by Alison Kent
“Was a god. Was. It was a long time ago.”
“Hmm.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Why not?”
“Because of what I see on your face when you talk about him.”
“If you see anything, it’s exasperation that I’m having to put up with him at all.”
“I know you better than that.”
Luna was ready to explode with all the things she was feeling for Angelo, but she had to work them out for herself before she said anything about them to Kaylie. “Tell me about this order you want to place.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure that I want to hear about it? Or sure that I don’t want to talk about Angelo?”
“Either. Or.” Kaylie reached over and tucked back Luna’s hair. “Both.”
“Yes, I’m sure. Now…”
“I want holiday napkins. Linen. I’d like holiday place mats, but since I’m already pressing my luck, I’ll settle for the napkins. Then I’ll buy place mats to match.”
Luna smiled. “I could do napkins. I could do place mats, too. Linen’s tricky. I’ll probably need a different loom. And the thread requires special handling. Let me do more research. And I need to know how many you want of each, and what sort of story you want to tell.”
“I’d like to tell the story of the house, my history here, the Wises and all they did for me. And the brownies, of course. I’m not sure how to do that, but thankfully that’s for you to figure out. As far as how many…” Kaylie screwed up her face. “You know my layout, how many seats I have. But since I haven’t opened yet, I honestly don’t know what the lunch turnover will be. Maybe we could just plan this for next year? Asking you to take this on now is just way too much. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I—”
“Kaylie, stop. Please,” Luna said, laughing. “Yes, I’m busy with the auction items, and my Patchwork Moon collection, and I honestly don’t know if I can fit this in for this holiday season, but let me think about it, okay? I might need more time just to decide how to tell your story, much less do the weaving. Especially now that I’m moving.”
“You close today?”
“I get the keys this afternoon.”
“You’ve got to be so excited.”
“I’m not sure excited covers all of what I’m feeling,” she admitted.
“Is it going to be strange leaving the only home you’ve ever known?”
“Is the better question, How strange has it been to live with my parents for twenty-eight years?”
“That doesn’t bother you, does it?” Kaylie asked. “I thought you loved living there.”
“I do. I have.” The years had been nothing less than wonderful. “But, yes. I should’ve been out on my own long before now.”
“You support yourself. I think that counts.”
She helped with the expenses at home, too. But the reasons she’d stayed so long had nothing to do with money and everything to do with the security and comfort of having her family close. The ten-year anniversary of Sierra’s death, her mother’s unexpected pregnancy, and the weight of the deception she’d borne so long had finally brought her to this realization. Angelo’s arrival had intensified the desire to make the change she’d put off too long. Her family would always be close. He’d gone on with his life without his.
“Maybe it does, but I feel like I’ve hit a no-turning-back point in my life. I have to move forward. And I also need to be going,” she said, getting to her feet and giving the other woman a hug when she did the same.
“I’m here,” Kaylie said, tucking Luna’s hair back again. “Anytime you need to talk.”
“I know. And I appreciate it. And I’ll let you know soon if I think I can fit in your napkins and place mats. Just know they won’t be cheap.”
Kaylie laughed. “I never thought they would be.”
Talking to Kaylie helped. By the time Luna arrived at the house, she wasn’t feeling as overwhelmed as she had been. Crazy, she knew, considering Kaylie had asked her to take on more work, but talking to the other woman always leveled her out. If Kaylie could deal with everything she’d had on her plate over the years, and especially the last few months, Luna could deal with Angelo Caffey.
Because that was what was going on here. That’s what this was about. It wasn’t the arts center, or her moving, or the arrival of her baby sister, or even Oliver Gatlin adding to the stress she felt. It was seeing Angelo. Kissing Angelo. Feeling a rush of emotions both familiar and new, an amalgam of her young crush and her later lusty cravings and her current confused state of wanting less of him and wanting him more.
And though he’d only just arrived in town, she’d been thinking about him leaving again. What it would be like to have him walk out of her life a second time when she’d never expected him to return at all. She hadn’t been ready for him, had been frightened, then speechless, then their sniping had found its way into the room and things had settled into a comfortable familiarity.
She laughed to herself at that, the idea that arguing and one-upmanship was normal, and continued to dig through the built-in drawers that took up the lower half of an entire living-room wall. The upper half of the wall was devoted to shelves. Books, and dozens of school portraits in hinged frames with family snapshots, and trophies. Lots of trophies. Emilio’s for soccer and Angelo’s football, Teresa’s for piano and Sierra’s cello.
This room was as ridiculously clutter-filled as the kitchen, which she hadn’t yet finished. There were drawers of sheet music, and others filled with spools of thread. Years of report cards. Tiny tools and extra screws and found buttons and twist ties and pencils with broken leads. Anything she could have needed in a pinch was in one of those drawers, but apparently no one ever had.
Angelo walked into the living room then, his steps having pounded overhead all morning as he packed the room Isidora and Teresa had shared. Familiar footsteps, though different, heavier. He was heavier now, filled out, grown up. But his impatience was what she remembered, demanding. His restlessness. She’d always wondered about that. What he had wanted. Why what he had wasn’t enough.
She wanted to know. Before he left, she wanted to discover what drove him, because surely it would help her understand her continued fascination when she hadn’t seen him, even heard from him, for more than eight years. She looked up from where she sat on her knees, a deep drawer open in front of her. He’d stopped at the end of the couch, resting the box he held against the back.
He wore blue jeans, scuffed work boots, another T-shirt, an old favorite she recognized that was too small for him now and washed too often for her not to stare. This one was gray, with a red, white, and green map of Italy down the center, the toe of the boot ending just above his fly. She returned her attention to the drawer, reaching for the first distraction she could, and holding up his third-grade report card.
“An unsatisfactory in conduct? So you’ve always been a hard case?”
He shook his head, snorted. “I had a sister in first grade, another who was two, and a newborn brother at home. Shades of things to come for the next four years, but I was eight and overwhelmed.”
Interesting, she mused, looking down as she slid the card back into its slot. A real card. Printed on what felt like a manila folder. Handwritten grades and notes and signatures.
Angelo went on. “My parents wanted me to play pee wee football, but my bike was a piece of crap and barely got me to school. Practices were across town, and I was worn out when I got there.”
“But you couldn’t take out your frustration on Sierra or Isidora or Emilio, so you took it out on third grade.”
“Mostly I took it out on fifth grade. I just happened to be in third.”
That made her smile. “A scrapper, huh?”
“I knew better than to whale on smaller kids.” He shrugged. “Older kids were fair game. At least to my eight-year-old way of thinking. Not so much to my dad’s, though you
can see his opinion didn’t do a whole lot to stop me. Putting a hammer in my hand finally did.” At that, he hefted up the box and headed for the front porch.
They’d been stacking things out there, one end for trash, one end for donations. A truck was due tomorrow afternoon to pick up the latter; it was the third load of giveaways, and they’d have at least one more. The trash was waiting for the arrival of a second Dumpster.
“I thought I’d run out to one of the burger joints on the interstate and grab some lunch,” he said, stepping back inside and leaving the front door open. “Want something?”
“A cheeseburger would be great, thanks.”
“You prefer one place over any other?”
“Any one of them’s fine. Add bacon and jalapeños. No fries. A chocolate milk shake.” She got to her feet. “My purse is in the car. Let me get you some money.”
He waved off her offer. “I got it. You can buy tomorrow.”
As if there was no question that she’d be here to eat with him. “Is that what we’re going to do now? Take turns?”
“Seems fair,” he said, shrugging carelessly. “Until I run out of cash. But we should finish up before I hit bottom.”
And once they finished up, he’d be gone. “What would happen if you extended your time away? Would you get fired?”
“Five days not enough for you?” he asked, his expression suggestive.
“Just answer the question,” she said, and tried not to roll her eyes.
“Why would I want to do that?”
The better question was, why was she asking him to? “I thought it might be nice to have someone from Sierra’s family involved in putting the center together.”
He waited for the full jolt of what she’d said to settle, then: “That would mean staying on. In Hope Springs.”
“For a while, yes.” This time she shrugged, but without pulling off careless as well as he had. “Or for as long as you wanted to.”
He came farther into the room, cocked a hip, and sat on the couch arm. “And are you asking someone from Oscar’s family to be involved, too?”
“I can’t imagine them being interested.” Because this was Luna’s community-based project. And Luna came from the wrong community. And then there was Oliver’s digging into the accident. She couldn’t ask them because of that. And she couldn’t tell Angelo why she couldn’t ask them. “They never were big fans of Sierra.”
He studied her fiercely, frowning. “Did she know?”
“That they didn’t want Oscar dating her?” She nodded. “She never told you?”
“She may have. I don’t remember.” He reached up, rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “I wasn’t exactly a model big brother.”
“Sierra thought you were,” she said, wanting to soften the blow of the things he was feeling.
“Maybe then.” He shook his head, scuffed his boot against the dry hardwood floor. “I doubt she did later.”
“Later?”
“When I was at school. When I was away.”
Oh, he had it wrong. “Distance wouldn’t have changed her mind—”
“Sierra was pregnant.” Three words dropped like bricks on the surface of a still lake, the circle of the impact widening, widening…
“What?” Her voice broke on the word, her whole world crumbling. He’d known? All this time, and he’d known?
When she blinked him into focus, he was nodding. “She called me not long after spring break and told me. She asked me to come home and hold her hand while she told our parents.”
The tips of her fingers had gone cold. They burned like icicles when she pressed them to her mouth. “I had no idea. I knew about the pregnancy, of course. But not about her calling you. Or that she’d planned to give your parents the news.”
And why hadn’t she known? Sierra had told her the rest. She’d told her everything. So why not this? It didn’t make any sense… unless Sierra hadn’t wanted her to think badly of Angelo for not coming. Except that wouldn’t have mattered unless Sierra had known Luna and Angelo were together. She hadn’t… had she?
“I wondered if you knew. I mean, not that she was pregnant, that was a given, but about her calling me.”
They’d shared everything else. Why not this? And why hadn’t Angelo mentioned knowing before now? “What did she say? I know it’s not my business—”
“There’s not a lot to tell.” He reached up and raked back his hair. “She told me she was pregnant, and she wanted to tell our folks but didn’t want to do it alone. She wanted me to fly home for the weekend and have her back while she did.”
Not long after spring break, he’d said. Did that mean he didn’t know the rest? “What did you say to her?”
“I told her she was old enough to get herself into trouble, she was old enough to face the music.”
But she never had, and Luna wondered why, when doing so might’ve changed everything—for their families and their friends and a tiny life who would never know what she’d lost.
Angelo went on. “The medical examiner didn’t say anything about her being pregnant at the time of her death. At least as far as I know. I assumed she’d lost it. Maybe even in the accident. Or gotten rid of it. It was half Gatlin. I didn’t figure Oscar would want to be tied down.”
This was what made her so sad, made telling the truth so hard. Neither Sierra’s family nor Oscar’s knew what the two had shared. Luna was the only one. And she didn’t know whether she had the words to make anyone else, even Angelo, understand.
“She would never have gotten rid of it. She and Oscar…” She let the sentence trail, thought better of telling him everything the couple had done.
“She and Oscar were stupid.”
“Don’t say that,” she said, a sharp hitch grabbing at her chest. “They were happy. They were… happy.”
“So what happened? To the baby? How far along was she when she called me?”
“If it was after spring break, then four months. She got pregnant in December.”
“Four months?” He pushed off the couch arm, paced to the front door and back, his steps hard. “I thought when she called me she’d just found out.”
“No,” she said and bowed her head. “She’d known awhile.”
“Was she sick?”
“Oh yeah. I always had crackers with me in case she needed them.”
“How did she hide being pregnant from our parents all that time? How did she hide it from her teachers?”
“I helped,” she said, leaning against the closed drawers and pulling her knees to her chest. “We bought her new uniforms. They fit well enough that she just looked like she was getting fat. It was easier over the summer. She only had music classes three days a week. The other days we holed up in the tree house, though she had no business climbing up there. Or we hung out in her room. Out of sight, out of mind. And she almost didn’t show through the whole pregnancy.”
“If she was still pregnant during the summer, then in September…” He stopped, stepped away, his mind obviously whirring.
Luna swallowed. “She had the baby the Friday before the accident.”
“And?” he asked, as slowly he turned back, his chest heaving, his eyes both fiery and dark. “Where’s the baby now?”
Luna had no idea. And that was the gospel truth. Though if Oliver Gatlin had gone digging… “She gave it up for adoption.”
CHAPTER TEN
Shock rooted Angelo in place. Shock and disbelief and a frightening amount of rage. Nothing here made sense. Not a single thing Luna was saying. He had to have it wrong.
He took one step closer, then another, stopping when his shin bumped the coffee table. “She had the baby? And she gave it up for adoption?”
Luna nodded, her gaze on the drawer she’d just pulled open, a barrier between them, a shield.
Dear God. He scrubbed both hands down his face, breathing hard, finally jamming his hands onto his hips. “And you didn’t think her family might want to know? Might have a right
to know? Might care that a piece of the daughter, the sister they’d lost, still lived in her child?”
“Of course I thought about that.” The drawer shook from the pressure of her hands curled around the edge. “I’ve thought about that every day for ten years. But Sierra asked me to keep her secret. She didn’t want anyone to know until she and Oscar told them.”
“Screw what she wanted. She was a kid.”
“She was an adult.” She yelled the words, her hair flying as she whipped her head around to face him. “She’d turned eighteen earlier that summer. Oscar, too. They didn’t need their parents’ consent for anything. They were both legal adults when the adoption process was started.”
He thought back to when his sister had called him, calculated the dates. She hadn’t been eighteen then. “I guess she had a C-section? Or was induced? Unless someone waved a magic wand to have her go into labor the weekend you two were away at art camp.”
“She was induced, yes.”
“Of course. The postmortem would’ve shown an incision, and I can’t imagine a reputable hospital releasing her so soon after surgery. But it should’ve been just as obvious to the coroner that she’d recently given birth.”
“Unless there was no postmortem,” Luna offered. “It’s not like the cause of her death was in question.”
He didn’t know. He barely remembered those days. He’d heard nothing from his parents about what had happened with Sierra’s body. Even thinking about it now… “What was it? The baby? A boy or a girl?”
“A girl.”
He sank onto the sofa, buried his face in his hands. It was bad enough that he’d kept the secret of his sister’s pregnancy from their parents… but this? How was he ever going to live with this? Because if he’d said something about Sierra expecting… “So I have a niece out there somewhere. My parents have a granddaughter.”
Luna was slow to answer. “Biologically, yes, but none of you have any claim on the child. Sierra was the only one in your family with rights. And she signed those away.”
He shook his head. “There’s got to be some recourse. I’ll need to talk to an attorney—”