by Ash Harlow
“I’m not talking about it. It’s over.”
“You fight?”
“No.”
“You love her?”
Jesus, did he love Marlo? Yes, he loved her in all kinds of ways, but he wasn’t going to admit that to anyone while he was doing his best not to love her. “That’s not the point.”
“Dickhead. I think that’s a pretty big point. Go back to her.”
“Visa, job, green card…I don’t have any of those.”
“Why don’t you bring her out here?”
“It’s complicated—she can’t leave. And it’s over. She made that clear.”
Clive took a long draw on his beer before placing the empty bottle back on the table. “This is life, mate. Nothing’s ever clear. Have you phoned her since you got back?”
“Nope. She didn’t want that. No phone, no email…” Even to his ears this was starting to sound stupid.
“And you believed her? Fuck, Adam, is it any wonder you married the girl you’d been friends with since, when, kindergarten? If this is the way you do relationships, no other woman would have stuck with you.”
He knocked Clive’s leg away, dislodging his foot from the rocker. “Okay, now you’re pissing me off. This has nothing to do with Emma.”
Clive stood and moved himself to the porch railing, blocking Adam’s view of the sea. “Good. Good, and you’re right. That was out of line. But you need to get angry instead of being so fucking passive all the time.”
“You’re ruining the view.” Adam’s voice was low and carried a wind-chill factor that took away any warmth.
“Tough. The view’s not going anywhere. You can spend the rest of your life staring at it when I leave.” Clive rubbed a large hand around the back of his neck for a moment before continuing. “Listen, Adam, I’m glad this has nothing to do with Emma. I’m glad you tried out a relationship with someone else. I’m glad you’ve been getting laid. I’m totally pissed that you’ve walked away from a woman who you apparently really care about, even though you won’t admit it. We don’t want you back here that much. Sort yourself out.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do! Now it’s your turn to listen…this does not come up for discussion with Mum and Dad, okay?”
“Phone the girl, and I’ll think about it.”
Adam picked up the magazine he’d been reading and threw it at Clive.
“Phone. The. Girl.”
“Okay, Dr. Phil, now lay off.”
Adam let the silence ride. Clive really didn’t know what he was stirring up. Being home raised pangs of guilt over Marlo. To make it worse, every time he entered his bedroom and saw Em’s face smiling at him from the photo by his bed, it was as though he’d cheated on her, making him feel guilty about Em, too. It became so bad he’d moved the photo to the living room, because somehow, shifting it from the intimacy of his bedroom was going to make it better. Nice try.
Guilt hit him again when he scrolled through the images of Marlo on his phone. He was finding it difficult to pinpoint whether he was being disloyal to Em, Marlo, or both of them. Probably both.
“There’s something else…there’s no easy way to tell you this.”
Tightness gripped his stomach. “Just say it, mate.” He hadn’t meant to sound so terse. He met Clive’s gaze, the eyes a mirror of his own, the face tinged with caution.
“We’re having a baby. Karen’s four months pregnant.”
Adam took a deep breath and stood. “Wow. Congratulations.” He reached for Clive and gave him a back-thumping hug. “Wow. I’ll grab another beer. We should celebrate.” He pulled from his brother’s clasp and headed inside, trying to calm the turmoil surging through him. He was thrilled for Karen and Clive and touched in an odd way that it had been difficult for him to share the news. Yet, despite his pleasure, he still had to take that moment to steady himself as he opened the beers.
Back outside, he passed one to Clive who watched him intently. “You okay, mate?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Really happy for you and Karen.” He knocked his beer bottle against Clive’s. “Here’s to a healthy baby who’s going to give you years of torment.”
“Nice.” Clive laughed. “Cheers, mate.”
Adam placed his bottle on the floor by his rocker. “Have you told Mom and Dad?”
“Yeah, they’re thrilled. Excited. You can imagine.”
“They’ve known for some time, huh?”
“A few weeks. I didn’t want to spring it on you the minute you got home. I wanted you to get settled.”
“Tell me…” Adam hesitated, hoping he could trust his voice. “Tell me…what was it like when she told you…when Karen told you she was pregnant? How did you feel?”
“Fuck, Adam…mate, I don’t want to do this to you.”
“Please, I’d like to know.” Because Em came to tell me, and I never got that chance to hear her words. He watched Clive rubbing at his forehead. When he did that as a kid, he used to say he was trying to push his words into the right order.
“Okay. Ah, the moment was unbelievable. I felt like the luckiest guy in the world. It was as if I fell in love with Karen all over again.”
Adam nodded. “I bet.”
“I cried.”
“You cried!” Adam grinned. “You big girl’s blouse.”
Clive moved in a flash and grabbed the front of Adam’s shirt. “That piece of information doesn’t leave this porch.”
Adam shook his head. “That piece of information, little brother, is gold.”
Back inside, Adam unpacked his mother’s care package. Seven meals, named, dated, ready to heat. God, if Marlo could see him now.
He stacked the meals away in his small chest freezer, closed the lid and leaned across it. Clive and Karen’s baby news had shaken him. His child would have been four now, old enough to appreciate the arrival of a cousin. Maybe he and Em would already have had a second child. He pushed the thoughts away. What was the point in imagining a life with Em and their children?
He grabbed a towel and set off for the beach. The wind had dropped completely, and it was nearly dusk—shark time.
As teenagers, he and Clive used to goad each other into the water at dusk while humming the Jaws theme music. It quickly became a favorite time to swim. The birds had hunkered down for the day, and an easy surf rolled in, unruffled so that in the low light, the surface of the water looked platinum. A swim would shake this mood. Drown his sorrows.
Adam stood up from the dinner table and started to clear away the dishes. In the kitchen, he stacked the dishwasher. His mother, who had followed him out, took him by the arm.
“Leave those, darling, I’ll fix them in a minute. Come and sit down. I want to talk to you.”
There was that uneasy grip on his chest that always came when a woman, any woman, announced she wanted to talk. After his session with Clive the other night, he’d decided to make the effort to eat with his parents a couple of times a week. He questioned the wisdom of that decision as he sat at the small breakfast table opposite his mother. Her blue eyes were steady but held the concern that had bloomed in the early days since his return.
“Where’s the rest of you, son?” She’d clasped her hands together on the table in that way that said she was holding advice she needed to share.
“What do you mean?”
“Not all of you came home from America.”
Silence. Hell, blindsided by my own mother. His heart changed gear, and his gaze skittered around the kitchen. Now he had empathy for Marlo’s need to pace.
Clive must have talked.
His system flooded with every emotion he’d suppressed since he had arrived home and driving the surge was the anger that now it seemed Clive had betrayed his confidence.
“You left part of you behind. She must be very important to have unsettled you this way.” His mother’s cool dry fingers curled around his hand, covering his wedding ring, giving him a small squeeze of encouragement.
So, not Clive, bu
t a mother’s intuition. This was worse.
“What’s her name?”
He didn’t want to think about Marlo and sure didn’t want to discuss her, so he shrugged. The look his mother gave him made him feel about ten years old.
Tell her, idiot. Don’t denigrate Marlo by denying her existence. “Marlo. Her name is Marlo.” His voice was unsteady.
“That’s a pretty name.”
“Yeah.” He stayed focused on her hand. Was she deliberately covering his wedding ring?
“Does Marlo feel the same way about you?”
“I don’t know anymore. We haven’t had contact since I came back to New Zealand. She’s getting on with her life, and I’m getting on with mine. It’s the way she wanted it. I have to respect that.”
“Except she has something of yours, and it’s a mother’s guess that you have something of hers, too. What’s holding you back? Is it Emma? Because she wouldn’t—”
He pulled his hand from her grasp. “Please don’t say Emma wouldn’t want me to be single forever, or unhappy, or alone, or whatever you were going to say, because no one knows what Emma would have wanted. We were a bit young to have had those ‘when I die…’ conversations. Speculating is pointless. When the time is right for me, when the right person is in my life, it won’t be a matter of what Emma would have wanted, because it will simply be right.” He fingered his wedding ring. “If you think for one minute I’m backing off because of Emma, you’re wrong. I’m alive, Emma is dead, and I intend to keep living, so I don’t need my future sanctioned by somebody’s idea of what Emma would have wanted.”
When he looked up, his mother was still watching him with those steady blue eyes into which he’d managed to squeeze a little drop of pain. Because I’m a prick, to my own mother.
“Hurting all over again, Adam?” Her voice was gentle.
Hurting? Yeah, she could still land an emotional blow to a cold heart when necessary. “Listen, Ma, I’m fine. Marlo and I, we had a bit of a fling. We had fun. I miss her.”
Great, now he’d grabbed the chance to act like a prick about Marlo, too. Jesus, if his heart would slow down, he might be able to get a handle on things.
“It’s taking me a bit to settle in back here, on the farm, but I’ll be right in a week or two.” He gave her a smile that flashed like a fifty-dollar fake Rolex—sparkling on the outside and cheap underneath.
She went to the dishwasher. “You’re not fooling anyone, Adam. You of all people know how quickly life is extinguished. Don’t shortchange yourself. And if this Marlo means to you what she appears to, well, you’re shortchanging her, too.”
“I’m needed here on the farm. I want to help out, take some of the stress off you and Dad and Clive.”
“You don’t think it’s stressful watching an unhappy son?”
“I’m not unhappy.”
“Listen to me.” Her face was stern, and he was ten year’s old all over again. “You’re not like Clive. Clive’s a farmer. You’ll never be happy on the farm. You always looked for something more, something a bit meatier to get your teeth into. Your father and I realized that about you at a very early age. It’s why we encouraged you to join the police. You like helping people and you’re good at that, but don’t confuse that desire to help with a misplaced sense of duty to your family.”
He could feel the emotion swelling in his chest, and he dealt with it quickly to stop himself saying anything else that could hurt his mother. He pushed his chair back and went to her. “I’ll get going. Thanks for dinner.” He pressed his lips on her dry cheek.
She caught him with a steely tone when she said his name. “Adam.”
He stopped by the door.
“Contact Marlo. Find a way to sort this out.”
Like I haven’t thought hard enough about that, already.
Adam stood and stretched. He hadn’t dealt with so much bureaucracy and paperwork since he was in the Police. CRAR had secured funding for a year’s trial to set up the quick response unit for dog fighting in the Asia/Pacific region. In between times, they wanted him in the U.S. to continue to fine tune their operations there. They had also secured use of another thousand acres bordering on Dog Haven Sanctuary. Not only were their plans astonishing, they included Adam.
The little buzz of excitement since the job offer over a week earlier never faded. He worked with the idea of telling Marlo he was coming back, but he was scared. Afraid that he would let her down again. And if he did, that small hope he nurtured that they might one day have a life together, would be defeated. She would never take the risk of letting him hurt her again.
His future was at the mercy of a faceless Immigration Department, and that was almost more than he could bear.
Chapter Thirty-Four
“Trouble?” Marlo asked. At midday it was odd to see Lulah sitting alone under the big white oak instead of her usual place as Queen Entertainer of the lunchroom.
Lulah shrugged. “Not sure.”
Marlo sat alongside her. “Come on, share.”
“That’s rich coming from you, boss.” Lulah nudged her arm.
“I’ve been trying,” Marlo protested.
“You’ve been very trying.”
“So, come on, let it our.”
“I’m worried about Vince.” Lulah was turning her phone over and over in her hands. “Three days now I’ve been calling, and I can’t get a response.”
“Maybe he’s taken himself on one of his solo hikes.”
Lulah shook her head. “Nah, he hasn’t dropped Calliope off to me, and he won’t take her when he goes solo. Plus…”
Marlo waited. A hesitant Lulah was not something she’d seen before. Finally, she had to prompt her. “Plus?”
“I don’t know…we were getting on really well, and last week he pulled right back. He’d started coming to movie and pizza night with the others around here. We had a casual arrangement to go mountain biking and when I called him about it I couldn’t get through. Later I was able to text him but I haven’t heard anything back. He was starting to show up every day at the Sanctuary. We’d, you know, have lunch together. Now, nothing. It really feels as if he’s avoiding me. We’re only friends, Marlo, nothing scary.”
“Maybe he sees it different, and you’ve got to admit, we really don’t know what is scary for Vince. You know him better than anyone around here does. You don’t think he’d harm himself, do you?” Marlo watched her intently. She had noticed a closeness developing between Lulah and Vince, and was a bit uneasy about it. Mainly out of concern for her friend. She really liked Vince, liked that he seemed to recognize the issues he had and that he was trying to deal with them in a way that didn’t drag anyone along for that daunting ride. She could see that, like her, he tried to deal with stuff alone. She got that. She really got that, but now she understood that going it alone was a strategy that sucked.
“I can’t be with him like this, Marlo. My father…heck, I love him to bits…but he is so unreliable. I’m not having another man in my life like that.”
Oh, there’s a tell. “So have you and Vince been—”
“No…God, no. Have you ever touched him?”
Marlo shook her head.
“I gave him this, you know, spontaneous sort of hug one day, and he went rigid. But not rigid in the part where you want a man to go rigid. His entire body stiffened…except the good bit. The good bit never got involved.”
“Jesus, Lulah.”
“The guy’s ultra-hot!”
She didn’t want to see Lulah hurt—emotionally or physically—and until she learned more about Vince, she wasn’t going to back any sort of relationship. She slipped an arm around her. “Leave it with me. I’m going into town this afternoon, so I’ll do a drive-by on his house and check on him.”
Lulah looked up, her eyes bright. “Thanks.”
‘Thanks’, yeah, I hope so.
Marlo pulled up outside Vince’s house. The place was small, maybe two bedrooms, old and obsessively well kept.
The lawns were short, edges trimmed, garden clipped into submission so that it all looked neat…and uptight. She stepped onto the porch and knocked on the door. Then knocked and waited several more times before testing the handle. The door was locked. She called to Vince, identifying herself and finally the door opened.
Pausing at the entrance, Marlo made a quick assessment of the room without moving from the doorway. There didn’t appear to be any sort of threat, but that message was taking a bit to connect with the hammering in her chest.
“Marlo.”
She jumped when she heard her name. Vince was in the shadow to her left as if he’d been hiding behind the door. Gratitude for Adam’s calming exercises rushed through her when she tested a steady voice. “Vince, hey, sorry to intrude. Can I come in?”
“Yeah, sure.”
His voice sounded wrong. Another quick sweep of the room, and she realized he was in crisis. It looked as though someone had been living under siege; in fact, camping under the small kitchen table. And that knife. The large bread knife on the floor beside the sleeping bag, tinned food, and water was setting off her early warning system. She did her best to beat down another rush of alarm. Calliope trotted across the room to welcome her and that helped slow her racing heart.
“Come inside. Can you close the door?”
Her own hyper-vigilance had stepped up, and every process she’d built said she shouldn’t close the door, shouldn’t cut off her escape route. Another quick scan of the room confirmed that once she closed the door she was trapped. She pushed through the indecision. Vince needed her to believe in him. She stepped in, shut the door, and moved over to the counter.
Vince stayed in the shadow.
“Rough time, huh?” she asked. His appearance suggested he’d been a few days away from a razor.
“Yeah. Can you do something for me?”
“Of course.”
“Can you check the roof of the house next door and see if there’s a guy up there?”
Oh, God, what’s happened? She hadn’t noticed anyone on the neighbor’s roof, but she checked for him, anyway. “All clear, Vince.”