“And you do?”

“I was good enough for you to make a baby with. I’d say I’m good enough to be your wife.”

Tina clenched her fists and squeezed her eyes shut. She wasn’t wrong. It was all true. And Grant had already tried to pay this woman off once.

“Tina?”

Tina spun around and the voices in the sitting room fell silent. Evangeline was looking at her curiously.

“My dear, what’s the matter?” She stepped forward and reached a hand out to Tina, who had begun to cry.

“Nothing. I’m sorry. I need to go. Please say goodbye to Beau for me.”

Tina turned around to leave and Grant was standing there in the hallway, looking sick. “Tina, sweetheart. Let me explain…”

Tina shook her head. “You can’t explain this one away, Grant. I know.” She hated her voice for shaking, she hated the tears that couldn’t stop pouring from her eyes, she hated showing him how much it hurt. She wrenched the ring off her finger, and her heart cried out as she did it. She’d worn it for less than 24 hours. Her dream… it was gone. Done, just like that. She held the ring out to Grant.

“Don’t do this,” he said, his eyes pleading and growing moist. “Tina, I swear, it didn’t mean anything to me…”

Tina set the ring on the table in the hallway and tried to brush past him. Grant grabbed her by the shoulders. “You’ve got to listen to me!”

“Let her leave, Grant,” Shelly said, coming up behind him and sounding bored.

“Michelle? What are you doing here?” Evangeline asked.

Tina got a good look at Shelly. She was well-dressed and looked pulled together – but Tina could see the desperation all over her, mixed with the triumph in her ploy, the oldest trick in the book. Tina was angry and she was hurt, but underneath that she felt overwhelming sadness for this woman, for Grant, and the life they had created together.

“Let me go, Grant.”

“What’s going on here?” Beau’s voice, stripped of all its jocularity boomed out from behind them. Grant looked over his shoulder like a guilty schoolboy and dropped his hands from Tina’s shoulders. Tina took the opportunity to pull away and ran out of the house without looking back and didn’t stop until she was on the street in front of the Rutledge home. She walked as quickly as she could, trying to put as much distance between herself and Grant as possible. She needed to stop crying. She probably looked a bigger fool than she felt right now, but her tears wouldn’t cooperate, coursing endlessly down her face and wetting the front of her dress.