JENNIE

Stirring from my wine-induced mini-coma, I stretched my legs under the covers. Taehyung's arm around my middle pulled me closer. He slid his hand up my front, his need pressing into my backside.

"I can't," I said softly when he nuzzled my neck and kissed my jaw. "I'm hungover."

Taehyung flopped over and sighed. "How was last night?"

"Nice," I said. "Spirits were high, and the food was good."

"And the head chef? Jeff, right?"

"Seems really sweet. Poor guy doesn't stand a chance against Rosé, though."

Taehyung laughed. "How does she do it? She's hot and all, but damn. I wouldn't touch her."

I sat up and looked back at him with a frown. "Why not?"

"Who knows how many guys she's slept with? She's always seeing someone new. Gives me the creeps just thinking about it."

"Babe, she doesn't sleep with all the guys she goes out with." I got out of bed and pulled on a t-shirt. "Even if she did, who cares?"

"I'm just saying, it'd be a deal-breaker for me."

Taehyung had a tendency to tease Rosé, but it was all in good fun. What he was saying now, though? It didn't feel the same. "So if you'd found out I had a reputation, you never would have gone out with me?"

He remained quiet. Probably wise.

"You wouldn't say that if she was a man," I pointed out.

Irritated, I went to the kitchen to make coffee.

Eventually, Taehyung stumbled out in a t-shirt and boxers. "I just couldn't deal with knowing half of Chicago had seen my wife naked." He came over and kissed the corner of my mouth, his breath minty on my cheek. "I'm not going to find that out, am I?"

"Taehyung."

"I'm teasing." He took two mugs from a shelf and passed me one. "You're nothing like Rosé."

I turned to face him. "See, what do you mean by that?"

"Babe. Seriously?" Picking up the coffee pot, he continued, "Sometimes she's dating more than one guy at a time. That's disgusting."

"She's our friend," I said as he poured two cups. "Don't call her disgusting."

"She's your friend. And let's be honest, she's a little slutty. One day it'll catch up with her."

I picked up a mug from the counter and warmed my hands with it. "I know for a fact there are guys at your firm who sleep with a new woman or two every weekend. I don't call them names."

"They're assholes," he said.

"You are acting like an asshole."

"Okay. You're right. I'm wrong." He raised a palm in surrender. "The chef could be the one. I mean, look at me—I never thought I stood a chance with you, yet here I am."

He sipped his coffee.

I knew Taehyung well enough to hear the sincerity in his voice. He wasn't just saying that to end the fight, but I did smile in spite of myself. "Oh, please."

"It's true. I thought you were way out of my league. I got lucky." He squatted to pull a skillet from a cupboard. "How's an omelet sound for my hungover girl?"

I grinned. "Like maybe your asshole status is changing."

--

Horizontal on the sofa with my nose buried in Vogue , I almost didn't notice when something bounced off my calf. I lowered the magazine and retrieved my cell phone from the end of the couch.

"You know what you have to do," Taehyung said from the kitchen doorway, wiping his hands on his pajama pants. The smells of eggs, grilled peppers, and sautéed mushrooms gave way to Dawn dish soap.

My confusion morphed into panic when I remembered last night's texts with Lisa. Suddenly, I couldn't recall if I'd deleted them in my tipsy state or even exactly what I'd said. "Where'd you get this?" I asked, gripping my phone.

"Your purse in the kitchen."

I blinked at him. "What do you mean, I know what I have to do?"

Taehyung rounded the couch, sat in a recliner by my feet, and took his latest thriller from the coffee table. "Leanore. Call her."

I deflated back against the couch and pulled a pillow over my face. "Why does everyone keep saying that?"

"You can't ignore your own mother on her birthday."

"I'm not ignoring her," I said. "Why don't you call her if it's so important? Get Jisoo on the line, too. Make it a conference call."

"Jen," he said. "Come on. Just dial the numbers and wish her a happy birthday."

I pulled the pillow away and looked at my phone again. "And then what?"

"And then you can hang up. Once you tell her you love her. And that you miss her."

It was all true, but it had been for a long time. I missed who she'd been before. Before the paranoia, the excessive drinking, the divorce. Before she'd turned on my dad, on me—her own daughter—and left me with scars both inside and out that I wasn't about to reopen.

Talking with her—even talking about her—threatened to take me back to the last night we'd spent as a family.

But it made Taehyung happy to see us getting along, and I'd already threatened his sense of family once this weekend with our argument over the house.

I sighed as I picked up the phone and scrolled my contacts until I saw it.

Leanore.

"Hello?" she answered.

"Hi, Mom." There was a pause on the line. "Mom?"

"Jennie?"

"Unless you have some secret daughter I don't know about. Are you there?"

"Yes, yes," she said. "How are you?"

"I'm fine." I scratched under my nose. "I just, um, called to wish you a happy birthday."

"I didn't think I'd hear from you. It's been months."

"I know. Things have been crazy here." Taehyung cleared his throat, and I picked at something on the couch. "How've you been?"

"I'm well," she said. "I keep trying to get in touch with your father. Money's tight. I don't know what I'll do in a couple months. He won't take my calls."

"He doesn't owe you alimony anymore," I said. "As if I need to tell you."

"I don't understand why he can't just help me out, though. He has the money."

"You know why, Mom. He's not your ATM, and you've had a thriving career. Don't play the victim." When my temper began to rise, I took a breath and evened my tone. "Anyway, he's finally just now finalizing his divorce with Gina, so he has his hands full."

"That's what she gets for breaking up a marriage," Mom muttered, her usual response.

She didn't break up a marriage. You did.

I kept it to myself. There was no point arguing with her. She wanted to believe my father had cheated with Gina more than she wanted to live in the reality that he'd never crossed the line. In the months leading up to their divorce, it was my mother's increasingly frequent and extreme accusations that had driven him away—and into Gina's arms. If not physically at first, then emotionally. But who could blame my father when years of my mother's drinking and paranoia had been wearing him down?

"How's the book coming?" I asked, hoping to change the subject.

"All right."

"Care to tell me about it?"

She sighed. "It's not there yet."

"You're keeping busy, though?"

"What do you mean by that?" she asked.

"Nothing. Just making sure you aren't . . . bored."

"Stop insinuating," she said.

"I'm not, Mom." Well, maybe I was a little. She could seem coherent and still be drinking. "Actually, you sound well."

"How's Taehyung?" she asked with a lighter tone.

"He's working a lot, but he's good." I glanced at my husband, but he was engrossed with his phone. "He says 'hello.'"

"Good boy. He works hard so he can take care of you, you know. Don't take that for granted. I did, and I can tell you, it's not easy being alone. Not easy at all."

If my mother was alone, it was a prison of her own making. Taehyung would never leave me. He'd always continue to offer me love, a home, a family. For giving me the security that had been stolen from me at thirteen, I owed him a great deal.

I should never have left the house during an argument, and I especially shouldn't have flirted with another person. That was something my mother would've done, and had done, to make my dad jealous.

I'd been making out-of-character decisions ever since Lisa had entered the picture, and I couldn't really ignore that red flag anymore.

I nudged Taehyung's arm with my foot, and he put down his phone. I gave my husband a small smile, grateful he hadn't turned our argument yesterday into anything bigger than it needed to be. That he'd been waiting up when I'd come home, and had welcomed me when he could've made me feel like shit for walking out on him.

His steady emotional support held strong. Even now, from a few feet away, he comforted me.

No matter how trying these phone calls were, he encouraged me to make them, and truth be told, had I not made the call, tomorrow I would've stressed over it. I didn't want my mother to feel alone on her birthday.

"Thank you ," I mouthed to him.

He cocked his head. "What for?"

"I should get going," my mom said. "I've had a long weekend. Thank you for calling, and give Taehyung my love."

"I will. Happy birthday."

"That was nice," Taehyung said when I'd hit End.

"I tried, but you know how she can be."

He nodded slowly. "I know how you both can be."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means that . . ." He shifted in the seat. "This way that you are, Jen? You learned it from her. When it comes to you and your dad, she's cold, even if she doesn't mean it."

Cold? Did he not see how her ridiculous passion and lack of self-awareness had set fire to our family? How she'd lost everything as a result but couldn't accept an ounce of blame?

"When my dad and I left, it just gave her an excuse to be unhappy. And something to crucify us for. It's always been one extreme or the other—narcissistic indifference or irrational madness. She's never been good at expressing herself."

"Neither have you."

I crossed my legs under me, chewing the inside of my cheek. "So . . . does that mean you think I'm cold?"

"Sometimes, yeah," he said, flipping through the pages of his book but keeping his eyes on me.

"Oh." It wasn't an entirely unfair assessment, but it was nonetheless painful to hear out loud. I never meant to be cold, just not hot enough to burn those around me.

Including Taehyung.

If he truly believed I acted that way, then why describe my icy phone call just now as nice instead of calling bullshit on me? Instead of forcing me to ask my mom how she really was, or tell her how I really was? Or make me confront the reasons for him and for myself that I couldn't go deeper?

Because my ability to enact logic over emotion suited him, even if it made me cold.

And that was why Taehyung suited me.

He never would've married someone emotional and fiery like my mother. He'd never be that person, either, never pick up and disappear the way Jaehyun had done to Rosé, or drive me away as my mom had done to us.

And I'd be a complete fool to risk the stable life we'd built for the chaos and destruction my parents had subjected me to.

But was starting a family the one thing that Taehyung couldn't give up? A concession I'd have to make to keep this life? As my mother had said, he took good care of me. Whenever I called, he answered. When I told him in the morning that I needed an ingredient to make dinner, he never forgot to pick it up on his way home. Small things like that made for a big deal in a partnership.

"Could you tell if she was drinking?" Taehyung asked.

"I don't think she was."

He put an arm behind his head and glanced at the ceiling. "I know I've offered before, but we can send her some money. Now that I've got more coming in and all."

Taehyung didn't offer money to anyone, but he had a good relationship with my mom. She adored him for the stand-up guy he was, and he adored being adored. Beyond that, I didn't really get it. "Dad says that's 'enabling,'" I pointed out.

"I just feel bad," Taehyung said. "Your dad spoils you, but the second he's no longer court-ordered to send Leanore money, he completely cuts her off."

I refrained from rolling my eyes. My dad was generous, but it only looked like spoiling to Taehyung, who could be cheap. "We shouldn't send anything," I said. "The combo of free time and unearned income only made Mom's indulgences worse."

Her addictions, more like. I knew I should verbalize her disease, but nobody else ever did. Not my father, not Mack nor Davena, not even Taehyung. Nobody called her an alcoholic, so I didn't, either.

"She's in her fifties," he said. "Your mom's not going to change."

"She could change," I said, "but not until she acknowledges there's a problem."

"I just hate to see you two fight."

"We don't fight anymore," I said. "That's the underlying issue. If I say even one wrong thing, it can cause the next World War between us, or between her and my dad. So I don't say anything at all."

"What I mean is . . . when the time comes, I want our children to know their grandparents," Taehyung said.

I didn't. My toxic mother should stay away from impressionable children. But voicing that sounded harsh, and it could invite questions I knew Taehyung didn't want to ask, and ones I didn't want to answer. And I knew if I ever told Taehyung the whole truth about the night my mom had put me in the emergency room, there was a chance he'd take her side. Nobody could understand sitting on a hospital bed at dawn, answering invasive questions about my home life while I'd balled my bloody pajama top in my lap—a concert tee with Shania Twain's face on it.

But it wasn't fair to blame Taehyung for not getting it when I'd kept some of the worst details from him. It hadn't necessarily been intentional on my part, but although Taehyung was a good listener, he wasn't one to dig for more, either. He knew my father and I had left one night after an argument, and that was as much as I was willing to volunteer. As for the scar on my side that had been left behind? Taehyung never asked about it, and I was fine with that.

I looked over at him as he flipped through his book, trying to find where he'd left off. Did he think I was worse than her? Colder?

I'd lost count of how many times I'd opened my mouth to explain what it was like. How it'd felt to live through the divorce knowing that Mom cared more about losing my dad than me.

How she maybe even loved the idea of us more than the reality, and that she was happiest in her misery because she could blame it on us.

If I tried to get Taehyung to understand, and he didn't—would that mean he was right? That I was to blame for the irreparable rift between mother and daughter?

I woke up from a nap in a daze, confused by the setting sun and the warmth of a heavy blanket draped over me.

Taehyung had tucked me in. Thawed me. Yet I'd fallen asleep thinking about Lisa's suggestive texts. The balls it'd taken to send them, to comment on another man's wife's dress, to give her a pet name.

Had she thought of glittering gold and honeybees when she'd laid her head on her pillow last night?

Did she ever spend a Sunday evening with a woman, or was that too intimate?

That wasn't my business. I turned my face into the couch pillow.

I closed my eyes, giving in to a second round of sleep, when Taehyung spoke from the hallway. "Yeah?"

"Hmm?" I asked.

"You called for me."

Had I? On some level, I knew what I needed. Not silly fantasies made of lust but the steady love I already had.

I reached for Taehyung. He climbed in with me, tented the blanket, and kissed my bare shoulder.

"Do you still think I'm cold?" I whispered, looking up at him.

"No." He rubbed a smooth cheek against me. I lazily pulled him on top of me and ran the soles of my feet over his long calves. The inside of his mouth was hot and soft, and when he drew away, I almost pulled him back.

Instead, I told him to get a condom.

We made love under that too-hot blanket, sweating and groaning into each other. After a second time, we lay panting until my phone began to chime.

"That's my birth control reminder." I wiggled out from under Taehyung, but he caught my forearm. I turned to meet eyes that asked me to stay. To skip today's pill, and tomorrow's, too. The moment stretched as we stared at each other in the almost-dark punctuated by melodious chimes. But it didn't matter how desperately Taehyung wanted it or pleaded with me—I wasn't stopping birth control today. Or tomorrow, either.

Slowly, I slid my arm through his hand and left to take the pill.