Page 21 of Faking Forever
“What would you do without me, Lizzy?” he asked as he exited the house and Beth shook her head with an adoring little smile, before suddenly remembering Kenny’s presence.
“I’m so sorry, Kenny,” the woman apologized. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your conversation. It looked serious.”
“Oh no, it wasn’t. I was merely telling Gideon that Smith is spending Christmas with his sister.”
“Of course,” Beth said with a warm smile. “Tina must be thrilled to have him there. I know she was a little gutted that he missed the twins’ first Christmas last year.”
Kenny stared at Beth in consternation.
“You know Tina?”
Beth gave her an equally confused look in return. “Yes, of course. We met at your engagement party. And then at your wedding.”
Right.
“I didn’t realize you kept in contact with her.” The words sounded cold. Stilted. And Kenny winced inwardly, wishing she didn’t sound like she had a massive stick up her arse. But she didn’t always know how to relate to Beth. Or Tina, for that matter.
“We exchange occasional texts,” Beth said, and her soft gray eyes had a wariness in them that hadn’t been there before. As though she was navigating a verbal minefield. “That’s okay with you, right?”
A bit too late to ask now, isn’t it? Kenny thought snarkily. Then immediately felt mean and small.
“Oh my goodness, of course it’s fine.” She strove for casual but still managed to sound insincere. “I just didn’t know that you’d exchanged contact details and become friends.”
“Friendsis stretching it a bit. We’ve only met those two times,” Beth said, still looking and sounding guarded. “But I like her. She’s lovely.”
“Yes. She is.”
Ofcourseher sisters-in-law had hit it off. Ofcoursethey’d befriended each other. While Kenny could barely have anything resembling a pleasant conversation with either woman. Once again she felt isolated and terribly lonely.
Beth hovered for a moment, looking like she longed to be just about anywhere else right now.
“Are you okay? Do you need anything? More wine?”
Kenny’s eyes dropped to her nearly full glass of cabernet and she shook her head. She hated how Beth often treated her with such stilted formality. The woman was warm and friendly to everyone else and happily bossed the Hawthorne men around with familiarity and affection, treating them like family. Around Kenny she just seemed uncomfortable and awkward.
Fern, who’d been a part of the family for all of two minutes, had been handed a glass of juice earlier with a breezy wave of the hand and told, “You know where everything is, make yourself at home and just top up whenever.”
“I’m fine, thank you,” Kenny muttered, feeling as uncomfortable as the other woman looked. “Don’t worry about me.”
Beth hovered for a moment, before nodding.
“I just have to…th-the roast?”
“Oh, of course,” Kenny waved toward the kitchen, happy to relieve them both of the burden of this awkward encounter. “Please don’t let me keep you. I wanted to have a quick chat with my father anyway.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. The old man would drill her about Smith’s whereabouts a lot more ruthlessly than Gideon had and would not be satisfied with any of the mediocre and unconvincing responses she’d given her brother.
Beth’s eyes flared with relief and she smiled.
“Okay, that’s good, I’ll just go check on the—um—the, y’know?”
Kenny knew her sister-in-law had a stutter, but she rarely heard it enter the woman’s speech around the others. When Beth spoke with her, it was always there, in hesitations, repetitions, and stumbles. And not for the first time she wondered if Beth was nervous around her.
Also not for the first time, she wondered why that was. And found herself quite helpless to find a solution to the problem. If, indeed, there was one.
Beth gave her another hesitant smile before turning away and fleeing the short distance to the open-plan kitchen, stranding Kenny in the middle of the crowd of laughing, happy people.
She took a fortifying gulp from her glass and turned toward the patio, hoping to find it a little quieter.
