Single Mom Seeks... (16 page)

“You should have had this, too,” he said. “This kind of happiness…it should have been yours, Lily.”

“But not yours?” she asked, her face buried against his shoulder, as he turned his head and kissed her softly on the cheek.

“No. I just never saw that for me. I never believed it could really happen.”

“And now you think you were right? That this proves you right?”

“Come here,” he said, drawing her around the side of the chair and pulling her onto his lap, wrapping his arms around her and taking a long, shuddering breath.

Lily fought against it, because she had a point to make and intended to make it. “It doesn’t prove you were right. Not at all.”

“Fine. Tell me everything I’m wrong about, just let me hold you while you do it.”

She sank against him, because that’s what she really wanted anyway, and because she was cold and tired and so scared, and he was…She sighed, pressing her face to his chest, draped over him like a blanket, thinking this was where she should have been all night, this close to him, facing this together. That they could have gone through this with each other, trusting, knowing, drawing strength from each other.

This was the way life was supposed to be, having someone beside you when things got really rough.

Which was much more than she could try to tell him right now, not when they still didn’t know where Jake was.

“You’re going to find Jake,” she said. “And he’s going to be fine, and he’s still going to need a home. He wants that home to be with you.”

“Not anymore.”

“No. This is just a blip. This is regular teenage stuff. You wait. He’ll have some explanation that will drive you crazy, but you’ll be so relieved that he’s home and safe that you won’t know whether to yell at him or just collapse right where you are and try to breathe for the first time in hours. And he’ll say something and give you one of those goofy grins of his, and you’ll think, He’s just a kid. A big, overgrown boy who doesn’t have half the sense he needs yet to survive in the world, but he’s great, and he’s yours. He’s a great kid.”

He sighed. “Lily, this great kid asked if he could come live with you instead of me, not twelve hours ago.”

“The only reason he wanted me was because he was afraid he didn’t have you anymore. But he does, and you’re going to tell him that as soon as we find him. Now think. Where else can we look? Who can we call? Someone has to know something.”

He put his hand in her hair and nuzzled his face against hers and started running through a list of people he’d already called when Lily’s phone rang in the distance.

“It’s mine.” She was praying it was Jake, but it turned out to be Marcy.

“Any news?” Marcy asked.

“No.” Lily wanted to scream. She’d thought this was it, that they’d found him.

“Well, I don’t know if this has anything to do with Jake, but you’ve had three phone calls this morning from neighbors asking if you’ve heard the latest about Audrey Graham. Something about her getting into a fight last night at a party with another woman from the neighborhood for sleeping with the woman’s husband. I wouldn’t have mentioned it, but someone said her poor daughter saw the whole thing, and didn’t you tell me Jake had a thing for Audrey’s daughter?”

“Yes, he does,” Lily said.

Could Jake be caught up in something with Andie Graham?

Lily turned to Nick. “Did you try to call Andie Graham last night?”

“Yeah. No answer. I even drove by the house. It didn’t look like anyone was home. Why?”

Lily shook her head. “Something about Audrey getting in a fight at a party last night and sleeping with one of our married neighbors. Just…wait a minute. Marcy? Which party? The fund-raiser for the heart association?”

“Yes, that was it. Phoenix Rising? Something like that?”

“The Phoenix Club. Okay. Thanks. We’ll check it out.” She clicked off the phone, then turned to Nick. “Andie’s mother went to the heart association ball last night and got into a fight with a woman whose husband Audrey was apparently sleeping with, and it was this big, huge scene, and Andie was there to see it. Do you think, if Andie had a problem, she might call Jake for help?”

“I don’t know. He’s only fifteen. Why would she call him? Someone who’d have to steal a car to go pick her up?”

“Maybe she didn’t know he’d have to steal it. Or that he wasn’t licensed to drive it. I don’t know. It’s something, and it’s better than thinking he ran away.”

“You know where they live?”

“Yes. Let’s go.”

They headed out the door and found a police car pulling into the driveway behind them.

Lily felt all the breath go out of her at his stern expression, felt Nick tense beside her as they stopped where they were.

The officer got out of his patrol car, walked up to them and asked, “Everything all right here, folks?”

Nick explained who he was, even pulled out his FBI shield. He told the officer what they were doing, then explained that he was the one who’d asked the local police to keep an eye on the house that morning. “That is why you’re here, isn’t it?”

“No. Actually, I was following up on a 911 call.”

Lily gasped, grabbed for Nick, finding his arm. It was rigid.

“What 911 call?” he asked.

“Possible alcohol poisoning, someone having trouble breathing, maybe needing an ambulance. The operator was trying to get all the information she needed, but the connection wasn’t good and before she could get it straight, the caller said not to bother with the ambulance, that they’d transport the victim themselves. We try to follow up on those calls, to make sure we don’t have someone in trouble who can’t call for help.”

“When did the call come in?” Nick asked.

“About forty minutes ago. I would have been here sooner, but I got redirected on a burglary call five blocks away. So, no one’s in the house?”

“No,” Nick said. “Who made the call?”

The officer flipped through his notes. “Didn’t give a name, but it was a female. Gave her phone number as 555-6685. You think the call was about your nephew?”

Nick nodded. “We think he was here. What hospital were they taken to?”

“Get in. We’ll use my siren,” the officer offered. “I don’t think you need to be driving right now.”

They sat in the back, side-by-side, his hand clamped down on hers, not saying anything until they came upon a traffic accident being cleared from the road beside them, a familiar-looking black sedan with its side resting against a telephone pole.

Nick went absolutely white. “I think that’s my car.”

The officer met their eyes in the mirror, reaching for his radio. “Hang on.” He asked for information on the accident they’d just passed and relayed it to them. “Black Ford registered to…Nicholas Malone, D.C. plates.”

Nick nodded.

The officer went back to the radio to get the condition of the passengers. “The kids seemed good,” the officer said. “Conscious, oriented to time and place. The woman was really out of it, though.”

“Woman?” Lily asked.

“You have names?” the officer spoke into his radio. “Jacob Elliott, Andie Graham and Audrey Graham.”

“Okay. That’s them. Thank you,” Lily said, squeezing Nick’s arm. “We found them.”

N
ick had made this ride before, as the agent who helped find the missing.

And by the time he took parents to their missing child, he almost always had some details on the child’s condition to relay to the parents. But no matter how reassuring the information was, the parents never really relaxed until they had that child in their arms.

Nick understood that exactly at the moment.

He wouldn’t believe Jake was safe until he could see Jake with his own two eyes. He knew he was on his way to Jake and that Lily was beside him, keeping him sane, but nothing else really registered for him. It was like someone had blocked out the world.

He needed this kid like he needed air to breathe, and he needed the woman beside him to stay beside him, to hang on to him, to believe in him, to forgive him, to trust him and more than anything to love him.

“Breathe,” Lily told him, hanging on tight.

And maybe to tell him to breathe, too.

The world moved in a surreal kind of drunken fast-forward then, confusing, noisy, crowded. He couldn’t make sense of it, but then he was walking down a corridor, and then into a room with cubicles curtained off into tiny spaces for each patient, and then, there was Jake.

Lying on a bed, blood and a nasty looking bump on his forehead, bruised cheek, split lip, looking like he had no idea what kind of reception he was about to receive.

“I kind of messed up your car,” he said.

Lily started crying.

Nick just grabbed him and hung on tight.

“So, this was all about a girl?” Nick asked incredulously, finally able to get some answers once the doctor had retrieved the CAT scan results and confirmed that Jake’s head injury wasn’t serious.

“Not just a girl. Andie,” Jake claimed, as if that made all the difference.

Nick turned to Lily, who was still by his side, his eyes pleading,
Help me here.

Lily fought a grin, knowing how horrifying the night had been. “Jake, what happened with Andie?”

“We’ve kind of…gotten to be friends. And I like her. A lot. You know?”

“I got that part,” Nick told him.

“Well, she’s been having trouble, and I’ve been trying to help her.” He looked right at Nick. “You said a man watches out for a woman—”

“You are not a man. You are fifteen—”

“You said we’d watch out for Lily. That we weren’t going to stand by and let anybody mess with her—”

“Okay. Yes, I did. Go on,” Nick said, thinking a vow of silence might be necessary at the moment.

“Well, that’s it, really. I was just trying to help her. Some stuff happened. Some really hard stuff—”

“With her mom?” Lily tried.

Jake clammed up. “I promised her I wouldn’t tell.”

“Okay.” Vow of silence was done. “You’re in the hospital. You sneaked out of the house in the middle of the night, stole my car, drove it without a license and wrecked it, with two other people in the car. We’re beyond any kind of I-promised-I-wouldn’t-tell crap. Spill it.”

Lily put her hand over his. He could almost feel her telling him to breathe.

“Jake,” she said. “This morning I got three phone calls asking me if I’d heard about Andie’s mom getting into a scene at a party last night with Phillip Wrenchler’s wife, because Audrey’s been having an affair with the woman’s husband. So if that’s part of the secret you’re keeping for Andie, it’s out.”

“Oh,” he said.

“Now,” Nick ordered once again, though why, he didn’t know. The kid didn’t follow orders.

“It’s not just this Phillip guy,” he finally admitted. “Since Andie’s parents’ divorce became final a few months ago, Andie’s mom started drinking. A lot. And sometimes she disappears, and Andie doesn’t know where to find her, and she gets scared. I mean, it’s pretty scary when someone you love just disappears.”

“Yeah, we got that part,” Nick said rolling his eyes.

Jake clearly didn’t make the connection.

“Go on.”

“So, Andie kept showing up at our house, saying she was looking for her mom, and I knew her mom wasn’t seeing you. At least, I didn’t think she was. I thought you and Lily were…I mean, I was pretty sure you and Lily were—”

“Yeah, me and Lily. Go on.”

“Turns out, Andie’s mom was seeing a guy who lives in the house right behind us. She’d walk down our street and then cut through our backyard, so his neighbors wouldn’t see. She got confused one day…. Okay, she got really drunk one day on her way to see him and walked into our house instead, looking for the guy. Next thing I knew, she’d poured herself a drink and when I tried to get it away from her, I spilled it all over the kitchen.”

Nick turned around and swore at the pale green curtain, rather than Jake, then faced the kid again. “You mean, that whole mess between us was because of Andie’s mom? You couldn’t just tell me it was Andie’s mom?”

“Andie was so embarrassed. I had to call her to come and get her mom, and her mom was like…flirting with me in front of her own daughter and stuff….” Poor Jake turned red, just telling them about it.

Nick still couldn’t believe it.

All this worry and upheaval and outright terror?

Over a girl?

“Go on,” he said.

“Well, that was it, really. Andie and I just talk sometimes. None of her other friends know how bad it is. But since her father moved out, her mother’s been drinking, staying out all night, chasing after men. Andie didn’t want people to know, but I’m like a stranger, practically, and we don’t hang out with the same people at all. I promised I wouldn’t tell anybody what was going on. So she talks to me, and she’s just so…awesome.”

He was beaming by the end.

The kid probably couldn’t even breathe around her, much less think.

Nick turned back to Lily, pleading with a look.

“She’s a beautiful girl, Jake,” Lily told him. “And I’m glad she had you to help her. But this is really the kind of problems two teenagers can’t solve. You could have told us. We’d have tried to help her.”

“She didn’t want anybody to know,” he said again, sounding so sincere, like that made perfect sense. That he’d do the same thing all over again.

It was all Nick could do not to scream. He was still scared half to death. His heart rate hadn’t yet settled down, and his muscles had turned to mush. It was a miracle he was still standing.

He made a face and leaned his head back to stare at the ceiling, like there might be answers for him somewhere up there.

Lily squeezed his hand once again, urging him to hang on.

“Tell us what happened last night, Jake?” she asked.

“Andie called. Her mom was at that stupid party, and she got really drunk and then she got into a fight with Phillip’s wife. Andie went to try to get her mom out of there, but then her mom couldn’t remember where she parked her car or find her keys. Andie was crying and said she just had to get them both out of there. So she asked me to come and get them.”

“And you didn’t think to mention to her that you don’t drive?”

“I can drive,” he claimed.

“Not legally,” Nick yelled.

Jake winced, looked hurt and sad and very young.

“Okay, fine. I’m sorry,” Nick said. “I’m just still a little bit…God, Jake, were you trying to scare me to death?”

“We thought you’d run away,” Lily told him in her softest, most soothing, understanding, motherly voice.

“I wouldn’t do that,” he claimed, like it wasn’t even a possibility.

“You packed a bag of clothes,” Nick reminded him.

“Oh, yeah.”

Oh, yeah!
Nick groaned.

“Okay, I was thinking about it, and I threw some clothes in my backpack, but I wouldn’t have really done it,” Jake claimed.

“Well, we didn’t know that,” Nick practically roared. “And when you took off in the middle of the night without saying anything and wouldn’t answer your phone—”

“Jake, he heard you leave the house eight hours ago. We’ve been looking for you ever since, imagining all kinds of awful things.”

“Oh. Well, all I did was go pick them up and take them to our old house for a while, to hide,” Jake said. “Andie’s mom was still a mess, and Andie just wanted to hide from everybody to think about what to do next. And I knew you’d be mad, but I was mad, too, that you didn’t trust me about anything. And I couldn’t figure out what to say to you, so…I just didn’t pick up the phone. That’s all.”

“That’s all?” Nick said, nodding and trying to breathe. “And the 911 call? Because we heard about that, too.”

“When Andie and I woke up this morning, she went to try to wake up her mom, but she couldn’t. It was like she was barely breathing, and then we got scared and called 911. But they said it was going to be about ten minutes before the ambulance could get there, and we didn’t think we could wait that long. So I was going to drive her to the hospital.”

“Because you didn’t wreck the first time you drove them that night. So why not do it again?” Nick said, admittedly a little too heavy on the sarcasm. He closed his eyes, so he couldn’t glare at Jake. “Then what?”

“I’m not really sure. One minute, we were fine, and then I kind of hit the curb and tried to get back in my lane. But I guess I went too far back the other way, and we slid into the telephone poll. Am I in a lot of trouble for that?”

Nick’s eyes popped open and he just stared at the kid, dumbfounded.

Am I in a lot of trouble for that?

“Lily,” he said again.

She leaned over and gave Jake a big hug, making him look even more like a silly, little kid in serious need of mothering and fathering. “We were just so worried about you.”

She soothed him, which Nick supposed the kid needed, while he thought,
Do kids just have no sense at fifteen?

Could that even be possible, that their reasoning and judgment could be so lacking at this age?

He knew Jake wasn’t stupid. He’d seen the kid’s report card.

Which just meant…

Fifteen?

Could it be this bad? This scary for a parent?

Then he thought about Joan.

Joan would love it when she heard about this. This was the kind of ammunition she’d been waiting for to use against Nick and his guardianship of Jake. She’d be thrilled.

“Excuse me?” a girl’s voice asked.

Nick turned, and there she was, Jake’s most wondrous girl in the world. Andie Graham, in all her adolescent, leggy, blond glory, plus a few bumps and bruises, but otherwise whole.

Nick wanted to beg her to never come near Jake again, and to explain to Jake just how dangerous women could be.

Look how much trouble this one had caused them both already.

“I just wanted to make sure Jake was okay,” she said.

Jake practically glowed with happiness from his hospital gurney, might have even winced a bit as he grinned, whether as a complete play for sympathy or because his head hurt, Nick had no idea.

“I’m fine,” Jake said. “Are you okay?”

She nodded, then waited there on the edge of Jake’s little space.

“How’s your mom, Andie?” Lily asked.

Andie bit her lip for a moment, looking embarrassed, then said, “The doctors say she’ll be fine.”

“Good.” Lily leaned over and gave Jake a hug. “We’ll be outside for a few minutes.”

Nick didn’t intend to go anywhere. He didn’t trust this girl alone with Jake for a moment, but Lily took him by the hand and led him out of the room. They went down the corridor and around the corner until they’d found a relatively quiet spot.

“You think that was a good idea? Leaving him alone with her?”

Lily laughed. “What are you going to do? Lock him in his room for the next six years until he’s twenty-one?”

“Can I do that, as his legal guardian? Because it doesn’t sound like a bad idea.”

Lily laughed some more and wrapped her arms around him and just held on tight. Nick couldn’t get her close enough. He sagged against the wall at his back, and then it was like Lily and the wall were all that kept him on his feet.

Relief washed over him like he’d never felt before, leaving him weak and exhausted and still terrified somehow.

“Oh, my God, Lily!” he said, his face buried in her hair. “He wrapped the car around a telephone pole, swerved all over the road. I don’t know how all those other cars missed him. He could have killed that girl and her mother while he was trying to save them. He could have killed himself—”

“I know. But he didn’t. And he’s fine—”

“And stupid! How can he be this stupid? A few surging hormones and adolescent dreams, a pair of long legs on a pretty girl, and he just turns stupid? Is that the way it works?”

“You never did anything stupid over a girl?” she asked.

“Not like…” He couldn’t say that, because it wasn’t true.

Nick took a breath and then another one, just couldn’t seem to get enough air in his body to make his head stop spinning. Then he looked down at her, trying to make it sink in. That the night was over, and Jake was safe, and they’d all lived through it, somehow, and Lily was here by his side.

“I was going to say I never had,” he told her, a hand tangling in her hair. “But I had my own pretty, long-legged blonde, and I thought I could just walk away from her somehow.”

She gave him a pretty smile through her tears.

“Tell me you knew all along how stupid that was of me, to think I could really walk away from you. Because I’d hate to think you believed I could and that I’d hurt you that much, Lily.”

“I was hoping you couldn’t.”

“You were right,” he told her. “Are you going to forgive me? For ever thinking I could live without you?”

“I don’t know,” she said, still smiling, a twinkle in her pretty blue eyes. “I mean, how do we know you’ve really learned your lesson?”

“I cannot raise this kid without you,” he said. “I don’t want to. I don’t want to do anything without you, Lily.”

She gave him a kiss, then another.

He pulled back, taking her face in both his hands, all teasing aside. “I think I knew all along, right from the first moment I saw you. I knew you’d be trouble, and I should stay away—”