Chapter 1

“Now Bailey, this is the last time,” I said as I pressed play on the DVD remote to start Tangled over again for at least the third time.

“But what if I wake up again?” my daughter whined from her bed.

“If you wake up again, please, for the love of daddy's sanity, pick another movie.”

I walked over to the nightstand next to the bed and turned on the tiny lamp and made sure the humidifier was running. Bailey had been sick since early afternoon, and I was just as miserable as she was. It was fifteen minutes until the clock hit three in the morning, and I hadn't even had the opportunity to close my eyes between vomiting spells, doses of medicine, and restarting movies.

“I want to grow my hair out like Rapunzel, daddy, and have the longest hair in all the world.”

“Your hair grows like your mom's – slowly. You'll be thirty by the time that happens, then you'll simply be too old to use your hair to help boys sneak into your bedroom.”

“But I want to,” she whined again.

If my girlfriend didn't get home from “shopping” with her friends soon, I thought I might commit myself.

“Bailey, let's get through a whole night of throwing up before we start a new adventure, okay? Daddy needs some sleep.”

I turned the room light out and walked over to make a small place for myself on her bed. I was way too tall to fit comfortably in a toddler bed, but I knew she would never close her eyes unless I laid with her, so I made the best of it and squeezed myself in.

The minute I did it I knew it was a bad idea, and I'd probably find myself waking up here in the morning in pain – it was a too tight of a fit, but her bed was almost as soft as my own was.

“Okay Bailey-bear,” I said with a groan as I finally found a nearly-fitting position and laid my head on the pink pillow next to hers. “You're comfy, daddy's comfy, let's go back to sleep.”

She was silent for a few minutes, and I started to think this time was going to be easy.

“Daddy?”

No such luck.

“Yeah?”

“Mommy's gone a lot.”

I was too tired to think of a good comeback appropriate enough for a four-year-old, and too upset with her mother to even care.

“Yeah, baby, she is.”

“Is she like Cinderella?”

Bailey loved every kind of princess, and everything in her world was like a fairy tale movie, but this association seriously threw even me.

“What do you mean, Bailey?”

“Cinderella rode off to a ball in a pumpkin and a pretty dress and she was gone until really late and she lost her shoe but she met Prince Charming. Is mommy like Cinderella because she's always gone until really late?”

Bailey never failed to amuse me with her Disney-warped sense of reality. Luckily it was pretty dark and she couldn't see my wry smile.

“Well, maybe she is. She has lots of pretty dresses, but she rides off to all her balls in daddy's Mercedes, not a pumpkin.”

“Does she have glass slippers?”

“Well, no,” I said. “I mean, mommy does have a lot of shoes – but no glass slippers.”

“Maybe you should buy her some glass slippers, daddy.”

This time, I couldn't help but laugh. “I'll keep that in mind, Bailey-bear.”

“Are you mommy's Prince Charming, daddy?”

I smiled, because it was flattering that the thought had even crossed my daughter's mind.

“I don't know, baby. Do you think I'm like Prince Charming?”

“I think you're mommy's Prince Charming. I hope maybe one day I meet a Prince Charming.”

“Okay,” I said, “new rule. No more Disney movies for you. Close your eyes before you give daddy anxiety issues.”

The room was quiet except for the movie for a little bit longer, but with Bailey, silence never lasted very long.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?” I asked with a smile.

“You didn't say 'I love you'.”

I turned to look at her. My eyes had finally adjusted to the dark, and I could see her wide but exhausted eyes staring at me.

“Daddy's just so tired, he forgot. I love you, Bailey.”

“It's okay, daddy,” she said in a motherly tone. “I love you, too. Now close your eyes and go to sleep.”

She put one hand on my cheek and closed her eyes. I watched her eyelashes flutter for a few minutes and kissed her forehead, then closed my own eyes to rest them once she looked like she was starting to doze off.

Before I knew it I had dozed off myself. I opened my eyes back up once I realized what I had done and looked at the lit-up display of the clock next to the bed – 3:17AM.

“Damn,” I quietly moaned to myself. I rubbed the deep wrinkles on my forehead from lack of sleep and started to decide exactly how I would slip out of this bed without waking my little girl up again.

After about five minutes of craning into weird positions, I managed to get out quietly enough that she only stirred once. I checked the humidifier one more time before shutting off the lamp and sneaking out of the door, leaving it open a crack so I could hear if Bailey called for me again.

I realized as I walked down our staircase that one battle was over for now, but my night was not over yet. The silence in the house was deafening, which meant my girlfriend still wasn't home.

Brayden and I had met two years after the band went on our permanent hiatus. She was a model back then, but a young and naïve woman at 22. She had been working with a scam modeling agency, doing a few decent odd jobs here and there. I had met her at a small fashion show after-party in Europe, where she had told me all about her problems getting paid from her agency.

We got close, I spent the next year getting her back on her feet – helping her get a new agency, new head shots, and getting her back into modeling regularly – and we had been inseparable since then.

A few months after she had finally started becoming successful in her career, Bray had unexpectedly ended up pregnant. Bailey came into our lives a few months later and even though she was unplanned, we quickly realized that our lives would never have been the same without her.

These days, Brayden wasn't doing a lot of modeling. She had gained weight in her pregnancy and, of course, became less of an asset to big companies. Her new modeling agency had worked to glamourize her after-baby figure, which I personally found even more gorgeous than the before figure, but it was something that a good percentage of the fashion industry wasn't looking for.

For the first few months, it seemed Bray had embraced motherhood rather than focusing on the loss of her career. She spent her days cleaning, baking, and crafting with Bailey. If I couldn't find the two of them in the kitchen, I could always find them at the dining room table covered in glitter, glue and construction paper.

Then Brayden had met some new friends, and everything seemed to change overnight. Slowly, the glitter and baking utensils were replaced with late nights out and lying about where she was going. It had gotten worse over the past year, and I was growing tired of feeling like a single parent.

The first place my feet took me when I got downstairs was to the refrigerator to grab a beer. It seemed the more Bray did this, the more I found myself drinking, too. The more my own problems built up, the more I wondered where the three of us were headed – which made me drink even more. It was a stupid thing for me to do, but at night when Bailey was asleep and I was alone waiting for Bray to get home, I couldn't help myself.

I walked into the living room and stepped over the piles of toys carefully, and turned on the floor lamp beside the couch before sitting down and grabbing the remote. I was feeling completely defeated tonight, and I mindlessly scrolled through hundreds of channels before settling on late-night reruns of I Love Lucy.

I watched halfheartedly, focusing more on staying awake and constantly checking the driveway and the garage to see if Bray had pulled up. Four o'clock quickly came, and I was about to call the police when I saw bright headlights pull into the driveway. Bray was finally home from her longest all-nighter in several months, and I couldn't wait to hear the ridiculous explanation that she would give me this time.

I took a deep breath to calm myself as I heard her key in the doorway turn. When she stumbled inside a few seconds later, she looked at me briefly, apparently startled that I was still awake. Then she pursed her lips and a nasty little smile formed on her face.

She didn't say a word as she locked the door back up and threw her coat up on the hook on the wall, right next to Bailey's pink jacket, still smiling the whole time. She turned and walked through the living room in her heels, strutting with her single shopping bag waving at her side. She smiled the whole way to the kitchen and threw her bag and keys on top of the kitchen island, landing with a clang on the ceramic tile.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” I said without looking at her. “Nice of you to finally turn up, Bray. I started to think that Victoria's Secret swallowed you up.”

“Big sale,” she remarked, holding strong to her bitchy attitude.

“That must have been one hell of a sale for it to last until four in the morning.”

“We went out for drinks afterward,” she spit at me.

“Well, I hope you had fun. I'll make sure to explain that to your daughter when she asks for the fifth time tonight why mom wasn't home to tell her goodnight. Wish I knew what to tell her about the past six months worth of missed goodnights, though.”

“Why don't you tell her the same thing you've been telling all your friends – that I'm just a huge bitch.”

All I could do was stare at her – this was not the same Brayden that I knew and had fallen completely in love with. She had turned into a monster.

“You want me to go and wake the kid up and tell her goodnight? I will, if you'd like.”

“She's got the flu and she's finally asleep without a fever, so no, I don't want you to. And if you can't wipe that little smile off your face and drop your attitude, you should go stay with one of your drunken friends for the night.”

She smiled wider instead, and chuckled.

“Those who live in glass houses, Lance. Bailey's so lucky to have a dad who's always halfway past drunk. You've been drinking again tonight, too. I can still smell it on you.”

“I've been home. Which is a far reach from you – you've been out of this house at least fourteen hours, probably drinking for the past seven or eight. Who knows what you've been doing the rest of that time; you haven't been here taking care of anything.”

“I'm sorry I'm not perfect like you are,” she said sarcastically.

“Brayden, I'm not asking you to be perfect. I'm asking you to be here. I'm sick of being a single parent, getting no sleep because Bailey is up a million times a night missing her mother, or I'm waiting up for you to make sure you get home safe, or even at all. I'm tired of the drama. It was okay when we were teenagers, but we're parents now. It's time you – we – start acting like it.”

“Drama!” she scoffed. “Drama. You want to know what I think of your drama, Lance?”

She threw the fridge open and grabbed the last two bottles of beer, and pulled a bottle opener out of the drawer hastily, throwing the drawer closed. She proceeded to pull the tops off both beer bottles and pour the contents down the drain, looking at me with satisfaction.

“That's really mature, Bray.”

“You want mature? I'll give you mature.”

All of a sudden the look in her eyes became wild – almost possessed. She reached down and pulled her top over her head, and tossed it over to the kitchen table.

“Bray, what are you doing?”

“You wanted mature. Is this mature enough for you, baby?”

She leaned down and took off her high heels one by one, using the counter for leverage. She was obviously drunk; I could smell the liquor combining with her perfume.

“I can take it all off for you, Lance.”

“Bray, knock it off. Quit acting like this.”

“Like what, honey?” She walked away from the counter, pulling the zipper down on her skirt. “You used to love it when I acted like this. You thought it was sexy. You don't think I'm sexy anymore?”

She walked right up to me and her face was inches away from mine. With her so close now, the smell of alcohol overpowered her perfume. She used her finger to rub up and down my inner thigh, all the way up to my groin.

“I used to be enough for you. Am I still enough for you?”

As she was about to grab my crotch to take off my pants, I grabbed her hand and pulled it away.

“Stop.”

She looked in my eyes, surprised that I would refuse her so forcefully. I stared back for a few seconds before letting go of her hand and walking off.

I was about halfway to the stairs when I felt her grab my hand and spin me around, and the next thing I knew I landed back-first hard against the wall.

“Just let me give you what you want.” Her lips were inches away from mine as she talked, deciding whether she would move in for more. “I know you want it.”

She finally leaned in and put her lips against mine. When she kissed me, it didn't feel like I was kissing the same woman that I had a few years ago. This new wild woman wasn't someone that I felt any kind of emotions for.

“I'm done,” I yelled as I broke the kiss and pushed her away from me. “It's over, Bray. I'm leaving.”

As I made my way up the stairs, I heard her following closely behind me.

“I've wasted six years of my life on your sorry ass!” she yelled towards me. “Six years with a loser from a fucking boy band.”

I went immediately to the closet and pulled my suitcase out of the closet. It got stuck on several boxes and I finally had to give one hard pull, spilling out other things in the process. All I wanted was to get out of here as fast as I could.

“You're a D-lister on the brink of falling off the food chain all together. One more little push, and you'll be done – off the radar.”

As I pulled any random clothes off their hangers and threw them in the suitcase, she pulled shirts and pants out of my hands and threw them on the floor.

“The only thing that's off the radar is you,” I said. “I don't know what the hell is wrong with you tonight, but you're just fucking crazy.”

“What's wrong with me is you,” she said. “You're such a loser. I don't know why I ever bothered with you.”

As I was throwing clothes in, she opened the door to the patio and walked outside, still in only her bra and underwear. As I walked over to see what she was going to do now, I saw her saunter over to the railing.

“Hey New York,” she yelled into the air. “Lance Bass is nothing but a washed up boy band loser. He can't even get it up anymore! He must have hung around his boy toys too long and turned gay – he doesn't find me sexy anymore!”

I gritted my teeth and grabbed one of my shirts that Bray had tossed around off the bed, and walked outside. I wrapped the shirt around as much of her top as I could and grabbed her by both shoulders and pushed her back inside.

“Have you gone completely out of your fucking mind?” I screamed. “It's not enough to pull me into your insanity, you have to wake up the whole neighborhood and pull them in, too?”

“Just shut up and get out,” she said with a smile. “I don't want to be with you. Get your shit and get out, you fucking loser.”

“Gladly,” I said as I zipped up the suitcase and pulled it off the bed.

As I walked down the stairs and grabbed the keys to the Mercedes off the kitchen counter, she followed me the whole way, laughing and spouting off more nonsense. I'd stopped listening; I was only interested in getting out of here to find a hotel so I could pick Bailey up in the morning. I was finally going to change our situation entirely. We were starting over – without psycho Cinderella.