Before We Were Strangers

by Brenda Novak

  “What’d he say then?”

  “Nothing. He got off the phone really fast.”

  There was a slight pause. “So what are you going to do?”

  Sloane rubbed her left temple as she drove. The tightness in her throat and chest, the pressure of unshed tears, was giving her a headache. “I don’t know.” She recalled the dirty looks she’d received from Clyde’s kids and couldn’t help feeling hurt. “I have to be out of the place where I’m living as soon as possible, but I’d rather not move twice in one month. Moving is hard enough as it is.”

  “Why don’t you come here? Lay over at my house? You can deal with that stupid landlord—or find another place, if it comes to that—after you get to town. It’ll be much easier when you’re not trying to do it from so far away.”

  The lump in Sloane’s throat swelled even bigger. She was tempted to jump at Paige’s kind offer, but she also felt guilty. Once she’d graduated from high school, she’d walked away from Paige the same as she’d walked away from everyone else—without a backward glance. She’d had to cut all ties to Millcreek, or she knew she’d never really escape. Her father would use those she cared about to manipulate her if he could.

  But Paige and any others she’d hurt didn’t understand the terrible choice she’d had to make or why she’d made it. Paige could have some inkling, since they’d talked about Sloane’s mother on occasion, but she could hardly identify with the deep-seated suspicion that’d eaten at Sloane ever since she was five years old. “Are you positive you have room for me?”

  “Sloane, I’m divorced. Micah left me the house. He gave me everything—far more than I asked for.”

  Mention of Micah Evans made Sloane’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. She couldn’t help but feel his name right in her gut—even after all this time. He’d married Paige only months after Sloane left Millcreek. Her boyfriend and her best friend—such a cliché, and yet, she’d never seen it coming.

  She should have, she supposed. She’d known that Paige had a thing for Micah, could tell by the way she’d acted whenever he was around. But a lot of the girls at school had had a crush on him. Why wouldn’t they? He was the boy who had it all—looks, personality, intelligence and athletic ability in a state where football was everything. It was just that Sloane had never imagined he’d suddenly take an interest in Paige; he’d seemed so indifferent to her before.

  So what had gone wrong in their marriage? Sloane was curious, but she couldn’t ask. That was one subject she was fairly certain she and Paige would never be able to discuss. She’d left them both without a word and without ever contacting them again, so they’d moved on with their lives. Sloane couldn’t fault either one of them for getting married and even having a child together, no matter how much it hurt. But considering their history, wouldn’t they all feel a little—or a lot—uncomfortable?

  “I can get a hotel,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to invade your son’s space.”

  “No way would I ever let you go to a hotel,” Paige said. “Trevor’s nine. He’ll see it as a grand adventure. And I would love the chance to spend some quality time with you. I’ve missed you,” she added more softly.

  Since she was stopped at a light, Sloane allowed herself to close her eyes for a brief moment in an effort to stem the tears that were finally trickling down her cheeks. She’d missed Paige, too. Terribly. Because she’d never been close to her father or her brother, and her mother had disappeared when she was so young, Paige had been almost like a sister. But Sloane couldn’t allow herself to feel that longing, to acknowledge the pain of their extended separation, because it could and would influence her ability to stand strong against her father.

  Someone honked behind her. The light had turned green. With a quick glance in the rearview mirror, she gave the Jaguar some gas. “I wouldn’t want to put you out,” she said to Paige. She wouldn’t want to come to depend on her friend’s support, either. She needed to be able to leave again, when she was ready, couldn’t allow herself to fall into the kind of emotional quicksand that could so easily suck her in and make it that much harder. Leaving ten years ago had been the most difficult thing she’d ever done; she wasn’t interested in making that hurdle any more difficult to clear.

  “Life is short,” Paige said. “What matters are the people we care about. Come stay with me. Let me help you get situated here.”

  Sloane could almost feel Clyde nudging her to embrace the opportunity. He’d always been so much better with people, always ventured forward when she held back. She needed to gamble more often, perhaps, but it wasn’t wise for her to risk making tight connections, especially in Millcreek where her future was so uncertain.

  Despite her reservations, she heard herself agree. After what Paige had just said, it would be rude to insist on getting a hotel, and she was glad for the chance to possibly rebuild their relationship, at least to the point that she no longer cringed when she remembered how difficult things had been between them their senior year. Besides, with Clyde gone, she didn’t want to stay in New York any longer.

  Once the decision had been made, she felt an exciting yet frightening blend of anticipation buoy her spirits. “I can’t wait to meet Trevor,” she said, and that was true, even though she understood it would also be painful. Had she stayed in Millcreek, she might’ve married Micah and been the one to bear him a child...

  “He’s such a sweet boy,” Paige said, her voice filled with the affection she felt for her son. “I predict you’ll love him.”

  Did he look like his father?

  She’d soon find out.

  “It’ll take me a few days to get packed. I’ll rent a storage unit in Dallas for my stuff and will bring only a suitcase to your place. Then, when I figure out what’s going on with the house I supposedly rented, or I’m able to get a different one, I’ll have everything delivered.”

  “What will you do with your car?”

  “I’ll drive it.”

  “All the way to Texas? That’ll take forever!”

  “I don’t have to do it in one or even two days. I’ll stop and spend the night whenever I get tired.”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  Sloane could use all of those hours to prepare for what lay ahead. “I really appreciate you helping me out.”

  “It’s no problem. You’re welcome here. You’ll always be welcome here.”

  “I should arrive in a week or ten days. I’ll call with the exact date as it gets closer.”

  Sloane was about to hang up when Paige stopped her. “Does your father know you’re coming?”

  “Not yet.” She hadn’t told him. But she had a sneaking suspicion that word might’ve traveled back to him. Her father was an important man in town—the most important. That she’d run away at eighteen and hadn’t been seen again, except in the pages of various fashion magazines, would be big news in such a small place. Her father had probably told everyone she was just like her mother—flighty, undependable, selfish, vain. He’d characterized Clara that way so many times; Sloane knew “being like her mother” wasn’t a positive thing.

  Anyway, if someone in town had learned she was coming back, it was likely Ed would be informed. Guy Prinley might even have been the one to tell him. That could explain why Mr. Prinley was trying to back out of renting her the house. It would be like her father to do all he could to punish her for “turning against him” in the first place.

  “Then I won’t mention it,” Paige said.

  Sloane turned down the long drive that wound around Clyde’s sprawling French Tudor to her own Tudor-style bungalow. “There’s nothing he could do to you for letting me stay with you, is there?”

  “Excuse me? Why would he do anything to me?”

  Paige owned Little Bae Bae, a boutique downtown that sold toys, clothing and furniture for infants and toddlers. She wasn’t beholden to Ed for her job or an
ything else that Sloane was aware of.

  “He wouldn’t. Never mind. Clyde’s funeral was today, and I’m not myself. Let me call you later.”

  “Okay,” Paige said and Sloane disconnected. She hated to think her father might’ve tried to stop her from getting the Woods house, but now that she’d acknowledged the possibility, she couldn’t quit mulling it over.

  Especially because there’d always been something about Ed, some lack of feeling or conscience, that frightened her.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It took two weeks to get everything packed up and sent to storage in Dallas, an hour and a half east of Millcreek. There weren’t any storage facilities in Millcreek itself. The movers were driving a big, lumbering truck almost the size of a semi and yet they delivered Sloane’s belongings before she got there. She stayed in several states along the way and lingered in Dallas for two days.

  She was procrastinating her final return to her hometown, and she knew it. She’d lost Hazel Woods’s house, wasn’t going to get it despite how perfect it had seemed. She had a legal claim, could’ve pressed her right in court. But as angry as Mr. Prinley made her, he’d returned her money, so she didn’t get ripped off in that regard, and she wasn’t prepared to file suit. She had enough negativity to contend with, didn’t see the point of forcing him to provide the keys. She’d decided—at Paige’s urging—that she would stay with Paige and her son for the first week, until she could more thoroughly investigate her housing options.

  In deference to the heat, she was dressed in a sleeveless taupe sheath dress with white polka dots and white sandals. The air-conditioning in her Jag was doing its job, and yet she felt moist with perspiration when her GPS guided her, on a Thursday, to a one-story brick house with a black door and matching shutters, behind the baseball park where her father probably still played in a men’s league.

  It was almost dinnertime. She’d wanted to arrive after Trevor went to bed. She felt it would be wise to get reacquainted with Paige first, to have a chance to talk and catch up with her old friend before meeting her son and facing whatever emotions he might evoke. But Paige had been so anxious to see her she’d talked Sloane into joining them for dinner.

  As Sloane parked at the curb and turned off her engine, she eyed the picture window in front with more than a little trepidation. She didn’t get the impression that Micah and Paige had been wealthy while they were married, but she could tell they’d been comfortable. They’d had Paige’s income from the store, and Micah had become a police officer. According to Paige, he was hoping to make chief one day, and it looked as though he had a great chance. Paige said he was the frontrunner in the department for when the spot became available in the next decade or two, which didn’t surprise Sloane. She’d always expected Micah to do well. He’d been so capable, even when he was only eighteen.

  She saw the curtain move. She’d been spotted.

  Steeling herself for the onslaught of memories that were already beginning to assail her like arrows, she gathered her purse and the bottle of wine she’d brought and got out.

  The front door opened and Paige hurried down the walkway. “Sloane! Welcome back!”

  Sloane resisted the urge to return to her car and drive away. She loved Paige, had missed her, but her feelings toward her best friend had grown murky before she left, and after so long, they were mixed with her residual feelings for Micah and her reluctance to embrace Millcreek in general. “Hi. Thank you for letting me come.”

  Paige gave her a warm hug. “Letting you! Of course! I’m so happy I was able to convince you. After leaving the way you did, you must be hesitant to see your father and brother, or you would’ve gone to one of their houses. This will give you a friendly place to hang out while you set yourself up in whatever situation feels most comfortable to you.”

  “I appreciate that. I won’t need to stay long.”

  Paige took the wine Sloane proffered. “You’ll be in town at least a year, though, right?”

  “Maybe not quite that long. We’ll have to see what happens.” She’d leave earlier, if possible. She was only here until she could determine what’d happened to her mother twenty-three years ago. She had no idea how hard solving that mystery would be but guessed it wouldn’t be easy. Not long after she’d moved to New York, she’d hired a private detective who’d searched using every database available to him and found nothing. He’d said it was as if she’d disappeared into thin air. He’d wanted to come to Millcreek and talk to everyone she knew, see if he could track Clara that way. He insisted it was the logical next step. But it had been a step Sloane hadn’t yet been willing to take. It crossed the line from searching for her mother to investigating her father, so she’d stopped him. And he was about the only person who’d ever really looked.

  Ed claimed she ran off, and he was seen as such a rich, upstanding and important member of the community that, to Sloane’s knowledge, no one here in Millcreek had ever pressed him, least of all anyone in the police department. Now that he was mayor and could influence whether the officers on the force kept their jobs or received a promotion, she doubted that was likely to change.

  No one had ever asked Sloane what she’d seen and heard that night. Since she was only five at the time, they probably didn’t expect her to have anything of value to contribute. She wasn’t convinced she would’ve spoken up even if they had asked her what she remembered. She’d been too afraid of her father and too unsure what the sounds she’d heard signified. Heck, she was still afraid—afraid that her father was as dangerous as she thought he might be, or that she’d come out in open opposition to him only to learn that her mother was as flighty and undependable as he claimed and had, indeed, abandoned them.

  Being wrong would be almost as bad as being right, at least when it came to her relationship with what she had left of her family. Her father would never forgive her for voicing the deep, dark suspicion that lurked inside her, let alone doing more. Maybe that was why it had taken her ten years to come back. If only her brother possessed a memory of that night. Then she could’ve gone to him for clarification and illumination, would’ve had someone whose opinion she could lean on. But Randy had been spending the night at a friend’s when their mother “left.” And he was so close to their father, he would never entertain the possibility that had given her such terrible nightmares, nightmares in which she saw her father digging a grave in the backyard and then heard him slowly climbing the stairs to come get her.

  “At least we’ll have a few months together.” Paige took her hands and squeezed them. “You are so beautiful. Look at you. You only get prettier with time.”

  At only five foot two inches, Paige was considerably shorter than Sloane, who stood over six feet—the All-American Mary Anne to Sloane’s more sophisticated Ginger. Paige’s mother used to tease them about resembling those two characters from Gilligan’s Island, except Sloane had dark brown hair, amber eyes and olive-colored skin. Thanks to her mother’s Greek heritage, she didn’t look like Ginger, and Paige had sandy-blond hair and freckles, so she didn’t look like Mary Anne. Paige’s mother had been referring to their general sizes, shapes and personalities, Sloane supposed. Sloane had always gotten the impression that Mrs. Patterson wished Paige would elicit the same amount of attention as Sloane, but Sloane felt the Pattersons should be grateful Paige didn’t. Paige was pretty, and yet she could blend into a crowd if she preferred to be anonymous for a time, or go to a mall, a movie or a nightclub without being unduly noticed. Sloane stood out, had never been able to disappear in a crowd.

  “Motherhood seems to agree with you,” Sloane said.

  “I love it.” As if on cue, Paige turned, drawing Sloane’s attention to the entrance of the house, where a boy who had to be Trevor peered out at them.

  “Come here.” Paige gestured to him. “Come meet your mother’s best friend. You know how you and Spaulding hang out together all the time?”

 
He nodded as he drew closer.

  “Well, I grew up with Sloane. We were inseparable all through elementary school, middle school and...and most of high school.”

  Until Paige had fallen for Micah after Sloane was already dating him. Micah had put quite a bit of stress on their relationship. The way Paige’s tone weakened at the end of that statement told Sloane she, too, remembered, and it made Sloane slightly uneasy. She feared she might’ve made a mistake coming here, but it was too late to change her mind.

  “You are such a handsome boy,” Sloane said and felt her heart melt the second Trevor’s big blue eyes, so much like his father’s, met hers.

  “Wow!” he said. “You’re tall!”

  She got that reaction a lot. People often stared as she walked by or whistled or mumbled about her height. “Yes, I’ve always been tall. Looks to me like you are, too—for your age, anyway.”

  “Yes.” Paige tugged on his ball cap. “He’s the tallest boy in his class.”

  “My dad’s six-five,” Trevor said proudly. “He’s even taller than you.”

  Sloane nodded. “Yes, he is.”

  He squinted as he gazed at her. “My mom said you went to high school with her. That you know my dad.”

  It took some effort to keep her smile in place. She hadn’t expected such an acute pain in her chest. “Yes, that’s true.”

  Trevor twisted his neck to look up at his mom. “So can we invite Dad over for dinner, too?”

  Paige cleared her throat. “Not tonight, sweetheart. I’m sure he’s busy.”

  “He’s not. He’s about to leave the station. I just talked to him.”

  “Maybe another time,” she muttered and propelled him along as they started for the house.

  “I’ve made chicken enchiladas,” she told Sloane. “I was craving a good margarita, so I decided to go with Mexican food.”

  “Sounds wonderful. You can’t get good Mexican in New York, not like you can out here.”