by T. L. Haddix
She had to decide if she was comfortable taking more intimate steps or not. She was almost certain she was ready though that might change when the time came to make the decision.
“Stop worrying about it, Haley, and let it happen if and when it happens,” she muttered as she put her things back in her locker. What she felt for Eli was so much more than a simple, girlish crush or superficial interest. She refused to feel guilty for falling in love, and that was that.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Noah was getting entirely too big a kick out of watching Eli squirm as he got ready for his date with Haley Saturday evening. His enjoyment was clearly annoying his brother, but as Noah figured that was one of the line-items on the brother’s list of things to do to one’s siblings, he didn’t care.
“I liked the purple better,” he said when Eli came out of the bedroom tucking the tail of the third shirt he’d tried on into his pants.
Eli stopped, scowling fiercely at him. “What’s wrong with green?”
Noah laughed, truly amused, and spread his hands. “You look fine. Honest to God, Eli, I don’t think she’s going to care that much. She’s probably as nervous as you are, given that this is your first ‘official’ date.”
“You think so?”
“Oh, definitely.” He crossed his arms and watched Eli’s face as he walked to stand beside Noah, who was leaning against the back of the couch. “What’s worrying you?”
Eli studied him. “I’ve still not told her about what caused the fight between us. I feel like I should come clean before we go any further, but I don’t know how to even begin.”
Noah released a long breath and shifted his feet. “What worries you? Telling her about the fight, or telling her about me?”
“Both.” He shrugged and looked down at his hands. “I can’t tell her about one thing without telling her about the other, and I swore years ago I wouldn’t reveal your secrets, the family’s secrets, to anyone else without permission. I don’t even know if I have the right to ask for that permission. And then,” he continued before Noah could speak, “if I tell her about how stupid I was back then, how… cruel I was, what if that’s all she sees of me?”
“Yeah, because Haley strikes me as being so judgmental,” Noah told him softly. “I can’t speak for the rest of the family on this. As far as myself? I figure you’re well on your way toward getting in front of a preacher with Haley, whether you’re ready to admit that or not. And if you’re not heading that way, you should be. She’s a good person. An honest person. If she’s not, I’ll eat my book of veneer samples. I’m comfortable with you telling her everything.”
From the way Eli’s shoulders had tensed, Noah figured he wasn’t expecting that sort of absolution. The surprise on his face as he looked at Noah confirmed that suspicion.
“Everything?”
Noah scratched his jaw. “Just try not to make me sound too crazy.”
Eli surprised him by hugging him, then slapping him firmly on the back.
“Thank you.”
“Do me a favor, though?” He waited until Eli looked at him to continue. “Get the truth out. Get it over with. And get past it. Stop trying to pay penance for that shit. It’s done and buried. In some aspects, literally. It’s past time to let it all go.”
Eli lifted his chin. “I could say the same to you about a certain blonde who was here this week, who’s going to be around. Will you consider burying the hatchet with Sophie?”
Noah didn’t like that suggestion, not one bit. “She might not let it be buried,” he said instead of answering.
“Will you try?” Eli held his hand out and waited.
After a minute, Noah shook his hand. “Fine. I’ll try. Guess it would make me a hypocrite if I didn’t, huh?”
Eli grinned. “Yeah, a little bit. I’d better go.”
“Have fun. Say hi to Haley for me.”
Long after he’d gone, Noah still stood there, staring at the piano, thinking about what they’d discussed. He really was okay with Eli telling Haley about him and his abilities. That shocked him a little.
“You’ve come such a long way,” his cousin Moira said from beside him. “Nonny’s proud of you. Not so much about your turmoil over Sophie, though. She’s worried you’re going to get hurt again.”
Though she looked like a little girl, she was older than Noah’s father. But she’d been a small child when she was murdered, and that was the form she most often took.
“And what about you, munchkin?” he asked as he headed to the kitchen to get food going. There were some leftovers that he’d probably heat up, he figured. “Are you worried?”
Moira was sitting on the counter beside the fridge now, legs swinging back and forth as she watched him prep his food. “Yep. You’ve learned to listen to Eli. To trust him. Unless it pertains to Sophie. Just something to think about, dear cuz. You need to contemplate trusting him about her, too.”
And then she was gone, a tingling sensation on his skin and a slight pressure at the base of his skull the only indication she’d been there.
“Nothing quite like taking orders from a munchkin girl-child who likes to act like she’s a sage,” he grumbled.
A musical laugh sounded, fading out softly.
Noah smiled despite himself. Any time these days he thought about taking himself too seriously, Moira or his grandmother Molly Dean or occasionally, very rarely, his great-grandmother Eliza would show up to remind him he was human. They didn’t interfere, per se, but they had definite opinions about how he handled his life and they weren’t afraid to speak up about said opinions if they thought he was out of line.
Knowing they had his back was comforting, even as much as it was annoying from time to time. Even so, Noah had finally reached the point in his life where he accepted his abilities, and he’d stopped wishing he didn’t have them.
“Maybe that means I’ve finally grown up,” he said to Fig, who was perched on her usual barstool, fur standing on end in a harmless reaction to the static electricity the ghosts produced.
She meowed, then purred as she tapped the counter in front of her.
“Yeah, you’ll say anything as long as I give you a treat.” He slid his food in the oven, then got her special kibble down from its hiding spot in a locked cabinet. As he handed them out to her one by one, he laughed at himself. “I’m thirty-one years old, practically a virgin and a hermit to boot, I talk to ghosts, and I have a cat. Fig, I think I need a life.”
She glanced at him as she devoured a piece of kibble, unconcerned by the content of his words.
“Yeah, I’m happy with the way things are, too.”
And he very firmly ignored the little voice in his head that taunted him, the voice that reminded him of the kiss with Sophie. The kiss that had had him in knots all week. It was just that the door he’d locked her behind had gotten thrown open unexpectedly, that was all. That was the only reason the kiss still bothered him. He simply had to figure out how to close the door back again, and he’d be fine.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Haley’s stomach was threatening to tear her body apart as she waited for Eli to arrive for their date. Just thinking about how hopeful she’d been yesterday made her sick, or rather, sicker than she already was.
As she looked at the carefully stacked letters on the coffee table, she tried to get her head around what she’d read, then re-read over the last eighteen or so hours.
She couldn’t believe the contents were real. But… they had to be. Didn’t they? At least in part.
“I’m so damned confused,” she whispered, resting her head in her hands for a brief instant. Her temples were pounding, the headache one she’d not been able to get rid of all day.
When Jenna had arrived last night, full of sass and sparkle, she and Haley’d gotten off to a bit of a r
ough start.
“Why didn’t you call or come by when Gramps died?” Haley asked.
Jenna’d grown serious then. “I didn’t know what to say. I’m sorry. Besides, you had Eli. I didn’t think you needed me.”
“Jenna… You’re my best friend. Gramps was the only family I had. How could I not need you?”
“I’m sorry, Haley. Really, I am. I should have been there. Will you forgive me?”
Haley searched her eyes for any hint she wasn’t telling the truth. She saw none. “Forgiving doesn’t mean I’ll forget right away, you understand?”
“I know.”
Things were good from there, as normal conversation gradually took over. Haley told her about Dudley, the move, everything, and by the time they’d eaten, they’d caught up on each other’s lives with one exception.
“So tell me about this wonderful man you’ve fallen for,” Jenna teased as they took seats on the couch. “All I’ve heard about him is how great he is. I don’t even know his last name or anything else about him.”
“Yes, you do,” Haley retorted. “It’s Campbell. I told you that weeks ago.” As to the “anything else,” well, Jenna had a point. Haley’d wanted to keep Eli and their budding relationship to herself for a while at first.
“Eli Campbell. That sounds so familiar. Where’s he from?” Jenna was frowning, staring across the room at a poster of soft flowers Haley’d hung up.
“Here. Well, Hazard. He’s been away for over ten years, though. He was in the Army.” The concern on Jenna’s face gave Haley pause as she lifted her coffee. “Jen?”
“Where was he stationed, do you know?”
“North Carolina.”
Jenna gave a little shake of her head. “He wouldn’t happen to have been married before, would he?”
A shiver of unease chased over Haley’s skin. “Yes. Why?”
“To Erica?” Jenna sat forward, her face drawn, placing her own cup carefully on the table. “Please say he wasn’t married to Erica.”
The shiver had grown into a full-blown sense of dread. “Yes, he was. You know Eli. Don’t you?”
Jenna didn’t answer for a minute. “Do you have a picture of him?”
With shaking hands, Haley picked up her phone and scrolled through her pictures to find one she’d snapped of Eli on the day of the move. She looked at it for a moment, then passed it Jenna, who cursed.
“Yeah, that’s him. Fuck me running.” She reached for her purse, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Porch?”
Haley nodded and followed her outside, grabbing her coat on the way. She waited until Jenna had sucked down half the first cigarette before speaking.
“How do you know him? I get the feeling it isn’t good.”
Jenna’s laugh was devoid of humor. “It isn’t. Remember me telling you about the friend I had who got killed in the car wreck? The one who’s husband was having an affair with her cousin?”
Haley’s heart stuttered as she recalled the conversation from a few years back. “Vaguely.”
“Yeah. Well, that’s him.” She took a long drag on the cigarette, then stubbed it out on the bottom of her shoe as she exhaled. “I’m so sorry, sweetie.”
“There has to be some kind of mistake,” Haley said.
Jenna shook her head. “Nope. I wish there was. But that’s him. I only met him once, but I recognize him. Handsome son of a bitch.”
With her arms wound tightly over her chest, hands clenched in the fabric of her coat, Haley felt her world shift to the edge of a chasm. “Tell me what you’re talking about.”
So Jenna did. “I met Erica when I moved in with Jay,” she said. “She was in the apartment next door. Eli was always deployed, it felt like, at least when I was there.” Jenna had spent summers with her mother in Hazard. “By the time I was eighteen, well. She wasn’t that much older than me, and we both liked to party. And she was lonely since he was gone so much. We became friends.”
She lit a second cigarette, studying the glowing red tip for a moment. “Don’t think that Erica was a good person. She wasn’t. She was out for herself and herself alone, okay? But part of that came from the way he treated her. He cheated on her from the time they got to North Carolina until she died. He was never without a side piece. And she took her revenge by fucking as many guys as she could.”
“That doesn’t sound like Eli,” Haley heard herself say.
“That’s what she said. That the guy she’d married had been sweet and funny… at least to her. I guess he was a douchebag to his brother or something and that was one reason he had to leave home so fast. The Army seemed like the best way to do that.”
Jenna shrugged. “Regardless, they separated for a while. For about a year. And that’s when he cut Erica off financially. He never did straighten that out, not even after they reconciled. That’s why she had to work. In her last letter to me, she’d found out about the affair with her cousin—Sonya? Samantha?”
“Sophie,” Haley murmured. “Her name’s Sophie.”
“That’s it! Sophie. Anyhow, Erica found out about it, and she was going to confront Sophie. Eli was on his way home from overseas somewhere, and Erica was afraid he was going to divorce her or worse. And then she died. I guess he didn’t end up marrying the cousin after that, did he?” she asked casually, as though she was unaware of the utter devastation her words had wrought in Haley’s life.
“No, he didn’t,” she said. “Excuse me for a minute.”
She barely made it to the bathroom in time to be sick, crouching down over the toilet as her stomach rebelled. It couldn’t be true. Jenna had to be mistaken. She had to be. But then as Haley scrambled to think back to everything Eli had told her about his marriage, about Erica, little snippets came through that made her wonder.
“He kept saying he’d done truly awful things,” she whispered after she rinsed her mouth out at the sink. “Things he didn’t expect to be forgiven for. Oh, God. What if it’s true?”
When she came out, Jenna was pacing in the living room, phone in her hand as she texted someone. She put it away as Haley came in. “Hey. I was getting ready to check on you. Are you okay?”
Fine, for someone who was frozen solid inside and out. “You said she wrote you letters. Where are those? Do you still have them?”
For all that she wasn’t sentimental, Jenna was a terrible packrat.
“Sure. They’re at the house, at Mom’s, in a box. I’m so sorry, Haley. Sorry he couldn’t be the white knight you thought he was.”
“I want to see the letters.” Haley ignored the platitudes. “Tonight. Can we go?”
Jenna eyed her uneasily. “Sure. You think you’re up to it?”
“Yes.”
Thirty minutes later, they were digging through boxes in her old room. They had the house to themselves, as her mother and stepfather were out.
“Aha! Here they are.” Jenna turned, a small shoebox in hand, grinning. “I knew I had them.” She handed the box to Haley.
“This is heavy.”
“There are a lot of letters there,” Jenna said as they headed downstairs. “Do you want to take them with you?”
“No. I want to read them here first. I may have questions.” She sat down on Lottie’s sofa, uncaring if she was putting Jenna or her mother out, and started reading.
Two hours later, Haley’d seen enough. The letters were revelatory. Like Jenna’d said, Erica had few redeeming qualities. And there was a girlishness in her penmanship that bespoke a much younger woman than Haley knew her to be. But the picture she painted of Eli… there was nothing childish about that.
“She says he hit her,” Haley told Jenna faintly as she folded one of the letters. “When she told him the truth about her sterility, he hit her.”
Jenna sighe
d and pushed her hair back off her face. “That’s one thing that I never really believed. I wasn’t there when it happened, when they split up. I was up here visiting Mom. But after I got back to Fayetteville, I was talking to Jay’s wife and she swore up and down that he left before Erica got all bruised up. She always thought Erica’s boyfriend at the time did it. I’m not defending him,” she said, holding a hand up, “but for all the man’s obvious faults, that was the only time he ever laid a hand on her. It didn’t add up.”
Haley’d sat so long, her muscles were stiff when she tried to stand. “I want to take these with me.”
Jenna stood, too. “Okay. I’d like them back, though. What are you going to do?”
“Go home. Think.” There were still several letters to get through, letters from the time period right before Erica’s death.
When she got home, alone, she sat down and stared at the box. She didn’t want to open it again, didn’t want to know what other ugliness those letters held.
Erica had been a very hedonistic, greedy, narcissistic woman. That much was evident almost from the first letter. She took pleasure in recounting her infidelities and flirtations to Jenna. And as Haley had known Jenna for so long, she knew that her friend would have eaten up the juicy details. Because while she wasn’t as conscienceless as Erica, Jenna wasn’t the most altruistic of souls on a good day.
Haley even thought there’d been a bit of pleasure tonight when Jenna had seen how much pain her revelations had caused. But that hardly mattered, not compared to what Haley had read in the letters.
Regardless of how little she wanted to finish reading, she had no choice. She knew that. Jenna had said Eli’d been having an affair with Sophie when the wreck happened. And Haley had to know what Erica said about that.