by L. J. Stock
“Miss Quinten?” the receptionist asked sweetly. “Mr. Gloyd will be right with you. Can I get you something to drink while you wait?”
“Water, please.”
“You got it.” She rose and slipped away down the hallway behind her desk, leaving me to look out over the city as it spread out around us.
It never ceased to amaze me how funny life was. No matter what we were dealing with personally, no matter how much our worlds crumbled down around us, leaving dust and debris, the world kept right on turning, and people went about their business. This should have been comforting, but the fact of the matter was the continuation of the day to day just made everything more surreal. Life had been much harder after Dustin had died. I’d spent so much time thinking about the people who would never get to know him, who would never be touched by his kindness or know how warm it was in the embrace of his love. They would never know him.
With my father’s death and all of this business, my thoughts were purely selfish. How could they not see how torn I was about all this? Why couldn’t they all feel my anguish? Why was this happening again? Why couldn’t I be protected against all of this destruction for once? Death was a tragedy no matter who it touched, but since the phone call from Meg about my dad, I felt like I was walking around with a target on my back. I wanted to wrap the people I loved in bubble wrap to protect them from the curse of knowing me.
I was withdrawn from my destructive thoughts by the return of the receptionist. She set a small bottle with the firm’s logo on the label next to me and smiled sympathetically before slipping back behind her desk to resume her work. The water gave me something to do while I waited with growing discomfort, and I was only halfway through my escape plan when the buzz of the phone made me jump. The young woman murmured quietly into the receiver, her fingers diligently snapping across the keys as she typed. The anticipation grew until my tension crackled in the air around me, causing a wince when she finally did call my name.
“Miss Quinten, Mr. Gloyd will see you now. It’s the door at the end on the far left.”
I kept the bottle in one hand and wiped the palm of the other on my jeans as I nodded, stood, and reached for my bag. I really didn’t want to be there in that office anymore. I wanted to be heading home to Colorado where my life made a bit more sense. I felt as though I was about to stand in front of a firing squad.
By the time I’d knocked on the door, I was in full decline toward an anxiety attack. My head had put together all these images of what I should expect and what was about to go down, and when I knocked, the deep, “Come in,” almost sent me running in the opposite direction.
Swallowing the manifestations of my own fear, I pushed the door aside and stepped into the room. Finding the cheerful faced man behind the desk made me relax a little, but it was the warmth of his office that squashed the need to flee. Inside this room, there weren’t the sleek lines and cold walls of the reception area. He’d covered one wall in shelves filled with leather-bound books and fronted with family images, trinkets, awards, and nicknacks. Children’s faces smiled from the frames on his warm cherry wood desk, while the credenza behind him held files and more pictures. The surface was littered with them, and a little chaotic, but the sight brought comfort with it.
“Ah, Miss Quinten. I finally get the pleasure of meeting you.” He stood and offered his hand to me, and I rushed across the room to shake it before taking the seat he offered with a tip of his head. “I’m sorry it has to be under these circumstances.”
He smoothed his tie down his chest and over his stomach as he sat again and wheeled himself closer to the desk. He tapped his hand on a fat manila folder and then linked his hands over the top.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, too,” I supplied, crossing my hands in my lap.
“Your father talked about you often toward the end of his life.” He slipped on a pair of reading glasses and opened the file in front of him. I figured he must have been old school considering most people worked from computers these days.
“We were estranged,” I said defensively.
“Yes,” he cooed paternally. “He mentioned that as well. He liked to think he deserved it.”
“I don’t know about all that. It was my choice to stay away, and I couldn’t bring myself to see him after what happened. He knew this, too, which was why I was surprised he reached out to me after his death.”
Mr. Gloyd nodded thoughtfully and smiled at me as he pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose. There was no judgment in his glance, no condemnation, just objectivity as he played Devil’s advocate.
“Mr. Gloyd, I appreciate that you probably knew my father much better than I did. Maybe you even became friends, but for me, he died when my mom did. He gave up and liked to pretend I didn’t exist because denial made life easier for him. As much as I wish things could have been different, they’re not. I did the only thing I could to survive and succeed.”
A smiled passed over his face and warmed his eyes further. His cheeks rose as his lips curled giving him the look of a kindly grandfather. “I didn’t mean to overstep, Miss Quinten.”
“You didn’t.”
He nodded in acceptance and picked up a few of the papers in the envelope before sliding them toward me. “Why don’t we get started on the paperwork?”
As rocky as the conversation was to begin with, we fell into an easy companionship as he went through all the paperwork and technicalities with me. He explained everything, what they meant, and what would happen once I signed every piece of paper. He gave me financial records, explaining how they had grown over the past four years since my father had asked him to keep everything in order. He handed me several keys to the house, the vehicles, and the bank’s safety deposit box. I had a copy of everything I’d signed, my father’s death certificate and several other state and federal forms, including the taxes that had been paid over the last fourteen years. My father had made sure to keep everything in order, and had even organized a cremation for himself. When I asked, I was told I would be called when he was ready to be collected. His request was for his ashes to be scattered at Mom’s grave, and that small kindness felt right for me to do for him at the very least.
By the time I left Mr. Gloyd’s office, I had a large envelope filled with a novel’s worth of paper, keys, and a couple of bonds my father’s father had bought for me when I was born. I felt stunned, bewildered and a little confused by the whole transition.
After a quick text to Megan, I got in my car, which was cast in shadows in the multi-story parking garage, locked myself in and cried, finally releasing the growing anxiety and sadness that had been creeping over me since I’d arrived in Amarillo.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
So, what now?” Megan asked from the car speakers. I had my phone connected to the Bluetooth as I drove back from Amarillo. My eyes were finally starting to lose the harsh red tenderness of my tears that had circled them when I’d first left the parking garage.
“I honestly thought that I wanted to sell it all without thought or attachment and move on, but now I think I want to take a few days and consider all of my options. Maybe even talk to Holly about what she wants. I’m not getting sentimental here, but I also don’t want to just throw it all away out of bitterness.”
“I think it’s the smart thing to do. There’s no rush now. If you want to take a few days, months, even years, there’s nothing to stop you. It’s yours now. No one can take it away. Like you said, you don’t need the money.”
“It’s so weird to think about all those things he’s left for me. There’s so much, Meg. More than I could have imagined. And can you believe my hideout all those years was owned by my dad?”
That little tidbit had been a shock to me. The land had always been his, purchased by him and my mom when they’d bought the house after they’d married.
“At least you know why you were never bothered by someone screaming trespass. What about the house?”
“The lawyer h
ad a janitorial company go in once a month to make sure everything was clean and maintained. He also asked the troopers to drive by once a day to make sure nothing bad went down. He said that would be up to me now that the estate was mine.”
The line went quiet for a moment, and the only sound was the whirring of the asphalt under the tires as I drove. I knew Meg was just waiting for the invitation to speak and say the things I couldn’t bring myself to think about, let alone say aloud.
“Say it,” I finally blurted out as I grabbed the soda warming in the middle console. Taking a mouthful, I waited, swirling it in my mouth to try and ease the dryness there.
“I have nothing to say.”
“Liar,” I responded after swallowing and settling the cup back in its place. “You always have something to say, and this… I know this is just eating you alive.”
“I think you should keep the land where your trees are,” she finally said, pushing the words out quickly. “I also think you should leave the house for me to take care of. I can do what needs to be done there. You don’t need to go back to that place ever again. I can’t see you broken like you were after that night. Holly doesn’t need to see you like that, either.”
“And that right there is why I love you. I can say, with my hand on my heart, that if it were left up to me, I would burn the place to the ground without a backward glance.” I brushed the hair back from my face and tightened my other hand on the steering wheel. My grip twisted as the flashes of Dustin’s glassy and lifeless eyes stabbed themselves into my memory.
“Mikayla!”
Megan’s voice cut through the darkness that pooled and threatened to drown me. Shaking it off, I took three deep breaths before I responded.
“I’m okay.”
“Yeah, well if that’s your reaction from just talking about it, there’s no way on God’s green Earth you need to go back into that house again.”
“You’re such a mother hen,” I teased in an attempt to calm us both down. “Just do me a favor and keep Holly preoccupied. I need to drive for a bit.”
“You going to your trees?”
“I honestly don’t know,” I admitted quietly as my eyes hit the grown-over train tracks that ran toward the horizon just outside of town. All I knew was that I wasn’t ready to go back to her house and talk this through in person. Megan wanted to look after me, and I loved her for it, but right now I needed to sort through my own thoughts, hang-ups, and inhibitions. I had to exorcise my demons for a while so I could hold my head up high when she inevitably brought them up for discussion.
“Well, you don’t ever need to worry about Holly.”
“I know it.”
“Love you.”
“Backatcha,” I sang, my thumb hovering over the end call button on my steering wheel. “I’ll be back soon.”
“Take your time.”
I smiled, said my goodbyes, and ended the call.
Being left alone with my own thoughts wasn’t exactly the greatest idea after the afternoon that I’d had. My father’s written words lingered on the edge of my mind on a loop. There were sentences that just played over and over again; memories of the times we spent together when Mom was alive were now tainted with red around the edges. It was a constant reminder that this man had killed the one thing in the world I had loved and wanted more than my next breath. How did I reconcile that with the man who had left me everything and an apology to accompany it? That letter he’d written, the last letter he would ever write for me, contained the most honest things he’d ever said to me. He had resented me, hated me, and turned away from me to ease his own hurts. It didn’t make him right; it didn’t make his reaction right. Nothing would ever do that. Not now, and not when I’d been nine.
I drove for what felt like hours, circled the town several times and headed south before turning myself around and finding a more definitive route. It took me a while to see where I was finally headed, and I’d barely registered the stretch of road when the sound of shredding rubber hitting the underside of my car, drowning out the quiet hum of the radio.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I cursed, slapping the hazard lights on my dash and easing the car off the road. It wasn’t until I was at a stop in a cloud of dust that I realized exactly where I was. As the dust settled, I dropped both palms and my forehead against the steering wheel and let the ghosts of that afternoon surround me.
I couldn’t help but remember Dustin riding my ass in that huge truck of his, or his erratic behavior and the heartbreak in those unfathomably blue eyes as he finally unleashed all of his pain and anger on me. All of that history had happened here, on this tiny patch of road that had once been so familiar to me.
“You did that on purpose,” I whispered, glancing in my rear-view mirror and half expecting to see his truck sitting so closely, all I would see was the chrome of his grill. “But thank God for full sized spares.”
I slipped out onto the cool asphalt and planted my hands on my hips as I took in my surroundings. There were fields as far as the eye could see in both directions. The warm spring sun was slowly heating things up, and after I kicked parts of my tire aside, I opened the back and pulled on my old flannel shirt to protect the blouse I was wearing. I worked quickly and diligently, the heat of the sun quickly making me uncomfortable as I placed the jack where it needed to be and started to work the damn thing after I’d loosened the nuts. When you lived out in the rural countryside, you learned to do things like changing your own tires. Jen had always told me that women needed to be self-sufficient, especially on roads where cars seldom traveled. According to her, there was nothing wrong with being a damsel when there was a good man around—we just needed to look after ourselves when the occasion called for it.
She was right, of course. Who knew when the next car would pass by out here in the middle of nowhere? It was just a coincidence that the one truck that happened by slowed down when I was just about through removing the shredded tire, and in the process of dropping the stupid spare on my toe, leaving me hopping around like a fool. It was also just my luck that the brown-eyed god that jumped out of the damn vehicle was the man from the bar the night before.
I blew my sweat-dampened bangs from my forehead as he pulled on the bill of his cap and approached in his confident lope. There was a cocky smile on his lips, one side rising just a bit higher than the other as he stopped and leaned around me to see the bare metal where a tire should have been.
“What are the odds, darlin’?”
I gave him a sarcastic laugh and looked down at the spare, which was sat just feet away from me, and supplied, “Of course it’s you.”
“Well, damn, anyone would think you were happy to see me.”
I rolled my eyes and bent, reaching for the tire, which he nudged out of my reach, leaving my hands to swing back and slap against my knees.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked, straightening to my full height and planting my hands on my hips.
“Nothing right now, but I’m planning on being helpful. Ain’t that good of me?”
“Thank you,” I said in the most insincere way manageable. “But I’ve got this.”
“I’m not disputing that,” he replied cheerfully as he crouched in front of the old tire and examined the damage. “What the hell did you run over?”
“Nothing that I know of.”
He stood again and tipped his head to the side before nodding at the front of my car with a big grin. “Is that The Way I Choose?”
I looked between him and my cracked door where the ‘Bad Company’ song filtered through at barely a whisper. I was actually impressed. He was dressed like most of the ranch hands around here, and I’d assumed that he was another country boy through and through, but he’d given me pause for thought. Something I appreciated. I offered him a genuine smile and nodded. “It is.”
“I just surprised you,” he declared, his beautifully imperfect smile making another appearance.
I raised one shoulder in agreement and droppe
d it again, watching as he rubbed his jaw and rolled my spare toward him, getting down to work with a small laugh.
“I like knowing I have the ability to do that,” he finally said, his big hands gathering everything he needed.
“Why?”
“Because it means that your preconceived notion about me has been shattered.” He looked up at me briefly. His smile grew. It was a warm, sensual, and heart-stopping smile now. One that made my chest ache and a flash of recognition flutter in the depths of my stomach. I tried to shake the odd nostalgia off and turned away from him, kicking a piece of rubber from my path.
“You’re very self-assured.”
“Not really. I know what I like, I know what intrigues me, and when I’m interested in something or someone, I go after it with a single-minded determination.”
“I see.” I snorted and spun on the balls of my feet to look down at him again. “And what if the other party isn’t interested?”
“Well, I see that as a challenge. Just means I gotta change their way of seeing things. I’m also really good in bed. That’s always helpful.”
“Be still my beating heart.” I raised my hand to my chest and fluttered my eyelashes at him. “Now how can I turn down an offer like that?”
“Just something to think about.”
“Or look forward to?” I asked with a snort. “I own a bar back at home, and I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone with your level of game.”
“Where’s home?” he asked, ignoring the backhanded compliment I’d just offered him.
I pointed in the general direction of northwest and smiled sweetly. Again, my vagueness didn’t seem to deter him in the slightest. I would have found it annoying if I hadn’t already decided it was endearing.
“What made you want to open a bar?” he asked as he tightened one of the lug nuts.
“I worked in one for a while. I had all these ideas but the owner kind of shrugged me off like I was an idiot, so when I fell into some funds, I decided to put those ideas into practice.”