He didn’t blame her for needing his help, but had come to care about finding Araceli.
He came out of the bedroom, looking recovered from yesterday’s trials with his wet hair and unshaven cheeks, determined as he made his way to the breakfast cart that room service had delivered earlier.
“Anything?” he asked in his morning voice, a gravelly sound she knew would eventually disappear with the passage of time and another cup of coffee.
She was getting to know this man so well.
Bracing herself, Courtney met his whiskey gaze. “Our Jane Doe is a girl named Carmela Herrera. She’s from Medellín, Colombia, which happens to be where Mr. Aguilar is from.”
“She’s family.” Not a question.
“His niece.” Courtney nodded. “You’re not surprised.”
He arched a dark eyebrow and ran a hand through his hair. “Alien smuggling is big business,” Marc said as he reached for the thermos of coffee and poured himself a cup. He sipped, looking thoughtful. “You okay?”
No, she wasn’t okay. She suddenly felt raw about a little girl who’d lost everything she loved, a child who had cried herself to sleep every night and had begged a woman she’d cared about to take her home. A child who had been missing for so long, maybe waiting for someone to come find her. And no one had bothered for all these years.
Courtney understood what it felt like to be alone.
But not like Araceli, who had been a child without a choice, and the reality that someone had simply replaced her felt so overwhelming, her heart was breaking. How could anyone just substitute one child for another as if they were interchangeable?
As if they didn’t matter?
“This wasn’t premeditated,” Marc said with a gentleness to his voice that was unfamiliar, as if he understood. “That much I can tell you. The Aguilars couldn’t have planned the bus situation during the evacuations. They couldn’t have known the Pereas were going to need them to take one of their kids. They enrolled Araceli in school, which probably means they’d meant to send her like they were sending the other kids. There’s a lapse of a good ten months before Jane Doe surfaced. Something happened during those first weeks here in Atlanta.”
But reason wasn’t going to assuage the way she felt right now, so close to the edge she could only say, “She was only a little girl, Marc.”
“Courtney, don’t—”
She heard him move toward her and glanced around in time to catch his surprised expression as his arms came around her.
And in that one instant, everything changed. She wasn’t surprised by the way his arms felt around her, strong and capable of blocking out the despair that engulfed her. But only by the way she felt so right against him, as if this moment had been inevitable and on some level she’d always known.
Resting her face against his shoulder, Courtney did the only thing she could in that moment. She inhaled the clean scent of his skin, savored the warmth of him through the shirt, the way her nose fit against the curve of his neck.
She felt his surprise disappear in slow degrees, in the way his arms relaxed, the steadying throb of the pulse in his neck, the unexpectedness of his action yielding to the reality of two people so aware of each other.
And he was aware of her. Courtney knew in that moment she wasn’t the only one who had been resisting.
Marc was just more skilled at hiding what he felt.
Courtney supposed she had known all along. His actions had revealed what his words had not. The hints had been there—in the small kindnesses that had broken through his aloof manner, the verbal reassurances, the determination to track down Araceli even if it meant traveling when he wasn’t ready to.
She had thought he only wanted to finish their search so he could get back to his life. She had thought he had only wanted to get away from his family, and she had provided him with a way to do that. And maybe those had been his only reasons at first.
But small revelations had been slipping through all along, she realized. Tiny cracks in the veneer of distance he wore like armor, small revelations that allowed her to see the real man he didn’t share with many. The man his family and Harley had once known, the man who could come to care about Araceli, and care about her enough to bridge the distance between them and wrap his strong arms around her.
She hadn’t realized, but maybe she just hadn’t been able to admit that she’d known all along. To admit would have threatened the control she had barely held in check.
And she had known that caring for this man would be a bad bet from the start. That much she’d known without any doubt.
She exhaled a sigh that lingered in the stillness between them, a sound of relief and revelation, of inevitability.
One tiny sound that broke the moment between them, ended the exquisite and fragile awareness that was no longer content to remain hidden.
Marc’s arms slipped away and he stepped back, his expression closed.
No, there would be no more denial.
The earth had shifted. She knew that by the way he turned away from her, grabbing a cup from the room-service cart so unsteadily that coffee sloshed over the rim, by the all-business tone that suddenly asked, “Did Jane Doe have any clue what happened to Araceli?”
Everything between them would be different now. There would be no more pretending. No more avoidance. They could deny the awareness between them, but they’d only be lying.
“Giselle didn’t say, so I’m going to say no. She would have told me if she’d heard anything about Araceli. No question.” But what felt even more disappointing was how Marc retreated, distancing himself and getting straight back to business.
The whereabouts of a missing child should have felt more critical than his decision to ignore the awareness between them. Far more critical.
But Courtney couldn’t deny the emptiness she felt as she forced herself to blow right past the truth the way Marc had, unwilling to dwell on the feel of their bodies pressed close. There would be nothing more between them but this search. It was for the best. He was fighting hard to regain his life. Marc, once a heartbreaker, would no doubt be a heartbreaker again, and Courtney couldn’t lose herself to a man who distanced himself from everyone who loved him. Not when loneliness had taken over her life and she’d been too busy, too foolish, to realize it. She was consumed by the search for Araceli. She was vulnerable right now. Far too vulnerable.
“Then we can scratch the Aguilars off our list. The FBI will be on their way. That’s if they didn’t already send an agent from the field office here in Atlanta.”
“They’ve got to track the Aguilars down first.”
The cup poised at his lips. “You think you tracked them down before the FBI?”
She shrugged lightly, a casual gesture when nothing felt casual anymore. “I know what I had to do to find them, and it took me over a week of dead ends. Mr. and Mrs. Aguilar aren’t involved with foster care here. Apparently, they applied and were turned down because they didn’t meet the state’s criteria. They’re off the grid. No government benefits. No subsidized housing. No health-care assistance. All my normal channels were dead ends.”
“You tracked them down without the FBI’s resources.”
Once she might have felt good about that. Right now she only felt overwhelmed and a little scared. “The FBI has made searching for Jane Doe their priority. I don’t know what resources they’ve devoted to tracking down Araceli yet, but the Aguilars have moved four times since they sent their last child back to Louisiana. No utility records since the house all those years ago, which means they’ve been apartment-hopping. The only way I found them was through Mr. Aguilar’s cousin, who has four kids with three different last names and only one in her care. The house she lives in belongs to her boyfriend’s mother. I don’t care who is doing the looking. It is going to take time to unravel tha
t.”
“Enough time to give us a chance to get there first if we leave right now?”
Courtney shrugged. “Might be worth a shot.”
Marc set down the cup, obviously as eager to put action and distance between them, and said, “Then let’s go.”
And the search was firmly between them again. Even though Courtney knew this distance between them was for the best, she didn’t feel it inside.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
NORMAL PEOPLE PROBABLY didn’t have heart attacks when they found yellow notices taped to their front doors. I wasn’t normal. Not for as long as I could remember, so the sight of that thin sheet of paper made my blood pump and my head dizzy.
I should have known to expect something like this. Today was going to suck no matter what I did.
Reaching for the notice, my hand trembled. My hand that controlled a pencil boldly, or a marker, or a paintbrush. It shook as I took the notice from the door, careful not to take paint with the tape.
The words were handwritten, an artistic scrawl. I did not expect that. My heart pounded so hard I could only hear a loud bump, bump, bump, so I jumped when a voice said, “Rent check bounced. Where’s your aunt?”
Dead, dead, dead.
Spinning toward the person who had caught me unaware, I realized the super had been stalking the floor waiting for someone to come home.
“Working.” The strangled sound that came out of my mouth made him look at me weird.
The superintendent was a thick-featured man with an accent who always smelled like booze. Debbie used to say he probably used vodka as aftershave. If I were sketching him, I would have decked him out like Russian mafia, someone who would get the job done with a lead pipe and his beefy hands. Not sure why that image stuck when he never wore anything but dingy T-shirts and jeans that didn’t cover his butt. To be fair, he was effective at evicting deadbeat tenants.
Which I was not.
But he had startled me, and threw me off. I usually reacted faster, but I didn’t like being surprised.
“Your aunt, she’s working a lot. I never see her.” He waited for me to fill in the blanks.
I shrugged, trying to pull off an act as a stupid kid who didn’t know anything, but I was coming across as nervous. He sensed it. I could tell by the way he narrowed his gaze.
“So there’s no trouble with the money?” he asked. “You and your aunt, you have it to pay the rent?”
“Yes, yes. I don’t know what happened.” That much was true. The money was in Debbie’s account. I transferred it there myself. “I’ll tell her. Something must have happened with the bank. She’ll fix it. Can she give you another check?”
He considered me with his googly eyes, deciding if I was trustworthy. Debbie’s checks had never bounced before. I didn’t know what had happened, but we both knew the bank had already closed.
“If the money is there, I’ll tell the bank to put the check through again tomorrow. You owe me thirty dollars for a late fee. If it bounces again, that’ll be another thirty. And your bank will charge you a fee every time also. Better to pay the rent on time.”
That announcement seemed to make him happy. Misery loves company, Debbie used to say. I agreed.
“Do you want a check for the late fee?” I asked. “My aunt will want to know.”
“Cash only.”
He would pocket every dime for his trouble. The bank would get another thirty for theirs. Not to mention I’d have to go to an ATM, which would cost me another five bucks unless I went to the bank.
Nothing like wasting my limited resources.
“Okay. I’ll tell her. Sorry. I don’t know what happened.”
He grunted, finally satisfied, and trundled off on his plastic slides. I waited until I heard the stairway door shut behind him before unlocking my door. I didn’t bother flipping on the light, just unloaded my backpack on the table.
One glance at the dark apartment and I knew I wouldn’t make it through the night obsessing about the rent check. I needed to know what happened, needed to know if someone was onto me and if I should grab my emergency bag and hit the road.
Leaving behind everything I had left of Debbie and our life together.
She’d died six months ago today.
There was no way today wasn’t going to suck.
I stared at our living room, with the thrift-store furniture we’d bought after coming to Nashville.
Quirky bedroom lamps. A sofa that might have once belonged to an old lady with cats. It smelled of dust and fur and had been covered with plastic and a ton of tiny pinprick holes. We’d pulled that off and the floral upholstery underneath had been in pretty good shape. Couldn’t beat the price, even though the sofa made Debbie sneeze.
No televisions. No telephones. No computers.
That was the rule. Nothing to connect the outside world to our home and risk my return to foster care.
Or send her to jail for helping a runaway.
She had tried so hard to hang on until I turned eighteen, so I wouldn’t have to hide anymore.
Because of me, she’d had to hide.
I always felt so guilty because of that. She used to call me silly and said God had brought us together to help each other. Since I brought so much love into her life, the little inconveniences and big risks were nothing at all. She thought her leukemia diagnosis only proved it.
“We’re all living on God’s time,” she used to say. “He gave me the chance to do something worthy with mine since I wasn’t going to get a lot of it.”
I was her something worthy.
She was everything to me.
Mother, sister, aunt, friend, teacher, guardian, partner in crime, partner in laughter, partner in prayer, my cheerleader, my manager and my support staff.
Even now, when she’d been gone for six long months, all her careful planning kept life running.
The only thing she had ever asked of me after all she had given was that I would remember she was home with God and being taken care of better than I was. I wasn’t supposed to forget that. I could be sad. I could miss her. I could even cry. But I always had to be grateful for the time we’d had together and trust that she was in a good place.
She had been a free spirit and always would be—in this life and the next. She promised to keep her angel eyes on me if she could, and to see me again when I got up there.
We had both hoped that wouldn’t be for a long time, so I was on my own until then, trying not to rock the boat, as she always said. If I could stay under the radar, I might ride out the next year and a half with a roof over my head and my plans unchanged.
If not...well, a year and a half wasn’t that long. God would provide. She’d believed that with her heart and soul.
And I missed her so much it hurt.
Being inside the apartment right now depressed me. Even a trip to a pay phone and an ATM would be a welcome distraction from being alone.
Had I been a normal person, I would have called up a friend and said, “Let’s do something.”
I would have called Kyle.
Of all the people I knew, he was the one I wanted to be with now. He had started guitar lessons today. Not to learn but to teach. He was so good, the Venue had offered him a deal—teach free guitar lessons one day a week, and get time in the recording studio and free promotion for his performances.
I thought he got a sweet deal, and was dying to know how things went on his first day.
He said once he got in good with the directors, he was going to pitch me. He wanted the Venue to display my work in the coffee shop, like a gallery showing. He kept telling me that my stuff was better than what was hanging there now. He wanted to share his good fortune. That was the kind of boy he was. Generous and kind. I liked that about him.
But I couldn’t call Kyle. I couldn’t let anyone too close because they always expected normal things, like phone calls or knowing where I lived.
Normal things, and I was not normal.
Having close friends had never been a problem because Debbie and I had had each other, and we’d always been on the move. Until she’d gotten sick and everything changed. Then there’d been doctors’ appointments, hospital visits and chemotherapy treatments. We’d been in Nashville ever since.
I steered clear of some hoods from the building behind mine and headed past the chain-link fence that surrounded the apartment complex. The night was dark now. I’d stayed at the library until it had closed at six, then sprang for a cup of coffee at Starbucks, working on a paper until well after eight. Debbie wouldn’t approve of me going out now. I knew it, but I also knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I found out what had gone on with the bank. If I didn’t sleep I would lie awake and obsess all night and get nothing done tomorrow.
The streets in this fringe part of downtown weren’t too desolate yet. It was only a few minutes past nine. Debbie and I had taken women’s self-defense classes when we’d been in Florida, so I kept my eyes open. I knew how to stay safe, knew what to do if I wasn’t.
The pay phone wasn’t far from the bank anyway, and I didn’t want to draw any more attention from the super. If he watched my place too closely, he’d realize Debbie wasn’t there, and then I’d be in trouble. All her careful planning depended on two things—no one noticing I lived alone or that she had died.
She had come up with that plan. It gave her some control. She had lots of faith, but withering away from leukemia wore her down. She didn’t care about dying for her, but for me.
I was thankful I’d been able to care for her the way she’d always cared for me.
We had needed each other. I still did.
But, thankfully, one phone call to the automated service with all her passwords solved the mystery.
The stupid bank had frozen all account activity because there’d been a security problem with the ATMs. This had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with the bank. All I had to do was go inside or online to access my account and confirm all my transactions were authentic.
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