to be good for you. You need some good in your life after everything that happened with Lance.”
Jade groaned and pushed herself up from the table. “I don’t want to talk about all that tonight.”
“We’re not. And I didn’t mean to bring it up. I’m just saying that I think you deserve some happiness. I think there are good things on the horizon for you. Even if your real family doesn’t turn out to be everything you’ve hoped for, there can still be positives. Maybe you’ll get a huge settlement from the hospital and you can buy a nice house. That would be something good.”
Jade picked up the half-empty bottle of wine from the counter and carried it back to the table. She refilled both their glasses. “It would certainly help,” she admitted. “Lance’s addiction ate through all our savings. I’m making decent money now, but things like a house are just pipe dreams with the cost of living in Charleston.”
She set the bottle on the table and sat down in the chair. “Things weren’t supposed to end up like this, you know? Everyone said that Lance was the smart choice for me. He was older, established, educated... Marrying him was going to provide me with the stable, safe and loving home I wanted for myself and my future family. We wouldn’t struggle with money the way my parents did. Everything was supposed to end up perfectly.”
“No one could’ve expected what happened to Lance, honey,” Sophie said. “They call it the opioid epidemic for a reason. A lot of people get caught up in it without meaning to. He was never the same after that car accident.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
It had been the beginning of the end for their marriage, although Jade didn’t know it then. She was too busy fighting her way through her last year of pharmacy school to see the warning signs. He’d needed the pain pills after his back surgery, but the more he took, the harder it was for him to manage things at work. The more stress he was under, the more pills he needed. As he started to fail, Jade had graduated and thrived in her new career as a pharmacist. Lance couldn’t cope with the idea of her being more successful than he was, and it just fed into his existing drug problem.
The next thing she knew, the cops were at her door at 2:00 a.m. and she was being questioned about a break-in at the pharmacy where she worked. Apparently, Lance had taken her keys to steal pain pills. His doctors had recognized he had an issue, and refused to give him more pain medication, so he’d resorted to more desperate means to get it. Jade had filed for divorce before Lance could even get a public defender assigned to him. It was one thing to battle addiction, but to put her career at risk in the process seemed like a deliberate move on his part that she couldn’t overlook. He couldn’t stand her success and she was tired of propping up his ego.
“The irony of it all is that I broke things off with Harley because he was supposedly the bad boy who wouldn’t amount to anything. Lance was the good guy with a future. Harley was trouble with an angel’s smile that would lead me down the wrong path in life. I can’t help but wonder sometimes,” Jade said, as she fingered the rim of her wineglass, “what would have happened if I’d made a different choice. Did things work out the way they were meant to? Or did I go against my gut and make the worst mistake of my life by walking away from him all those years ago?”
And if it had been a mistake, Jade couldn’t help but wonder if Harley showing up on her porch was a second chance to make things right. Did she dare take the risk?
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