by Jane Kindred
I blinked up at the green eyes staring down at me. I had to know. My words were quiet. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”
Lukas’s expression didn’t change, but I could sense a mental battle waging behind the green gaze. “No.” He breathed in sharply. “But it wasn’t you, it—”
“It’s not you, it’s me? Really?” I choked back a shriek of hysteria. “After eight years hiding out on the Lost Coast, you’re giving me it’s not you, it’s me?” I shoved him with both hands, and Lukas caught my arms and spun me around, crossing his in front of me.
“I wasn’t hiding from you,” he said against my neck. “I can’t explain. But you can’t be here.” His arms tightened around me when I tried to break free, drawing me against his chest. I could feel his heartbeat at my shoulder in an erratic rhythm. “You can’t be here, Millie,” he whispered. “Please just go home.” The way he was holding me pleaded the opposite.
After a moment, his grip loosened and he let me turn in his arms, but didn’t let go, as if he were unable to break the contact between us. One hand moved to the right side of my jaw, his thumb on my cheek. My brain shouted at me not to be a fool. I didn’t move. Lukas leaned down, his mouth so close to mine I could feel his breath, and then he shuddered and pulled back his hand, combing it roughly over his scalp as he dropped his arms and stepped away.
“Fuck, Millie.” The words were heaved out of him on a ragged breath. “Why the hell did you have to come?” He turned and walked swiftly into the trees, leaving me standing shocked and humiliated in his wake. Again.
As a kid, when I’d been so full of hurt and anger I didn’t know what to do with myself, I’d lit fires. It was one of the reasons I’d ended up at the YGC. I clenched my fists, practically smelling the sharp, bitter smoke as I imagined setting the cottage on fire.
I had to get the hell out of here. This was too fucked up.
I went inside and stuffed everything I’d removed from the duffel bag back into it, a comforting ritual to take the place of the more destructive urge. All my things and nobody else’s—nobody’s cruelty, or hatred, or inappropriate touch—nobody’s baggage but mine. I slung the bag over my shoulder and practically ran for my car. I’d left the top down, and the seat was damp from the fog, but that was the least of my worries.
I knew I shouldn’t be driving with the medication still in my system, but there was no way I was going to spend the night here on Lukas’s property. I peeled out of the drive as I spun the car about, swirling dust up around me, and drove faster than I should on the dark road. I hadn’t even switched on the GPS, but there wasn’t anything else out here. I just had to drive straight on through the dark towering trees until I reached the highway and get the hell out.
A loud crack startled me, and I hit the brakes just as a ponderous redwood branch split off from somewhere overhead and thundered to the ground, the front of it landing right across my hood. I gripped the wheel, my heart pounding. If I hadn’t braked, the branch would be on top of me. I started to shake with delayed fright and anger. There was no way I was getting this car out. I was stuck at the Strand.
I did the only thing I could think of. I called Cole. An ex-lover who only occasionally dated women, he was the closest thing I had to a best friend.
The reception was sketchy.
“You’re where?”
“At the Strand Winery near Jerusalem.” There was a completely silent pause, and I checked to see if I was still connected.
“You’re in Israel?”
“No, Jerusalem, California. Didn’t you get my message?” I’d left a voice mail to tell him where I was going before I’d hit the road, calling the landline he never picked up so he wouldn’t talk me out of it.
“You’re breaking up. I can’t understand a thing you’re saying.”
“Well, I can understand you just fine.”
“What?”
“I’m in Jer-u-sa-lem. Ca-li-for-ni-a. The physical therapy job. I left you a message.”
“Still not getting that first bit. You got a job?”
“Yes. Out of town. But I’m quitting, and I need a ride home. Fucking Lukas Strand is here.”
“Honey, I’m sorry. I’m getting like every fourth word. I could have sworn you just said you were fucking Lukas Strand.” Cole laughed. “Which obviously can’t be what you said. I have to run, but give me a call later when you’ve got a better connection.”
The line went dead, and I burst into tears. I indulged for a good fifteen minutes until my eyes were swollen and my head ached before I mentally kicked myself in the ass.
There was probably a rural bus route that stopped in Jerusalem. I’d just walk back there in the morning. And if it wasn’t a daily occurrence, I could rent a hotel room until I figured something out. I was pretty sure I’d seen a hotel or a B&B or something on the quarter-mile strip that marked the boundaries of the little hamlet.
As I picked up my bag, my phone beeped with a text message. Maybe Cole had gotten the voice mail after all and had pieced together the conversation.
Your mother’s name was Beverly Petty. You were rescued from the fire she died in.
I broke down again, still sitting in the front seat of my ruined convertible, while fog dripped from the trees like silent, intermittent rain. In my head, the fantasy pasts I’d created for myself over the years played in a series of maudlin, embarrassing vignettes: that I’d been abandoned by a frightened teenager who’d given birth in secret, that my mother was a drugged-out crack addict who’d burned me in a fire started by her pipe, or that I’d been stolen from a real, loving family who were still somewhere searching for me. I’d even looked for myself on milk cartons.
For some reason, it had never occurred to me that my mother might have died.
She had a name now, and with that name, a vague sort of face, a “Beverly”, whatever a Beverly looked like. Unless whoever was sending these messages was a sick son of a bitch who just wanted to play games with me.
My tears of self-pity stopped, and I dried my eyes with angry swipes and sent a message back: Who the hell are you?
After a moment, there was another beep. Someone who wants to help.
I thumb-typed furiously. How do I know anything you’re saying is true?
It was a moment before the next message followed. You were found at the Greenwich Street Fire Station wrapped in a blanket stitched with your name.
My pulse raced. What were the odds someone could have found that out? They would have had to gain access to sealed state records. There wasn’t even any mention of it in old newspapers. I’d looked. I supposed they could have gotten the information from someone who’d been at the station back then, or worked at the adoption agency, but why? What would be the point of trying to deceive me about my past?
What do you want from me? I texted.
There was a pause of a minute or two before another message came. Good night, Emilie. We’ll talk again tomorrow.
It occurred to me then that the weight of the condensed fog in the trees above might have been what dropped the branch on my car, and there could be more where that one came from. I was sitting in the dim illumination of my own headlights, wasting the battery—not that it was going to do me much good at this point—in the middle of a very dark forest with an unstable redwood poised above me.
I got out of the car and heaved my bag from the backseat with a glance down the road. The cottage lights were a distant glow. I started toward it, walking unsteadily over the rocky surface of the road and trying not to trip over anything in the dark, until it occurred to me halfway there that I had a flashlight app on my phone.
I laughed at myself and turned on the beam, making much better progress for the remaining yards. As I reached the porch, I once again had the unsettling feeling of being watched from the trees, and I dashed up the steps and yanked open the door, locking it behind me
like a child who’d just seen a scary movie and walked home alone.
* * * * *
At Aravella’s suggestion, I chose one of the downstairs bedrooms to sleep in, but I lay awake for a long time, listening to the sound of the waves thundering against the rocks far below. When I finally slept, it was fitful, my mind trying to process my little world that had been turned upside down and shaken like a snow globe.
I woke just before dawn with a sudden sense of calm. I’d dreamt of my faceless mother, as I had on so many other nights, but this time she was Beverly. She’d stood at the end of my bed in a red silk robe, auburn hair like my own blowing across her indistinct features from the wind on the bluff. “Don’t worry, Emilie,” she whispered. “I haven’t gone far.”
Chapter Three
A knock came at the cottage door just after I’d showered. I pulled on a long-sleeved tee and slipped into my jeans, still towel-drying my hair as I opened the door.
Aravella stood smiling on the porch, her hair wound into a chic knot at the nape of her neck. Behind her at the bottom of the steps, a little boy sat in a wheelchair, dark hair like Aravella’s hanging long over his eyes as he peered at me warily. I regarded Aravella with dismay. I’d planned on heading over to the house before breakfast to make my apologies and then set out for Jerusalem to find out about a bus.
“Roger carried the wheelchair all the way down to the drive,” she said happily, as if the boy himself had walked here. “Koste, this is Dr. Lang. She’s going to help you get better.”
“It’s just Millie. I’m not a doctor.” I shifted uncomfortably. “Aravella, could I speak with you inside for a moment?”
Her dark brows drew together, but she nodded. “I’ll be right back, darling.”
I frowned at her after she’d stepped inside and closed the door. “I told you I wasn’t sure I was staying. I just don’t think this is going to work for me. I can give you a recommendation for some other PTs I know who are looking for work—”
“I’m well aware that you have a history with my husband.” Her fawn eyes were flat and hard. “He told me. He also said it was over.”
I let out a long breath. “It is over. It’s been over for years. I had no idea he was Koste’s father, or I would never have come.”
Aravella folded her arms. “I don’t care. Fuck him if you want.” She made the word as blunt and hard as it was ever meant to be. “But nobody else is coming all the way out here to help Koste. You know it as well as I do. Nobody else has a life they can just walk away from like you apparently do.”
That smarted. Truth usually did.
The hardness went out of her eyes, replaced by anxiety. “I’ll double what Signe’s paying you. Please. I’m afraid for my son.”
I knitted my brow. “Afraid? Aravella, he’s going to need to do some work to get back on his feet, but he’ll be fine as long as you get him moving. Children are very resilient.”
She unfolded her arms and walked to the west-facing window, shaking her head. “The lighthouse is always locked. I don’t know how he got in there. Koste says he doesn’t remember—retrograde amnesia, the doctor called it. He hit his head when he fell. I know it’s not fair of me to ask someone else to look after my child, but I’m afraid to leave him alone and I can’t take him with me.” Aravella turned around to face me. “I have to fly to Greece. There’s been a death in the family, and I have to take care of some things. I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone. Koste is special. I need someone with him all the time, and he needs the physical therapy, so I thought this would work out perfectly.”
From the way she said “special”, I gathered she meant developmental problems of some kind and not just that he was her little darling. “Look, Aravella, I’m not a behavioral specialist. I do physical therapy. That’s it. If he needs some other kind of help—”
“He doesn’t need help. He needs looking after. That’s all. He wanders off. Which, of course, he can’t do right now, but once you start working with him, I’m not sure how much longer that will last.”
I wondered if that was why she hadn’t exactly encouraged his mobility. “Why can’t his father look after him?”
Aravella’s expression darkened as if a storm had rolled over it. “Lukas is busy with the winery.” The words were bitter. From their argument at the dinner table last night, I suspected there was more to it than Lukas’s job.
I sighed. “I appreciate the predicament you’re in, and I feel bad for your son, but contrary to what you may think, I am extremely uncomfortable being around Lukas. I don’t want to see him. Staying here, working with his son, is just a really bad idea.”
“If you’re with Koste, you’ll never see him,” she said bluntly. “So if that’s your problem—problem solved. You won’t be able to get down to the house with the wheelchair, and even if Koste starts making some progress with the therapy, I doubt he’s going to be up to the climb himself anytime soon. If things go smoothly in Thessaloniki, I’ll be back in a week. And you can’t tell me you don’t need the money. I’ve looked into your finances.”
My mouth nearly hit the floor. “You what?”
“I hired a PI to investigate you. I wasn’t going to trust Koste to a stranger without being sure what kind of person you were. You have no family, no savings, and no other job prospects.” She appraised me for a moment while I fumed. “I’ll triple your pay, then.”
I opened my mouth to tell her to shove her money up her perfect little ass when an anxious cry of “Mamma!” came from outside. Aravella whirled around and yanked open the door. Konstantin was on the ground with the wheelchair tipped over.
I ran with her to pick him up and found him shaken but uninjured, having landed on the side without the cast, with the chair taking the brunt of the fall.
Aravella brushed his hair out of his eyes as we got the chair upright. “Sweetheart, what happened? What were you doing?”
“I had to go to the bathroom,” he said in a small, mortified voice, and I realized he’d wet his pants.
“Why didn’t you call for me?”
“I did.”
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry.” Aravella gave me a challenging glare as she straightened. “He’ll have to come inside. I can’t very well push him all the way back down the hill and leave him there while I go get Roger.”
“Of course not. Bring him in.” I picked up the little bag she’d left on the porch as Aravella lifted him out of the chair and carried him up the steps like a complete invalid.
While she cleaned him up in the bathroom, my phone vibrated on the kitchen table with a voice mail, though the phone hadn’t rung. It was from Cole.
“Honey, where are you? I got a little worried after that weird call last night, and I went by your place. When you didn’t answer, I checked with your building manager and he said you were ‘out of town indefinitely’. What’s going on? You said something about a message, but I never got it. Call me. You’re kind of freaking me out.”
Shit. He was the only person I’d left the details of the job with. I’d wanted to make sure someone knew where I was going when I hit the road, in case I got into an accident or the client turned out to be an axe murderer. And now I didn’t even have a car to get back home, unless there was a mechanic in Jerusalem who could work miracles.
I started to slip the phone into my pocket when another buzz went off. A text message this time—from the anonymous number.
Good morning, Emilie. Sleep well?
I wasn’t in the mood for games. What do you want?
Your happiness. Nothing more.
How wonderfully selfless. Why did you bring me here?
You deserve to know the truth.
About what?
Who your parents were. Who you are. There was a pause before the next bit came through. How Beverly died.
I could feel my heart rate spiking. Maybe I should take a
nother pill. I didn’t like using the meds two days in a row, but the last forty-eight hours had totally fried my nerves. My thumbs were poised to reply when Aravella came out of the bathroom carrying a clean, dry Konstantin.
“He really needs to be using his uninjured leg,” I scolded automatically. “Carrying him around is only going to make it harder for him.”
“Sounds like you’re reading from Lukas’s playbook,” she said as she took Konstantin over to the couch and set him down.
I bristled. “It’s professional advice, Aravella. For free.”
Footsteps sounded on the porch, and I looked over at the open door into Lukas’s stony face.
“What’s going on up here? Aunt Clara said you called the house needing help with Konstantin and I find the wheelchair out front full of piss.”
Aravella stood in front of the boy almost protectively. “She was supposed to send Roger up. I wouldn’t expect you to take an interest in your son.”
He raised an eyebrow, his eyes hard. “Is he?” The emphasis on the word “is” had an ugly connotation.
Konstantin seemed to sink into the couch, and I felt a surge of anger toward Lukas that had nothing to do with his behavior toward me. It was one thing to exchange barbs with his wife in front of his kid, but anyone could see what a cruel comment that was to a child. Though his head was still hunched over his shoulders, Konstantin’s eyes were fixed on his father. There was something else in his gaze besides embarrassment. Not fear, surely?
“We’ve got everything under control, thanks,” I said, feeling suddenly defensive on behalf of the poor kid. It was as if Konstantin were a weapon they wielded at one another. Growing up alone had been hard, but with parents like these, I couldn’t see that Konstantin’s situation was much of an improvement.
Lukas studied me with an unreadable expression. “I thought you were leaving.”
I lifted my chin defiantly. Even if he hadn’t turned into a flaming jerk, the way he wore his height had always felt like a challenge. When we’d first met in kung fu class, it had certainly been one. “What made you think I was leaving?”