“But—”
Maggie kept on moving, hoping Neve would follow. “But nothing.”
“Wait.” That was Jack. “Please. Let’s talk.” He followed her outside. Maggie handed her umbrella to Neve, but the wind twisted it inside out and in two seconds it had blown from her friend’s hands down the block.
Figures
, Maggie thought.
Neither one of us can catch a break tonight
.
She tried to jam her arms into the raincoat she’d borrowed from Eden, but she almost tripped on her damn high heels for the tenth time that night. With trembling fingers, she wrapped the belt of the coat around her waist like armor.
“Maggie, let me explain.”
“Explain what? That you forgot to mention you had a fiancée?”
He winced.
“Jesus, Jack, did you think I wouldn’t find out? Did you think you could ask me to dance and just pretend the rest of your life didn’t exist?” Her voice broke. “You can’t kiss me like that and then tell me you have someone else to go home to. And you can’t stand there now and think you can explain it all away.” She began to hiccup. “We’re leaving.”
“It’s not what it looks like.”
She didn’t let him finish. Taking Neve by the hand, she hurried toward the Honda, still parked in its lonely spot near the other exotic vehicles. A gust of wind chilled Maggie down deep, and she stepped into a puddle that splashed water halfway up her legs. She barely felt it.
Behind her, she thought she heard Jack say something else, but she didn’t trust herself to turn around or listen. She handed her last five-dollar bill to the valet attendant, jumped inside her car and pulled the door shut, ripping two of her fingernails. Beside her, shivering in the damp night air, Neve bundled herself into the passenger seat. Maggie thought she saw the dark shape of Jack on the sidewalk behind them, but she ignored him. She pulled away from the hotel so fast she spun her tires on the wet pavement. She didn’t care. Anything to get away.
“You okay?”
Maggie wiped her cheeks. She wasn’t sure if the wetness on them came from rain or leftover tears. Maybe both. She shook her head at Neve. She didn’t want to talk about it. Not until they were about fifty miles away and she could scream at the top of her lungs. Why had she let Eden convince her to come to the ball? Why had she run into Jack Major after all these years? Was the universe that desperate for a joke on her behalf?
One of those new contemporary singers crooned on the radio. She snapped the knob to the left, and it stopped with a squawk. At the corner, she slid through the stop sign and fishtailed into traffic, ignoring the horn and the angry shouts on her left.
Just let me get home
, she thought, her insides pretzeled up so tightly she was surprised she could still breathe.
Suddenly Maggie became aware of sirens wailing around them. As she looked around, she saw cones set up along the street to mark missing pavement and knee-deep puddles. Up ahead, blinking red lights broke the darkness, and she realized she was driving straight into a traffic jam. Branches hung from splintered trees, and windowless buildings surrounded them. Darkness everywhere.
Power outages
, her brain told her. While she’d been tripping merrily down Memory Lane back at the ball, a massive storm had swept the rest of the city. Only now that they were in the middle of it did Maggie realize the extent of the destruction.
“Maggie?”
“We’ll be fine. Just give me a minute.” She glanced down a couple of side streets, but without a sense of the city’s layout, especially at night, she didn’t dare take a detour. The cars ahead of them began to slow as a trail of taillights blinked through the precipitation. Thirty miles an hour. Twenty-five. Fifteen. The traffic became a slow-motion conga line, each following the tracks of the one ahead. Miles from the city limits, flooding and stranded vehicles had turned Boston’s streets into a giant parking lot.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” She’d finally decided to leave, and now she couldn’t even get out of town.
Maggie’s cell phone rang.
“Do you want me to answer it?” Neve asked.
Maggie shook her head.
But Neve had already picked it up and checked the incoming number. “It’s Eden.”
“Go ahead, then,” Maggie said. She let a Cadillac pull in front of her.
“Hello? Hi, it’s Neve. No, we’re—” Neve glanced at Maggie. “Where are we?”
“Damned if I know.”
“About a mile or so from the hotel. We ran into traffic. It’s pretty backed up out here.” Neve didn’t say anything for a minute, just nodded. “Let me ask her.” She put the phone down on her lap. “Want to stay at her place tonight?”
“No.”
Neve lifted the phone and then put it down again. “You’re sure?”
Maggie rubbed her forehead and willed the cars ahead of her to move. “Yeah.”
I don’t want to risk seeing that lying son of a bitch again
.
And anywhere in Boston is too close to Jack.
Neve nodded. “Okay.” She listened for another minute. “Eden said she talked to Kurt, and if you still need the money, he could have it for you by Monday morning.”
Monday morning? That’s too late. Hell, tomorrow past noon is too late.
“Forget it.”
Neve murmured something into the phone and hung up. “She said to call if we change our minds.”
Maggie had no intention of changing anything, least of all her plan to get out of Boston as fast as possible. She shook her hair free from the ponytail. The car ground to another halt and she put it into park this time, taking a moment to loosen the strap on her shoe. Already, the arch of her foot ached from the stop and go effort of working her way through traffic. As they waited, a siren went screaming by them, a police car squeezing through as it responded to something in the darkness up ahead.
Maggie’s neck tightened. She glanced at the dashboard clock: a little after twelve. Almost seven hours in Boston, and she hadn’t accomplished a single thing. She hadn’t found Dillon. She hadn’t found a way to get the fifteen thousand dollars. Worst of all, she’d run into the one person who still haunted her dreams. She’d danced with him. She’d kissed him, for God’s sake. She’d let herself try out the feelings that hadn’t died after all, only to find out he belonged to someone else.
A space opened up in front of them, and she jammed the car back into drive. Through the next light, around a bend, and two lanes became one. The car ahead of her swerved, and Maggie braked and skidded to the right. Neve whispered a prayer under her breath.
“We’re okay.” The Honda straightened out, its tires found a spot on the road to grip, and they crept forward again.
“This is really a mess,” Neve said.
For a minute, Maggie wasn’t sure she meant the line of traffic in front of them or the scene in the hotel she’d left behind her. Both seemed pretty bad to her. Tangles, no matter where you looked. All she knew was that she needed to keep moving forward. She held onto that thought with a single-minded focus and tried to swallow away the lump in her throat.
“Maggie?”
“We’ll be fine.” She tried to sound confident. “There’s probably an accident or a stopped vehicle up ahead, and once we get past that and onto the highway, it’s only fifty miles back to Hart’s Falls. The rain’s stopped, anyway.” She tried not to notice the vast puddles on either side of them, the sections of road they crossed that lay under water. Every once in a while, the car hydroplaned on the slick street, and she hoped they’d make it home without an accident.
“You’re sure you’re okay?”
“Fine,” Maggie said again. “I’ve driven in worse conditions than this.”
“I wasn’t talking about the weather.”
She chose not to answer and glanced at her gas gauge instead. Thank goodness she’d had the unusual foresight to fill her tank before leaving town earlier that evening. The orange stem hovered just below Full. Turning the radio back on, she searched the AM stations, hoping for a travel report or some clue to the problem.
“…traffic conditions are slow both in and around the city…”
No kidding.
“Travelers should use caution when traveling in flooded areas and find alternate routes to avoid accidents on Tremont and Washington Streets, as well as Harrison Avenue.”
Maggie peered up at the street sign just ahead of them. Tremont. Of course.
So close. So far
. And nowhere, nowhere to go to escape the turmoil inside her head. She counted the streetlights, dark orbs around them, and tried to calm the pain in the center of her chest. Despite her best efforts, her mind returned again and again to the moment in the foyer. To Jack’s fiancée. His betrayal. Her heart breaking apart at the realization that she still ached for him. Tears trickled down her cheeks, surprising her. She wouldn’t have guessed she had any left to shed.
A memory from their first summer together stole its way inside her head. She didn’t even have enough strength to push it away.
*
“Hi, Mom.” Maggie stood on the front stoop, one hand wrapped in Jack’s. Wild rose bushes twined around their feet and saturated the air with thick perfume. They’d decided to stop by at the last minute, delaying their return to school after a long weekend at the shore.
“Maggie! Jack! What a wonderful surprise!” Hillary smiled at her daughter and the tall man standing beside her. She pulled them both close for a hug.
“Sorry we didn’t call. It was a last-minute thing.”
Hillary waved a hand as she ushered them inside. “Please. You never have to call if you’re coming home. You don’t do it enough,” she said over her shoulder. “Dinner’s just about ready. John’s staying late at the office tonight, so I‘m glad someone’s here to eat all this food. I always make too much.”
“Mom, you don’t have to feed us. Really.” Maggie let Jack’s fingers go as he ducked into the hall bathroom to wash up. She joined her mother in the kitchen and swiped her finger around the edge of a batter bowl. “But it does smell great.”
“It’s just chicken and potatoes. And brownies, if you leave me any batter.”
Maggie smiled and finished filling the brownie pan.
Home isn’t so bad every once in a while
, she thought. She hadn’t been back since Christmas, though, and before that, Labor Day. It didn’t matter that it took less than two hours to drive up to Poughkeepsie from the city. At school, she might as well be a million miles away. School was safer, anyway. Too many memories within these walls. She shivered a little in the warm kitchen.
“Your brother called last weekend,” Hillary said, as if reading Maggie’s mind.
Maggie set the table and didn’t answer.
Stepbrother,
she thought to herself.
Not my real brother. No connection to me. No reason for me to keep track of what happens in his life anymore.
“He’s got himself a job out in southern California, painting houses for the summer. Sounds like good-paying work.” Hillary pulled the chicken from the oven and set it out to cool. “I wish you’d call him once in a while.”
Maggie fished in the refrigerator for two Cokes and didn’t answer. She wouldn’t know where to begin with Dillon. It had already been almost a year since she’d seen him. How did you pick up a conversation after everything that had happened? Did you just start somewhere in the middle, as if you’d never stopped talking? Or did you start from the beginning? Did you work your way back into the give and take of small talk and then move on to larger things? Things that hung in the air between you, intangible but so real they pressed against you and exhausted you with the effort of ignoring them?
She bumped the door closed and leaned against it for a minute. “Jack and I spent the weekend at the shore.”
Hillary turned, wiping her hands on her hospital scrubs. “And it looks like you had the time of your life.”
Maggie felt her cheeks redden. “We had fun.”
Hillary crossed her arms and smiled. “I think you had more than fun. Every time I’ve seen you these past few months, you’ve been glowing.” Her eyes moved toward the hallway as the bathroom door opened. “You know, Jack is a wonderful man. He’s grounded, and smart, and seems to know what he wants out of life. If he makes you this happy all the time, then hold onto him. He’s good for you, in all the right ways. Don’t let him go.”
I don’t want to
, Maggie wanted to say.
But it’s hard sometimes. There are things I still haven’t told him. Difficult things. Painful things. The things that might make him want to leave.
Hillary shot her daughter a knowing glance as Jack walked back into the kitchen.
He’s good for you, in all the right ways. Don’t let him go…
*
Well, I had to
, Maggie thought. With one finger she traced the path of the rain as it spilled down her window.
I didn’t have a choice. And I can let him go again. No big deal.
Yeah, right.
She swallowed and scrubbed at her cheeks. She couldn’t think about Jack right now. She had to get herself and Neve home in one piece. She had to make arrangements to sell the house. She had to pay off the bank and find another place to live. She had to figure out how to keep Doyle Designs running.