To Break a Vow Read online

  “Nope.”

  “Is she a friend of Mommy and Daddy’s? Do we know her?”

  Toy shook her head slowly. “I don’t know her but you might. Or…well, you should.”

  Something in her tone made me pause in the middle of lathering my wrists and stare at her. “Who is she, Toy?”

  “She says that she’s your mother-in-law.”

  If Toy would have swung on me in slow motion, she would have given me a black eye as I stood frozen, staring at her in disbelief.

  “Well?” she asked.

  My response was to dry my hands on my apron before removing it to hang it on a hook. I pushed through the swinging door, Toy hot on my heels as I headed for the lobby.

  “That’s her over by the condiment bar. Pedal pushers and sophisticated bob.”

  “What is she doing here?” I muttered to myself, standing in front of the stock room, not yet ready to approach the first family member of Jereth’s outside of Jeremiah that I’d ever seen.

  “That’s what I’m wondering. I thought you filed for a divorce.”

  “I did.”

  Toy bit her lip. “Well, maybe she’s bringing you the signed papers.”

  Fear clutched at my chest at the idea that this woman had brought herself here from Lord only knew where to bring me documents that Jereth himself couldn’t be bothered to bring. I wanted those papers, but although I hoped that wasn’t why she was here, I wasn’t clear on what I expected from her.

  “I’ll be back.”

  By the time I’d made it to the condiment bar, the woman had finished doctoring up her drink and turned in my direction. She was a few inches taller than me with pretty brown skin and minimal grays in her perfectly styled bob. Even without a smile on her face, it was clear to me where Jereth and his brother got their cheekbones.

  “Latonya?” she asked.

  “That’s me. How can I help you?”

  She held out a hand. “My name is Sabrina Hawkins, Jereth’s mother. I was hoping for a moment to speak with you.”

  I shook her hand, feeling overexposed under her shrewd stare. “I’d say it’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Hawkins, but considering the circumstances of your surprise visit that would be a lie. As you can see, I’m at work and don’t currently have a moment to spare. In fact, I was in the middle of a task when you requested to speak with me.”

  She gave me a surprised look. “Oh. Forgive me; don’t your parents own this business?”

  Excuse the fuck outta me? This presumptuous ass woman had me all the way fucked up.

  Smiling to keep from saying something I would regret much—much—later, I gestured toward the front door. “You’d be correct. I suppose a selfishly demanding personality is something Jereth inherited from you. Let’s step outside for this brief conversation.”

  With narrowed eyes, she turned toward the front, and I used the few seconds that it took to make it outside to calm myself down. I will not let Jereth’s mama make me act a fool at my place of business.

  I repeated that over and over in my mind like a mantra as I waited for her to take a seat at one of the tables out front before sitting across from her.

  “Alright, Mrs. Hawkins, please put me out of my misery and explain why it’s so important that you speak to me now instead of when my shift is over.”

  “For starters, you can call me Sabrina.”

  “Why?”

  She blinked a few times. “Well, I—because we’re family.”

  My lip curled as I frowned. “No, we aren’t. I don’t even know you and you surely don’t know me.”

  “I know that you’re my son’s wife. That makes you my daughter.”

  Months ago, that declaration would have brought warmth to my heart, but today, it only made me even angrier at Jereth for denying me the opportunity to develop a relationship with a woman who actually cared about things like that.

  I shook my head bitterly. “The only thing I am to Jereth is his future ex-wife.” Shrugging, I added, “Maybe he’ll tell you about the next woman he marries on a whim then you can call her your daughter. For now, Latonya will be just fine. Or you can call me nothing at all since I’m sure we’ll never see each other again after today.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  With a longsuffering sigh, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and checked the time.

  “Look, I don’t know where you work, but here, at this coffee shop, we don’t schedule people to work unless their presence is necessary. My break will be over shortly, so you have seven more minutes of my time. I’d advise you to cut the fluff and get to the point.”

  Lips thinning, shoulders squared, she looked like she was preparing for battle, and maybe she was. There wasn’t going to be any love lost between the two of us since I’d never known her to love her in the first place.

  “Fine. I want to know why you’re divorcing him.”

  Her answer genuinely surprised me, and I sat back in my seat. “Why are you asking me instead of him?”

  “Once that divorce decree arrived on my desk, I decided the best thing to do was come straight to the source.”

  “Ma’am—”

  She held up a hand, cutting me off. “Jereth loves you! Whatever the problem is, there’s a solution. You can’t just give up on him!”

  Jerking back in my seat, I shook my head. “Now, hold up just a gotda—a doggone minute! You don’t know one thing about me to be accusing me of giving up on him! You don’t know how hard I’ve been fighting for that man!”

  She lifted both of her palms in the air and her tone adjusted to something less accusing, more coddling. “No, you’re right. I don’t know you at all, but I do know Jereth.”

  “Well, that makes one of us. Do you not see anything wrong about the fact that I’ve been married to that man for a year, yet this is the first time we’ve met? I don’t know any of your family, and as far as I know, none of you know me. This whole time, it felt like he was always withholding parts of himself from me, and at first, I had no problem being demanding. That was when I just wanted a piece of him, something to build with, something to grow on, and I didn’t mind asking a million and one questions and having to poke and prod for every tidbit. But then I wanted more—I needed more—I wanted everything and having to demand it got tiring. It began to feel like I was the only one who wanted something out of this, like I was looking at a potential life-mate and he was looking at a nuisance. Well—excuse my French—but I’m too fucking old to be begging a man to open himself up to me. I’m busting my ass to make sure that my twelve-year-old son doesn’t grow up to be an emotionally stunted asshole, and it would be counterproductive to attempt to maintain a relationship with a man who embodies exactly what I want my son not to be.”

  Her well-manicured finger shot into the air as she sputtered to defend her son. “Now, wait just a minute! Let me tell you someth—”

  Slapping my hands on the table, I stood up, giving her a hard look. “No, you wait just a minute! Don’t even waste your breath or any more of my time trying to dispute anything I’ve said. You can’t endear me to him; hell, your presence alone tells me everything I need to know. He probably doesn’t even know you’re here. He can’t or he would have beat you to me because try as you might, to ignore the facts staring you in the face, Jereth never had any intention of us meeting, and I’m sure after today you’ll agree that it was the right decision.”

  She glared at me, a thin sheen of moisture appearing on her forehead and upper lip, and I wanted to punch something. My mama would beat my ass if she heard the way I was speaking to this woman, but I was too juiced up on anger to care.

  “Look at you. Came all the way to Texas to defend your son’s bad behavior as if he was still a toddler incapable of vocalizing his emotions. I guess he’ll always be your baby, huh?” I cocked my head to the side, snarling in disgust that it was her and not her son sitting in front of me. “Tell me, Mrs. Hawkins, do you still wipe his ass for him, too?”

  If I were a s
ane woman, the way she lurched back in her chair as if I had spat on her might have clued me in that I had gone too far. Unfortunately for Jereth’s beautiful but self-righteous mother, she had caught me on a day that I’d given my last good fuck—along with all of the change in my cup holder—to the panhandler with the dog under Beltway 8. I stepped back from the tiny bistro table and shook my head, knowing there was no way to come back from this, so I might as well finish strong.

  “I have no respect for a woman who handicaps her fully grown children. Because of your half-assed parenting, I have to suffer, not once but twice. If I ever see you again, it had better be because you are handing me a signed divorce decree; otherwise, have a nice life, Mrs. Hawkins.”

  When I walked away from that table and reentered Black Coffee, I scraped the bottom of the barrel of my willpower to ignore how long she sat at the table wiping her face and blowing her nose with tissues she must have pulled out her tiny pocketbook. And because of how long she sat out there, I was in no way surprised to hear from Jereth Simon Hawkins two days later. In fact, I’d been anticipating it and might have even gone a little harder on his mother than I normally would have with the hope that the news might reach him and he’d finally resurface.

  ♥♥♥♥

  When You Ring & He Come Running

  The call came in on the Tuesday after her visit, just past six in the morning, which was our busiest time of the day. During peak hours, we kept the cordless receiver upfront with us so that we wouldn’t have to stop working to answer it. The moment it sounded I was able to snatch it up from the shelf under the register as I rang up customers alongside Tasha.

  “Good morning! Thanks for calling Black Coffee, this is Tonya. How may I help you?”

  “Tonya.”

  It felt like I hadn’t heard his voice in forever. The timbre of it somehow managed to ignite both my desire and rage and the melodic way he said my name made my stomach jump. Still, my rage tamped that down quickly, and I feigned ignorance. Never had I claimed to be fully delivered from my immaturity.

  “Yes, this is Tonya. How may I help you?” I kept my voice pleasant and unassuming like it would be if I were talking to a regular customer and not my husband of over a year. He chuckled and I lost my train of thought while counting back change to the man in front of me. Biting my lip, I started over and thanked the man for his patience before pressing the phone to my chest and asking Tasha to cover the front for me while I took my call in the back office. As soon as I cleared the swinging door that led to the stock room, I lifted the phone back to my ear.

  “You can help me by explaining the conversation you had with my mother.”

  “Oh,” I exclaimed suddenly as if I’d just realized who I was speaking with. “I’m so glad I have you on the phone. Did you receive those papers I mailed to you a month ago? Neither I nor my lawyer has heard anything, and Danielle was starting to get worried.”

  “Hold up with all of that; I need to know what you said that had her bawling into the phone.”

  Gritting my teeth, I struggled to maintain a neutral tone. “Well, actually, those papers are a bit more important, so if you could just—”

  “I know damn well you’re not going to tell me that anything is more important than someone disrespecting your mother. Nah, I know how you get behind yours and—”

  His intimating that he knew me was the last straw. It felt like a slap in the face, another swift reminder that, while I’d put all of my efforts into building something real with him, he silently pulled bricks from the foundation when I wasn’t looking. The fury washed over me and I let it—embraced it, even. Being ignored was trying, being talked over was difficult, but being gaslighted was un-fucking-acceptable.

  “You have a lot of gotdamn nerve calling me about your mother—a woman that I’d never met until she strolled her pompous ass into my place of business earlier this week, demanding that I halt the dissolution of a marriage that she didn’t even know about! She’s a fucking bully and bullies always want to turn on the waterworks when they get called out on their shit. Fuck you and your crybaby-ass mama! Sign the motherfucking divorce papers and lose my fucking number you—” My screams halted in my throat as I was startled by the phone being snatched out of my grip and slammed onto the base located on the desk.

  Chest heaving, I whipped around, coming face-to-face with my own mama who was staring at me with what looked like a mixture of fury and pity in her eyes.

  “Mama…”

  She shook her head. “Uh uh. I know I raised you better than this. Standing here, yelling at the top of your lungs…” she trailed off as I collapsed into the chair in front of the desk, shame bringing heat to my face.

  “Mama, I’m so tired!” I cried helplessly, falling forward and burying my face in my hands. She had raised me better than this, and I was making a right fool of myself. This wasn’t me—wasn’t how I behaved—but somehow, that man got under my skin, and all I could do was scream out my irritation. If Evan could see me now, he’d probably keel over from shock. The only time I’d ever lost my temper with him was when his parents tried to fight me for custody after our divorce and most recently behind that bird-brained woman he called his fiancé.

  My mama’s hands danced across my shoulders before settling at the back of my neck and soothing the tension she found there with her nimble fingers. “Some of it is exhaustion, sure. But much of it is because you love him.”

  My shoulders quaked under the force of unreleased sobs. Despite how much I wished I could say different, I did. I loved Jereth, and for my love to not be reciprocated was an unbearable pain.

  “When will it stop hurting?”

  It was an unfair question, I knew, because it was one she wouldn’t have the answer to. I ignored the irony of asking my mama for help after criticizing another woman days earlier for only trying to do the same thing for her child. But Cynthia Black wasn’t a woman who gave away the answers to the riddle, no matter how frustrated me and my sisters became.

  “I can’t tell you that, baby. Only time will tell.”

  Reaching across the desk, she pulled a box of tissue toward me, shoving a few sheets into the gap between my thumb and forefinger and kissing the top of my head with a whisper that she’d give me a few more minutes to cry before expecting me to return to my post behind the register. Nodding, I blew my nose while she left me in her office alone, closing the door behind her. Using every one of those few minutes she’d allotted me, I mentally shook myself. There was a time and a place for everything, and the back office during peak was neither the time nor the place, so I shuffled into the bathroom in the corner of the stock room to splash some cool water on my face to help me calm down. When I opened the door to head back out front, I was face-to-face with Toy. She stood outside the bathroom with her fist in the air mid-knock and a pinched expression on her face.

  “What? What is it?”

  Toy puffed out a breath of frustrated air and met my eye. “He’s out there.”

  This was like deja vu. That jumping sensation in my belly returned, and I placed a hand on my abdomen in an attempt to quell the movements inside. “He” could have been anyone, from my son to my ex-husband, but from the way she spat out the words like they clipped her tongue on the way out, I knew she could only mean one person.

  “It’s fine, Toy. Let’s just get back to work.”

  Unconvinced, she eyed me. “Fine? You sure about that?”

  With a nod, I skirted around her and headed up front. “I’m positive. I refuse to act unprofessionally in front of customers for any reason.” Customers and professionalism were my only saving grace these days.

  Pushing the swinging door open, I stopped first at the hand-washing sink near the coffee brewers then took up my post behind the second register, jumping right back into work to help Tasha get the line down. After taking orders for twelve back-to-back customers, filling black coffee orders and preparing hot teas, I hazarded a glance around the lobby, twisting my bottom lip to
the side when I didn’t see my enigmatic husband anywhere. As the last person in line stepped up to Tasha’s register, I turned around to check the brew station, noting that two of the three urns were low. Methodically, I set about grinding whole coffee beans and dumping them into a filter above the urns to begin the five-minute brewing process. I then moved to the pastry case to remove the empty bun pans, thanks to the morning rush, working in silence for ten full minutes before I felt Tasha tap me on the shoulder.

  “Just a minute, Tasha,” I tossed over my shoulder.

  Setting the pans on the back counter, I wiped my hands on my apron and turned to my sister, my heart seizing in my chest as my eyes collided with Jereth’s. He stood in front of the stock room door on our side of the counter with his hands shoved into the pockets of his rust-colored slacks. The pale yellow shirt he wore was unbuttoned at the top, revealing a few inches of mahogany skin at the base of his throat. Jereth knew damn well how good he looked, and for those few short months that I had been able to call him mine, I’d admired his confidence and knowledge of self.

  “Surprise!”

  Tasha started singing the chorus to Family Reunion by The O’Jays while she waved her hands to the side like a Nubian version of Vanna White displaying a shiny, new puzzle.

  “Well, well, well. Look what the mangy cat dragged in.” Toy slammed a bottle of multi-purpose cleanser on the counter by the register and glared at Jereth.

  Though Toy was on the other side of the counter, it suddenly felt incredibly crowded with all of us in this space together, and I had no idea where my mama had disappeared to. Breezing by my baby sister, I pushed past Jereth and headed to the back of the stock room in quick, determined strides. I was digging into my locker when I heard the distinctive gait that I’d come to recognize and even listen for on many occasions.

  “Tonya.”

  Just hearing him say my name caused my nipples to tighten uncomfortably against my bra, but having him here—within arm’s length—set my soul aflame. Despite my head being pissed that it had taken me cursing out his mother for him to resurface, my heart and my body were thrumming with the memory of what he could do to me now that he was here. Before I could turn and face him head-on, I needed to get my shit together. Hard nipples and a throbbing pussy made it difficult to oust a man from your life, even if it was in your best interests to do so. The moment my fingers grasped the edges of the envelope, I felt a sense of resolute calm fall over me.