically humping some random woman in the driveway. Right in front of my kids.”
“I don’t care about what Ilya does with random women, no. I’m sorry he’s a douche, Dina. What can I say? He’s a free spirit. Holler at him, not me.” Alicia put the creamer back in the fridge and added some sugar to her coffee, stirring it before sipping. “There’s honestly not much I can do about it, and, frankly, I don’t even want to.”
That last bit slipped out a little harsher than she’d intended, but Alicia decided she didn’t regret the words. Or her tone. It was the truth.
“Just say something to him, anyway. I know you’ll see him at work.” Dina’s voice faded, and there came a sound of scuffling. A wailing cry. She came back on the line, sounding disgruntled and exhausted and irritable, and Alicia would have had more sympathy for her if the woman hadn’t been so insistent that somehow everyone else take some responsibility for her woes. “Tell him it’s . . . well, it’s just not right that he lets his goods hang all out like that.”
“Fine. I’ll say something,” Alicia promised, if only to get Dina off the line so she could finish her coffee in peace. “I can’t make any promises about him changing his behavior.”
Dina huffed and puffed again. “He should be more considerate of the people around him! I mean, he should just think!”
“That’s Ilya for you. Not a big thinker.” Alicia hated the tone of apology that had managed to creep into her voice despite her earlier abruptness. No matter how she fought it, she was still taking the blame for him. “I’ll tell him to cool it.”