Gyeong stomped into the small foyer at the front of their house before Victor could finish that sentence. And by the time they caught up to her, she had already grabbed hold of the rolling suitcase and backpack he and Dawn had left in the hallway.

Dawn’s little mother charged down the hallway with their luggage, toward what Victor could only assume was the guest room of which she’d spoken so highly.

And if he thought Dawn would be any help in this argument, he was quickly disabused of that notion when she rushed after her mother, calling, “Mom hold on, let me help you with that!”

This was supposed to be about revenge.

But as Victor watched them go, he couldn’t tell what the hell the situation had become.

21

DAWN

So Victor meeting my mom didn’t go quite as I’d expected.

Technically, it was a perfectly pleasant evening. Mom couldn’t drink or eat anything after 9 PM, so after watching an unnecessarily long Marvel movie with us, she knocked off to bed.

We stayed up for a little while longer. In the same room but not necessarily together.

Victor had been on his phone nonstop since dinner. If I quizzed him on the movie we all supposedly just watched, I doubt he would’ve been able to answer any questions about it.

That was A-OK with me. I still wasn’t quite able to wrap my head around him being here. In my parents’ home. Like, chatting with my mom over dinner. And telling her she could choose the television fare because he was okay with whatever she wanted to watch.

Mom doted on Victor the same way she used to fuss over Byron. I could barely stand to go to the bathroom without her asking Victor if he needed anything while I was up. Then grousing behind his back in sign language that “a good wife shouldn’t leave it to the mother-in-law to do the asking.”

“He must really love you,” my mother had said earlier at Cal-Mart when we were shopping. “I don’t know many husbands who would come all this way with their wife just to keep a mother-in-law he’s never met company.”

“Maybe he was curious about you,” I suggested, even though I really did not want to talk about Victor. Especially with my mother.

“Or maybe he loves you that much. I see the way he looks at you whenever your back is turned.”

Yes, like a psycho who thinks he owns me because of something that happened fifteen years ago. I swallowed down the lump of bitterness that welled in my throat. What I had with Victor could be called a lot of things. But love wasn’t one of them.