Jolene walked back into her shop with blood drying on her jaw and her hands still shaking.
Roxy: Sit down. I'm getting the first aid kit and the good whiskey.
Her foot nudged a fat brown envelope with the bank's name on it, and her stomach went cold.
She opened it because her hands needed something to do.
The letter said her shop was security for a business loan of two hundred thousand dollars.
Jolene: What the fuck.
Dean's name sat at the top, signed in the same blue pen he used at breakfast.
Roxy: Read that again. Slow.
Jolene: He put my bakery up as collateral. If his loan goes bad, they take my shop.
Roxy: That slimy shit of a husband. This building is yours. Your name, your sale.
Jolene: Except every paper I signed when we married, because I trusted him.
She said it flat, and the flatness was worse than crying.
The bell over the door rang, and Dean walked in like he still lived there.
He had a smear of Monica's lipstick on his collar and he did not bother hiding it.
Dean: You made a scene, Jo. On my big day.
Jolene: Get out of my shop.
Dean: Your shop? This little box of cupcakes?
Dean: You're nothing without me, Jo. You know that, right? Nothing.
Roxy: Say that again and I'll break your nose with a rolling pin.
Dean: Fat girls don't get to threaten me.
Roxy: Honey, I'm not threatening. I'm promising.
He ignored Roxy and stepped in close, close enough that she smelled his cologne and Monica's perfume under it.
His hand went around her wrist, not hard this time. Just firm.
Her body remembered him anyway, and her skin went hot and then sick, and she hated both feelings.
Dean: Sign the building over to me and I'll let you keep baking.
Dean: Or the bank takes it and you sweep floors for a living.
Jolene: Get your hand off me. Now.
He squeezed once, hard enough to hurt, then let go like it was nothing.
Dean: Tomorrow I'll bring a lawyer and take what's mine. Have the keys ready, sweetheart.
The door clicked shut, and it sounded like a punch.
Jolene's hands were shaking, so she dialed the one man she knew would not ask questions.
Jolene: Dad. I need every lock in this shop changed tonight.
Gus: I'm already in the truck. Don't open that door for anyone, baby.
Gus showed up in twenty minutes with a metal box of deadbolts and grease under his nails.
Gus: Nobody takes my girl's shop. Nobody.
He drilled the old lock out and swore at it the whole time, and she loved him for every word.
While Gus worked, Dean came back and stood outside the glass, talking on his phone and smiling.
He tapped the window once, and Jolene's stomach turned over.
Gus: He can knock all night. Only new keys open this door now.
Roxy went into the back and came out holding a folder she had been sitting on for a month.
Roxy: I had these drawn up in March. You cried and said give him one more chance.
Roxy: The one more chance is over, baby.
Jolene opened the door herself and stood on her own step with the folder out in front of her.
Jolene: Dean. These are divorce papers. Take them.
Dean: You can't afford a lawyer, Jo. You can't afford anything.
She pressed the folder into his chest and something in her own chest opened up like a door.
Jolene: I can afford to hate you for free.
Jolene: You're not taking my shop, and you're not taking my name. You're just the man who's leaving.
Lupe came down Vine Street with fries in one hand and a cheap champagne bottle in the other.
Lupe: Roxy texted. I brought salt and something that pops.
Jolene ate a fry on her own doorstep, and it tasted like the first good thing of the year.
She caught her face in the new glass and did not hate what she saw looking back.
Two years of being told she was nothing, and she had never once been nothing.
She let herself think about being touched by hands that actually wanted her, and the thought did not scare her at all.