“I don’t know,” he said. “I was up there looking for something and I ended up spending a whole Sunday going through boxes, looking at stuff you and Lily made, and—I don’t know. Then I’m looking at this beautiful piece, thinking,
Why the hell did we just stuff this in here?
It’s gorgeous.”
“It is,” I said, dropping to sit cross-legged on the floor. “I used to love sitting next to it when we’d get in there and pull out the Christmas decorations. It—it never dawned on me to ask her why it was in there.” I smiled at him. “It was just the way it was.”
His expression went distant, as if remembering something from another time, and then he blinked it free.
“You miss her, don’t you?” I said.
“God, of course I do, honey,” he said, picking up his little clock, staring into it. “Every day.” He looked up at me and winked. “She was my best friend.”
That old tinge of emptiness sat in my stomach. “I miss her too.”
Especially right then. I so missed my mom that second as I touched the smooth wood. She’d been there when Ian had left me, or tried to be. I was so shut down, I didn’t take her up on much of it, and I regretted that later. The next year, she was gone.
She and Lily were always the tight ones, I was Dad’s girl, but we still had our moments. I could use one or two of them now. I swallowed hard, pushing down the horrid thing rising in my core that would push things to the surface. Crying wasn’t my nature. I forced a smile instead.
“Why do you want to sell the business, Dad?” I asked. “Truly. Be honest.”
Dad put down the clock and peered at me, looking older and more worn-out in his ratty T-shirt and pajama pants.
“It doesn’t lead anywhere, Savi,” he said, pimping the same tune. “In twenty years, you’ll end up—” He looked down at himself. “You’ll end up here.”
“So?”
“So, I want more for you.”
“Dad, what exactly do you think I’m gonna be qualified to do at forty-three? I don’t want to start over at some crap job, working for somebody else. Please don’t doom me to that.”
He rubbed at his jaw, which was beginning to fur up a little from his usual clean-shaven look. “I didn’t think about that.”
“Please do.”
“Well, if this place took over, you’d still be doing this,” he said.
“Working for them,” I said. I got to my feet and resumed my spot next to Rambo. “I like my job. I like that I really only work for you when it comes down to it.” I reached out and squeezed his ankle. “This is ours.”
He sighed, looking tired. “I know.”
I picked my next words carefully. “Unless there’s some other reason you want to get away from it.” I licked my lips. “Some—outside influence.”
“Like what?” he said.
I looked at him, studied his eyes for lies, slips, deception. Either there was nothing or he was scary good.
“I don’t know, I’m just rambling,” I said.
“Honey, the lady’s already coming tomorrow,” he said. “Just be nice. Hear her out. We can always say we aren’t interested.”
“We aren’t interested,” I said.
“After the fact,” he said in an exaggerated whisper. “Now,” he said, slapping his leg. “More interesting topics. What’s Abby doing lately?”
I gave a tired laugh. “She’s working, staying out too late, probably doing things she isn’t supposed to be doing.”
“Well, she comes by that honestly,” he said.
Hopefully, not even close. “What time is this cluster tomorrow?” I asked, suddenly exhausted. I just wanted to climb into my bed for three days.
“She said around noon,” he said.
“Joy.”
“Be nice,” he said.
“Hey, why are you home?” I asked, getting up.
“I live here,” he said, all smug.
“I mean, don’t you spend most evenings with Mrs. Sullivan?” I asked.
“Enh,” he muttered, giving a shrug. “Decided to take a night off. Have some quiet time.”
“Some quiet time,” I repeated. “Are you doing the Macarena over there?”
He waved me off with his typical squinty, irritated, don’t-go-there look. “I’m just saying maybe every night is a little much. Maybe we need to, I don’t know, dial it back a little.”
“Oh, my God, this is because of that whole ‘dating over three weeks’ conversation,” I said.
“It is not.”
“It is too!” I said. “You got spooked!”
“I do not get
spooked,
young lady,” he said. “I’m just—can’t an old man have a night alone in his pajamas?”
I sighed and held up a hand. “By all means.”
I kissed both he and Rambo on the head and went home. I didn’t have it in me to interrogate an old man in his pajamas. I had to believe he wasn’t involved. Right? Besides, my brain was mush, I was hungry and in a steak-deprived state, and I had the unfortunate memory of being pressed against Ian and using the L word in his presence. Granted, it was past tense, but still. Chocolate ice cream was waiting in my freezer.
Tomorrow was another day.
• • •
I made coffee at home that day. It was a chickenshit move, and I knew that, but I just couldn’t go to the butcher shop and see Ian there.
It was a valiant effort I’d made before—I felt—but it was different now. I’d had anger on my side for years. Justifiable anger. He’d flipped on his own declaration of love, sealed it by screwing another woman, and left me in his dust.
Now—well, there was still the woman, but I could see the orchestration in it. The open doors, the knowing exactly when I’d be coming over, the look. The look that had haunted me for years. Staring straight at me as I filled the doorway.
I never understood the darkness and bleakness of his expression, and lumped it right on up there with how selfish and callous he could be. The heartless soulless pig.
But now I could see it all again, and it was a different kind of darkness. The empty expressionless eyes were from misery. From hating himself and what he was doing. For killing us. So I wouldn’t follow him.
Sonofabitch.
Now it was fucking complicated. With secrets and illegal activity and fathers paying off kids with hush money. We weren’t kids at the time, but I could never in a million years imagine sending Abby away at thirty-two. Telling her to stay gone and not come back.
He did that alone. He hit the road alone. And it wasn’t lost on me that ending up in Key West meant he didn’t stop till the road ran out. It changed things. Regardless of how he’d gone about it, it changed things. And damn it, I didn’t need it to. I didn’t need to start justifying things in my mind, fogging things up.
“I have Duncan now,” I said to Gracie, who was lying on my legs like a queen. “Sort of. If he calls again.”
He hadn’t called the previous night, but he had stopped by to see me and said he had a busy day, so surely it wasn’t disinterest. Missy had said there was heat. A slow burn. I had never been one for patience with slow anything, so that was going to be hard for me. Especially with the bottle rocket currently in town.
“Did I tell you about his dog?” I asked her, watching her head tilt from side to side. “I don’t think she pees or poops—or eats. I mean, I saw a bowl, but it was as pristine as she was.”
Gracie wagged her tail and belched.
“Yep, nothing but class, my girl.”
There was a rap on my door that nearly did me in as Gracie vaulted off me, taking out a stack of magazines, a wooden bowl, and a book on her way. The door opened as she reached it and before my feet even hit the ground.
“Hey, it’s me,” called out a familiar voice. “Hey, Gracie Lou, what’s cookin’, good-lookin’?” she said, changing her voice to that tone we all use when talking to dogs.
“Right here,” I said, waving at my daughter. “What on earth got you up this early?”
“The neighbor’s idiot dog,” she said. “No offense, Gracie-bug.”
“There’s coffee,” I said. “Want a cup?”
“Yes, and why?” she said, landing on the floor cross-legged while I got up to make her a cup of coffee, with creamer and no sugar. “I drove to the shop first but your car wasn’t there. Are you sick?”
Was I sick. Well, there was an idea. But no, my dad would come check on me, and Missy would bring me weird shit to drink and I’d be pooping blue for three days.
“No, just taking it easy this morning,” I said. “Felt like being a little lazy.”
“That’s weird,” she said.
“I’m allowed.”
“You don’t—oh, tell me you don’t have a guy hiding in the coat closet, Mom,” she said as I walked up with her steaming mug. “That would be really embarrassing.”
“You think?”
She stood up so I could hug her. She smelled of vanilla and mangos and Abby. I loved her smell. When she was little, I’d play with her hair till she’d fall asleep and then I’d bury my face in her hair or in her sweet neck. There was nothing better in the entire world than that.
She was the one thing I’d done right, and that really wasn’t on me. That was all her.
“So what did the neighbor’s dog do to wrong you?”
“Ugh,” she said dramatically, sinking onto the couch. Her bright blonde locks were tied up high on her head, and her eyes stood out huge with no makeup. “They got a puppy next door and it wailed all night.” She looked at me with the eyes of doom. “All. Night.”
I chuckled. “Puppies will do that.”
Gracie made a yapping noise of protest. “Well, Gracie didn’t, but she compensated by staring at me while I slept.”
“I still can’t believe you let her in the bed,” Abby said. “You never let Hawkeye sleep in the people beds.”
“Yeah, I’ve mellowed in my old age,” I said. “And Hawkeye wasn’t as sweet as Gracie is.”
“Yes, he was,” Abby said. “Just not to you.”
Hawkeye was an ornery Jack Russell terrier that worshipped Abby and tolerated me only because I fed him.
“So you just felt like coming over in your sleep-deprived haze, or is something up?” I asked, studying her.
“I can’t just come see my mom?” she said, batting her eyelashes.
“Sure you can,” I said, tugging on her ponytail. “But you don’t.”
She gave a half roll of her eyes, still a young girl in that way.
“Well, I have to run some errands, go by the bank over here,” she said. “I got a note about something I have to go sign for or something.”
“For what?” I asked. “Do you use that account?”
“Not really, it’s just savings.”
“Oh, maybe it’s the deposit I made for your birthday,” I said. “If you aren’t very active over there, maybe a large deposit flagged something.”
I’d put a thousand dollars in her bank account when she turned twenty-one. Wasn’t much, but I saw it as maybe rent money in a tight month.
“Maybe,” she said on a yawn. “I’ll deal with it.”
“And what else?”
“Okay,” she said, pulling her legs up under her and pulling a pillow into her lap. “There’s this guy.”
“Ah.”
“Don’t jump ahead.”
I put my hands up in innocence. Abby went through poor unsuspecting boys like I went through ice cream. She was gorgeous and they dropped at her feet, but she never kept them for long. I always felt a little pang of something over that. I hadn’t given her much to learn from.
“His name is John,” she said. At my quickly opened mouth, she added, “And no, his last name isn’t Smith.”
I clamped my mouth closed again and squashed a smile. “Brown?”
“Reeder,” she said. “Do you need his age and place of birth, too, or do you have enough to look him up?”
“Who said I was looking?” I said, actually finding that hilarious. I’d just thought to Google Ian yesterday after eleven years a mystery, and she thought I was some high-tech momma spy.
“Anyway, he’s a cop,” she said.
Well, that got my attention. “Wow.”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “He’s twenty-four.”
“So, a baby cop.”
“Kinda.”
“And how did you manage to meet John Reeder the baby cop?” I said as Gracie totally blew me off and laid her head on Abby.
“At work,” she said. “I was waiting on his table, and he’s just so freaking adorable.”
“So what’s the problem?” I asked.
She paused and sipped her coffee. “He told me he loved me yesterday.”
Fuck. That word again.
“Umm,” I said. That was as profound as I could manage. “What—how do you feel about that? How long have you known him?”
“Two months,” she said. “And I have no idea.”
I blew out a breath. “I think I failed you in that area, baby girl. I’m sorry.”
Her brows drew together. “What?”
“In the love department,” I said. “Never my strong suit, and you probably have no idea what it looks like.”
“Yes, I do,” she said, chuckling. “I remember Nana and Poppy before she died. All sweet to each other.”
“Yes, they were.”