by Ruthie Knox
“Anything.” Oh, anything, Els. Ask me for the moon and the stars, and I shall give them to you.
Okay, so he hadn’t said that. But it was by no means beneath him.
“Why do you still call me ‘Els’ when I’ve told you repeatedly that I hate it?”
A sharp crease appeared between his eyebrows, and he said, “It suits you. I’ve always thought of you as my Els.”
She opened her eyes, meeting his familiar blue gaze. With her index finger, she tapped him sharply on the knee. “That’s your problem, Richard. Right there. That’s the reason we’re never getting back together.”
He squinted at her, then shook his head, a study in ponderous confusion. Richard had always been so great at projecting weighty emotions. He should have been a Shakespearean actor. He’d make a fantastic King Lear. “I don’t understand.”
“You don’t see me, and you don’t listen, either. I’ve always been an accessory to you, not a person.”
“That’s not true. I have an illness, but I’ve been working on it, Els, and—”
She raised an eyebrow. “You just did it again.”
“Did what?”
“Called me ‘Els.’ ”
“It’s only a name, babe. I know that if we—”
“It’s not only a name. It’s a symptom of what’s wrong, what was always wrong between the two of us. And even if you magically woke up tomorrow morning having learned how to care what I want to be called—even if you really have stopped drinking, and you started showing up for all your scheduled visitations with Henry and gave me some evidence that you care about your son—I’m still not going to fall into your lap, Richard. I’m done with you. We’re over.”
He stared at her for a long time, the angry furrow returning between his eyebrows. He looked heartbreakingly like Henry on the verge of a tantrum. Same blue eyes, same knitted forehead. His hand clutched at his knee, and she thought, He wishes he had a glass in that hand. If he had a drink right now, he’d knock the whole thing back in one go, because Richard doesn’t know how to deal with this kind of thing without alcohol.
But she wasn’t responsible for making his life easier for him. He’d turned up in her backyard. He had to deal with the consequences of his actions, same as anybody.
“I don’t understand,” he said for the second time.
He would never understand.
Picking up the contract off her lap, she prepared to go back to work. “Buh-bye now, Richard. See you around.”
It took a full minute, but eventually he did get up and amble off. No doubt he’d pick up Cassie’s phone number on the way out.
Cassie could play the part of his new lodestar if she wanted to. Ellen no longer saw the appeal in being any man’s guiding light.
Caleb picked at his falafel and stared out the windshield of his mother’s car.
He tried not to think about what Ellen had been doing around the back of her house with her ex-husband. Tried not to think about the quick glimpse he’d caught from Carly’s driveway of the two of them inches apart and leaning toward each other.
Of Ellen with her eyes closed, waiting to be kissed.
“Eat, Caleb,” his mother said firmly. “You need to keep your strength up.”
She’d brought him the sandwich and some cookies—lunch at four o’clock—and insisted he consume them in her presence. He took another bite, but he couldn’t taste anything. It was like eating cotton balls. He forced it down with a long swig of iced tea.
Ellen wouldn’t kiss Richard. Wouldn’t. No matter how pissed she was with Caleb, she flat-out disliked her ex.
Except she’d looked a hell of a lot like she was going to let him kiss her.
His mother craned around in the driver’s seat to observe the crowd milling behind them. Since Callahan had given the press conference and declared his intention to lay siege to Carly’s house until she let him in, he and Carly had been waging their battle over Twitter, with Jamie posting sweet compliments in exchange for every bitter, nasty thing she could think of to say about him. All three or four hundred people now behind the barricades were dividing their attention between the two houses and their phones. As Jamie set up his equipment on Carly’s lawn, they watched the action unfold and greeted each new online development with excited chatter.
Caleb wanted very much to punch Jamie Callahan. One solid whack in the jaw would go a long way toward evening the scorecard. The man was making his job hideously difficult. Come to think of it, it would be nice to give Carly a little shake, too, except of course you couldn’t shake a pregnant woman. Or any woman. Couldn’t even chew her out, because she had the blood-pressure thing. Shortie had complete immunity at the moment, the little brat.
Callahan’s record label spoke through Breckenridge, and Breckenridge had been riding Caleb’s ass all day long. This is suicide for his image. Get him inside and keep him there. Take away his phone. Force him to see reason.
As if Caleb were Callahan’s jailer. The truth was, he didn’t have the least bit of influence over the guy. He’d tried talking to him. He’d tried talking to Carly. Both of them had batted him away like a gnat.
So what the hell did Breckenridge think he should do, tie them up? They were grownups, at least technically. If they wanted to air their dirty laundry on television and on the Internet and in every newspaper in the country, they had the right. All Caleb could do was make sure they didn’t come to any harm in the process.
Also, keep the photographers away from the windows, prevent fights from breaking out at the barricades, confiscate alcohol, refuse to let anyone sit down, make sure he had patrols running around the fence line, arrange for porta-potties to be delivered, check and double-check every vehicle that came through, coordinate with the local police to pick up troublemakers, watch over the shift changes, field dozens of phone calls and e-mails and text messages, track who was supposed to be showing up to help Nana take care of Carly, rescue Ellen’s tulip tree, check in on Henry now and then, and suppress the urge to tell Breckenridge to back the fuck off.
Oh, and coordinate for Jamie Callahan to give a public concert for Carly on her front lawn in the hope of getting his foot in the door. Even though green-lighting this asinine gesture might well be the move that cost Caleb his job.
He’d only agreed to help—or at least not actively hinder—because he was a sap, and Carly loved Jamie, even if she was too stubborn to admit it.
All of which meant he really had better things to do than devote 98 percent of his attention to wondering if Ellen had something going with her jerk-off ex-husband. And if Caleb had blown his chance with her this morning or sometime before this morning. If Katie was right and he’d botched this thing with Ellen so bad from the beginning that he wouldn’t be able to fix it.
“What a mess,” his mother said. “Can’t you do something about all these people?”
“What do you think I ought to do about them, Mom?” He didn’t succeed in keeping the annoyance out of his voice. He didn’t even try particularly hard.
She gestured vaguely with one hand, her gold bracelet winking in the sun. “I don’t know. Send them back wherever they came from.”
“Yeah, I’ll get right on that.”
“No need to get snippy with me. It’s just so unseemly. This is not the sort of thing that happens in Camelot.”
His mother delivered most of her condemnations between the lines. What she really wanted him to know was that this media circus was spoiling her pretty little town, and she considered him a failure for not managing to prevent it or clean it up. Never mind that people had a right to assemble wherever they wanted. Never mind that he couldn’t kick the gawkers out of Camelot any more than he could control the weather. This was all his fault.
He’d stopped waiting for Janet Clark to pat him on the back a long time ago, but at least when he’d been in the army, she’d pretended to support the cause. These days, she went back and forth between acting as though the family didn’t need his help a
nd worrying his business would go under and he’d fail to rescue them. Now she’d come up with a new variation—this was the first time she’d seen him at work, and it meant she could also tell him he was bad at his job.
“I’m sure it’ll be over soon enough,” he said.
“I should hope so. I’d like to think you have more important things to do than babysit celebrities.”
Ah. He was bad at his silly job.
Enough. He set the sandwich down and got out of her car, bracing his arms over the door frame and leaning in. “This is happening in Camelot, Ma, unseemly or not. Things happen in life that are unseemly. You don’t have to like them, but bitching about them and wishing they’d go away is counterproductive.”
He wished he were only talking about the job, but both of them knew that wasn’t the case. He was talking about Dad. His volume had risen as he spoke, and an internal warning system told him he was in danger of losing it and chewing out his own mother.
“Don’t use that tone with me, young man. I raised you. I deserve your respect.” She crossed her arms, her eyes flashing.
“You raised me, and you did a good job. How about you quit treating me like a useless kid?”
“I don’t—”
“You do, and I’m done. I don’t need to be handled. I need you to help me take care of you and the rest of this family. Dad can’t do it anymore. I can.”
A bystander in a red T-shirt broke free of the barricade just then and streaked up the driveway, camera in hand. Caleb walked around the front of the car, caught the guy by the upper arm, and yanked it back hard, catching his opposite wrist. Red Shirt obviously couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag. Within a few seconds, Caleb had the guy’s arms behind his back, high enough to let him know how much it would hurt if he was unwise enough to struggle. Red Shirt sank to his knees, then to the asphalt, where he turned his face to one side and submitted meekly to the pressure of Caleb’s hand pressing his head to the ground.
It felt way too good.
Bryce extended a pair of handcuffs. The sun glinted off the metal, but Caleb didn’t move to take them. Red Shirt had become a prisoner, but Caleb was in the wrong mood to play jailer. He didn’t want to find out what he was capable of on this little sleep and this much frustration.
“You cuff him,” he told Bryce. After they’d exchanged roles, Caleb returned to the car.
His mother was clutching the steering wheel when he opened her door. “Is that—I didn’t know you did that sort of thing. It was …”
“It was necessary. And that’s about one-hundredth of what I do. You’d know that if you paid any attention, if you even asked me what I did all day long. I don’t think you want to know. I think you want me to fail.”
“That’s not true. I …” She sniffed and raised her face to his, and he saw her eyes were full of tears. He’d made his mother cry. Fucking fantastic.
Caleb forced himself to take a deep breath and exhale. His mom smelled like baby powder and incense from the church. She was difficult, but he loved her. “Thanks for lunch, Ma. I’m sorry I’m being an asshole. I’m not having a very good day. I love you, but I need you to go home now so I can stop worrying about you and get back to work.”
She nodded. Stiff. “I love you, too,” she said, so quietly it sounded like a secret she was telling him.
The worst part was, it didn’t even move him. Didn’t do a thing to loosen the tight knot of frustration in his stomach. Her love had never been in question. It was her respect he needed. Her faith.
As she drove off, he stopped by the SUV to talk to Cassie. “What time did you log Richard Morrow out?”
She looked down at the clipboard, unwilling to meet his eyes. He wasn’t sure he’d want to meet his own eyes right now, but Cassie seemed excessively nervous considering he’d known her since she and Katie were both giggling schoolgirls. “Quarter to three.”
“He was here for an hour?”
“Yes.” She was blushing.
“What am I missing, Cass?”
She gripped the steering wheel with both hands and didn’t answer him.
Eric piped up. “He was with Mrs. Callahan for ten minutes, sir. The rest of the time he spent out here.”
The man didn’t say, The rest of the time he spent out here flirting with Cassie, but he didn’t have to. Message received.
“Thanks, Eric.”
As soon as Caleb didn’t desperately need every breathing body he could get, he was going to have to fire Cassie. Which meant Katie would be pissed at him. Man, this day just kept getting better.
His phone buzzed. Another text from the guys at the roadblock wanting his opinion on something ASAP.
As he was forcing his way past the barricades and through the crush of bodies, his phone rang. This time, it was Sean. Caleb had assigned him to run the show over at Maureen Morrow’s house.
“What’s up?”
“Weird situation over here,” Sean said. “There’s a photographer trying to take the Callahan kid’s picture.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Why are you calling to tell me this? Walk him off the property.”
“Yeah, sure. But the thing is, I’ve seen this guy before, and—”
Caleb stopped in his tracks. “Is it Plimpton?” Realizing Sean wouldn’t know who he was talking about, he added, “Does he look like a rat? Little guy, slicked-back hair?”
“Yeah.”
Fuck. “And he’s actually on the property?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Keep him there, and watch your back. He might be dangerous. I’m going to send a cruiser to pick him up.”
“Sure. I can do that. But here’s the—”
“Is Henry in the house yet?” Caleb raked his hand through his hair. This was bad. This sucked.
“No, he’s—”
“Get him inside the house, then call me back.”
He was about to hang up when Sean said, “Hold on, man. Let me get a word in.”
Caleb sighed, which did exactly nothing to release the tension that had him wired tight. Adrenaline and stress made a potent cocktail. “Go ahead.”
“The thing is, the photographer’s here because Richard Morrow invited him. It’s some kind of sick photo shoot or something, I guess. I didn’t think it was my call to tell the kid’s dad what he could and couldn’t do, you know?”
“Shit,” Caleb said. It was the only thing he could think of to say. Ellen’s ex was an even bigger prick than he’d thought.
“Hang tight,” he assured Sean. “I’ll be there with Ellen in ten.”
Chapter Twenty-three
The slow-motion slide of her heart into her stomach made it impossible for Ellen to unbuckle her seat belt. Caleb had to do it for her.
Her baby was playing with his father in the sandbox, and Weasel Face crouched next to them, taking their picture.
Henry wasn’t in any danger. He was perfectly content, talking to himself and shoveling sand onto the back of his dump truck with the solemnity of the very young while Richard perched on the edge of the sandbox, performing parental attentiveness.
And yet Ellen’s hands shook so hard, she had trouble working the door latch.
Again, Caleb was there, helping her out of the car, and he said, “Let me handle this,” low and cautionary, but she could hardly hear him because there was a man, a strange man taking pictures of her son so he could put them in newspapers and on the Internet, where thousands of other strangers would see the soft, downy curve of Henry’s cheeks and his innocent blue eyes, clear as a mountain lake.
They weren’t his father’s blue eyes at all. They were Henry’s. Not Richard’s to sell. Henry’s.
And then, without realizing she’d crossed the drive, she had Henry in her arms. She’d plucked him so abruptly from the sand that it streamed off him, filtering into her sandals, and he went stiff and shoved against her with both hands as she pressed her face against his cheek. “Ma put you down,” he said. “Henry is w
orking.”
But she couldn’t. She knew she was overreacting—Henry had been in candid shots before, and a picture now and again wouldn’t bring the world to an end—but still she couldn’t stop herself from burying her face in his hair and breathing in the little-boy smell of him, that sweet combination of baby shampoo and cheddar bunnies and dirt.
The camera whirred and clicked quietly, recording her reunion with her son.
The photographs weren’t the issue. It was the violation. Richard’s violation—but here was the vulture he’d hired, sticking his camera in her face and saying, “Smile.” Until the edges of her field of vision turned scarlet, she’d had no idea the expression “seeing red” was anything more than a figure of speech. It was real, probably the result of the blood pounding in her ears.
“Caleb?” she said, mildly surprised by how not-insane she sounded. “Could you please take Henry inside?” But Caleb wasn’t next to her, where she’d expected him to be. He was still over by the car, conferring with the other agent.
“I’ll do it.”
Maureen’s voice. Maureen was here, it seemed. Ellen hadn’t noticed. She hadn’t looked at anyone or anything but Henry and Richard and the camera and the rodent-faced prick who was holding it.
“Henry doesn’t want to go inside,” her son said as Maureen took him from her. Her hands were reluctant to let go of his dirty little jean-clad butt. “Henry stay here wif Mama.”
As he receded toward the house, his cries rose in pitch and lost intelligibility, until he was crying “No! Noooooo!” and Ellen felt like she’d been knifed in the chest.
He’ll be okay. Maureen will show him a movie and give him a cookie, and he’ll be just fine.
Ellen had other things to worry about. Richard. But before Richard, Weasel Face.
She advanced on the photographer. This man—this scrawny man with his digital SLR and his knees stained from crawling over the damp grass in pursuit of pictures of her son—he was all of her nightmares rolled into one. He was the dream she’d had about losing Henry at the mall and the one where Henry had been in a bus that sailed off the edge of a cliff. He was the stranger with candy and the cleric who liked little boys. He was the driver on his cell phone who hit her kid on a crosswalk because he wasn’t paying enough attention to the road.