Here Gavin turned the focus on Cole, measuring him closely. “How’d you do it? How’d you keep her from coming back here, hassling you?”
Cole thought about it. “First, I’ll need to tell you a story—one that might not make you look too well on me.”
“Try me,” Gavin charged.
“Thirty years ago, I didn’t come to Fairhope or Hanna’s Inn by chance,” Cole explained. “I came here because Tiffany told me I should.”
“This was after the divorce?” When Cole nodded, Gavin scowled. “Why would you do that?”
“I had nothing,” Cole said, spreading the fingers of one hand. “She’d taken everything I cared out.”
Gavin put the pieces in place himself. “She dangled it over your head, so you’d do exactly what she wanted.”
“All I wanted was to be a father again,” Cole pointed out. “She promised me visitation if I infiltrated Hanna’s Inn and got the information she needed to buy it out from under the Brownings.”
“Did you do it?” Gavin asked.
Cole looked away. “I did enough that it’s a wonder Briar chose to forgive me eventually. It’s hard to live with it, still, knowing how deeply I felt for her while I betrayed her. Trust me when I tell you I know the power Tiffany can wield over someone’s life when she puts her mind to it.”
“How did it stop?” Gavin asked. “You did stop it. She never comes anywhere near the inn or the two of you.”
“There was a break-in during that time,” Cole told him, “in the front office. The window was smashed, the place was trashed, and there were enough elements missing for me to draw a link to Tiffany. I leveraged it against her. And when she tried to push back, Olivia and Adrian threatened to tip off local authorities. Tiffany doesn’t come around anymore because she knows if she does, they’ll make sure she goes to jail.”
Gavin absorbed the revelations, tracing the pattern in the place mat under his hand. Could he do the same—leverage enough against Tiffany to get her to back down?
“She managed to fight back after all of it, nonetheless,” Cole added.
“How?”
“Through you.”
Gavin read the truth in his father’s eyes. His lips parted when he realized what a pawn he’d been all this time.
He’d never been an outsider. Cole and Briar had embraced him. Yet Tiffany robbed him of a happy home, just as she’d tried to rob Cole.
She’d succeeded the second time around, Gavin thought bitterly. He’d doubted his father and let her win.
Gavin folded his arms. “One more question.”
“Anything,” Cole replied willingly.
Gavin nodded at the readiness behind his father’s acceptance. “Do you know a good lawyer?”
“It just so happens I do.” Cole dipped his chin. “If you’re thinking about fighting the good fight, I’m here to help you every step of the way.”
Cole offered readily, and for once Gavin accepted without thinking. “Why don’t we get started? Tonight.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
MAVIS TOOK HER TIME. She’d started teaching a restorative yoga class bright and early on weekdays. She’d spent two busy mornings in a row at her father’s garage, Bracken Mechanics, where she often handled the bookkeeping. Yesterday afternoon, she’d gone on a field excursion with Zelda and Errol. They’d spent an hour or so scanning the inside of a 1930s townhouse with their EMF readers. She’d then stayed up all night listening to audio recordings and screening new voice mails from potential clients.
She had definitely earned a few hours in the Bracken stable with her new mare, Mollie. The name had stuck since the day in Mobile when they met.
Mavis ran a comb over Mollie’s mane, brushing out the snags. Now that the horse was eating right and had been cared for, her coat held a lovely sheen. Moving her hand over it, she worked the comb over Mollie’s neck gently. During their small getting-to-know-each-other sessions, Mavis had found that the mare found song comforting. Her ears were no longer peeled. They stood at ease together. Her eyes, no longer wide, had lost their wariness as Mavis hummed into the restful lull.
She stopped humming, however, when she realized what song she’d chosen.
Mavis frowned, stepping back from the horse to pick the horsehair from the comb’s bristles. She tried to think of another song, but “Brandy” was on a constant refrain in her head. Maybe because Gavin had been gone for nearly a week.
He’d kept his promise to her. They’d had a conversation before he left. He’d told her he was leaving, though he didn’t know for how long. She’d asked where he was going.
“There’s something I need to take care of.”
When she tried for more details, he had asked, “Mavis, do you trust me?”
“Yes,” she answered.
Two days had been fine. Three was acceptable. Four days with no word from him and she had caught herself biting her nails. Now five and she hadn’t slept and her stomach churned because she knew the pull he must be feeling—the instinctual tug to head for open seas. All this on the heels of Tiffany’s visit didn’t bode well for his return, either.
“I’ll handle it,” he’d said when she brought up Tiffany, and nothing more.
Mavis tapped the comb against the surface of the stool before returning to her chore, humming something new.
The footsteps coming through the stable fell hard and with enough economy for her to know her father was there before she saw him. “I thought you were at the airfield,” she said when he reached the gate to Mollie’s stall.
“It’s after five,” James said. “Quittin’ time, baby girl.”
Mavis peeked at the face of her wristwatch. Hmm, she thought. Time flies when you’re doing your damnedest not to mope. She went back to brushing Mollie’s withers.
James waited a full minute or two before he asked, “Are we not talking?”
Mavis lifted a shoulder, let it fall. “I thought you had enough say at dinner the other night.”
He blew out a breath. “All right.” She heard him shuffle his feet. “What I said the other night…about him…”
Mavis waited, stopping once more to clean the comb.
She’d started back on Mollie’s face when James began again. “Emotions can cloud our thinking,” he ventured, carefully. “Especially when it comes to the people who matter. Gavin matters, much more than I think William Leighton mattered or any of the other fellows you tried to hide from us.”
Mavis frowned, grazing the star point between Mollie’s eyes with her fingertips.
James made a gruff noise in his throat, as if he were frustrated with himself. “It doesn’t matter that I’ve been sober over thirty years. To this day, I’m still an alcoholic. And I remember, like it was yesterday, how the grip of withdrawal made me reach for your mother. I saw her as a lifeline, and in a lot of ways, she was. I’m ashamed to say it, even after all this time, but in some ways, I did use her. I loved her, but I used her just the same.”
Mavis crossed her arms over her chest, planting her feet as she faced James for the first time. “First of all, let’s leave love out of it. It’s not helpful. Okay? Second, you realize Gavin isn’t an addict? He suffers from PTSD, and unresolved grief on top of some mental abuse, thanks to his mom. Not addiction. There’s a big difference.”
The light from the window at the back of the stall caught James’s beard, bringing all the silver notes to the surface and making him look more salt than pepper. His eyes were alive with blue, however, and they were lined with apprehension for her. “Neither PTSD nor addiction has symptoms that can be healed overnight. It doesn’t matter how much you love the person…”
“That’s twice you’ve dropped the L-word,” Mavis warned.
“Yes,” James said simply.
I’m not emotional. The words came and went quickly, yet they were anythi
ng but fleeting. It was a terrible denial. An even worse lie.
“Don’t let the truth chase you around like it did me,” James went on. “Eight years. I stayed away eight long years. That’s eight years I could’ve watched Kyle grow up, like I watched you.”
“You were getting clean,” Mavis reminded him.
“I was running,” James admitted. “Just like Gavin.”
Mavis felt as jumbled as a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces. Mollie shifted restlessly beside her and she reached out to soothe her. Contact with the horse made her relax by a fraction. She realized then how tense she really was. “What is it that you want me to do, Dad?” she asked. “When he comes back—” if he comes back “—you want me to walk away?”
“I don’t know,” James said. He ran a hand through his hair, still as thick as it had been when she was a girl. “Between what he’s got going on and the unresolved issues between him and your brother…it’s a pickle, and it involves every one of us.”
“His issues with Kyle are theirs,” Mavis replied. “They can work it out between them.”
“What if they don’t?” James wondered out loud. “What if it goes on? It’d make the long game tough between you and Gavin.”
Mavis couldn’t think about the long game. Why she’d considered it in the first place… Well, she was starting to wonder.
“Unless…” James’s facial muscles twitched, hinting at discomfort. “Unless you say the two of you never thought about the long game, that your relationship is temporary.”
“You know, people choose each other because they need each other even if it’s not lifelong commitment like you and Mom,” Mavis explained. “It can be temporary and still mean something.”
“I know,” he said. “I thought about your mom every day I wasn’t a part of her life.”
“Maybe I see something in him,” she argued, “like Mom saw something in you back then. He is mine, maybe for a short time—maybe for a shorter time than the summer you had with Mom initially—but that doesn’t make what Gavin and I have less real.”
James shook his head. “I’m not asking you to be ashamed. Your mother and me… We’re the last people who’d punish you for lov—” She winced and he quickly revised. “For feeling that deeply for someone. We love you, Mavis Blythe, and you ought to know that there’s nothing you’ve done in this life that has ever disappointed us. We just want you to be careful.”
“He’s not here,” she said, the statement sneaking through. She stopped short of letting the wall inside her fall down under the force of what was behind it. The stool behind her drew her attention as she turned away and set the comb down. She rubbed her hands together. “I don’t know if he’s coming back, so you, Mom, Kyle and everybody else can stop worrying about it.”
“I don’t want him gone,” James said. “Not if it makes you unhappy.”
“I told him he could go,” she revealed. “From the beginning, we agreed that if he needed to run then I wouldn’t stop him, so long as he let me know beforehand. That way, I wouldn’t have to find out from somebody else.”
“That doesn’t make it hurt any less,” James said. “Does it, baby girl?”
She rubbed her hands on the front of her jeans and faced him again. “I can’t talk about this anymore, Dad. I’m sorry.”
James noted the tilt of her chin, the stubbornness behind it, and hopefully none of the resignation. “And I can’t argue with you anymore. Not when you look more like your mother than ever. I hurt her once, the way he’s hurt you. It’s almost like history’s repeating itself, and that’s not an easy thing to watch.”
Mavis looked at the wall. “She did okay without you.”
He raised a brow. “It took a lot of truth to get her to come around to me again. And hugs, but those I had to sneak in so she didn’t break a vase over my head.”
She felt a smile along the fault lines of her mouth and wanted to hold on to it. “Are you trying to tell me you want a hug?”
“Would it make you angrier?” he asked, cautious.
“I’m not angry at you.” Giving in, she walked to the gate and let him swing it open. “Even so, I don’t have a vase.”
James didn’t so much hug her as scoop her against his chest. How he managed to hold her firmly and softly she didn’t know. When she took them, his hugs were always the same—just right.
“We don’t do this enough,” James said, and held her a smidge tighter before releasing her.
Mavis stepped back, brushing the hair from her face. Maybe it was easier for other people to be affectionate with those closest to them. For her, this meant more. “Don’t worry so much about me. I’m fine, just like Mollie here.”
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that women are made of tougher stuff.” He tapped the edge of her nose. “Dinner?”
“Kyle?” she asked.
“He’ll be there. And you’ll have to talk to him eventually, too.”
“Sure,” she acknowledged. “First I think it’d be best all around if I curb the urge to clock him.”
“With a vase?”
“In my dreams, it’s been more like one of Edith’s old dinner dishes,” she said.
“The ones with the peonies?”
“No, the ones with the quails she made us eat off of at Christmastime. I broke one once, so it’s not like it’s a complete set.”
James threw an arm around her shoulders. Jerking his chin in the direction of the tree line, he said, “Heard your hound ’round back yonder. Chasing the cats again.”
Mavis raised her voice and called, “Prometheus!”
Someone answered back, but it wasn’t the dog. “I found you! Put on your party boots, my friend. We’re going out a-drinkin’!”
They stopped and pivoted as one to Harmony. She’d taken the walking path with Bea from the mother-in-law suite where they lived. After the wedding, Kyle would live there, too.
Bea skipped ahead of her mother, wildflowers tumbling one by one out of her fist. She threw herself at James. He laughed and boosted her to his shoulder for a ride.
“Um, what?” Mavis asked, wiggling the toe of Bea’s sneaker as James made a circle around her.
“I said…” Harmony said, closer. Her hands were hidden in her back pockets and she had a gleam in her eyes that said trouble. “You, me, the tavern, drinks. Too-night. Your Mom said she and your dad could watch Bea.”
“Dad and I just agreed to dinner,” Mavis said, looking around for the man. He’d escaped into the house.
“You can do dinner at the farm any night of the week and so can I,” Harmony reminded her. “But it’s not every night that both Bea and Kyle are occupied elsewhere. Plus, your brother will have me married by next season. My bachelorette days are numbered, again. Let’s go! Let’s have some fun! Two single gals raisin’ hell.”
“You and your daughter raise hell all on your own on a day-to-day basis. Isn’t that enough?”
Harmony shifted up on the balls of her feet, speaking out of the corner of her mouth. “It seems you’ve had a taste for hell-raising lately, too. Your shake-up with Gavin surpassed us. I’d be kind of proud of you…”
“If it wasn’t him,” Mavis finished. “I’m not going out.” She decided firmly and made a move to follow James.
Harmony moved smoothly into her path. “I need you.”
Mavis grimaced. “Don’t do that.”
“I mean it,” Harmony insisted. “A bride can’t celebrate her engagement without her maid of honor.”
Mavis blinked. “You…want me to do that again?”
“Uh, yeah,” Harmony said, as if it were obvious. In a second, she was back to serious. “You’re my best friend. I want you standing beside me when I make an honest man out of Kyle.”
“You’re not going to make me wear aquamarine again, are you?” Mavis asked, wri
nkling her nose. “Because once was enough.”
“My aqua phase ended long ago,” Harmony granted.
“Thank you, sweet baby Jesus.”
“Besides. A little birdie told me you look much better in red.”
Mavis frowned. “Little birdie?”
Harmony pursed her lips. “Okay, a big birdie. A big, smitten birdie.”
“Smitten,” Mavis said. Gavin had been coined a lot of things but smitten wasn’t one of them.
“I might’ve cornered him,” Harmony admitted, “at the inn, before he took off.”
“You didn’t think to mention it?” Mavis asked.
A thoughtful pause filled the void, along with a light breeze and echoes of a nicker from the stable. “To tell the truth,” Harmony said, “what he had to say for himself took a few days to sink in.”
Mavis opened her mouth to ask. Just as fast, she let it close.
“I went swinging at him,” Harmony explained. “Verbally ’cause I figured he was still sore from Kyle’s dinner interrogation.”
“Ambush,” Mavis amended. “Even you have to agree. It was a cheap ambush.”
“Kyle got his licks from my end,” Harmony acknowledged. “It helped Gavin out when he admitted he hadn’t gotten you entirely out of your drawers.” At Mavis’s steaming silence, Harmony demurred. “I was confused. When we were kids, I thought you hated him.”
“He irritated me,” Mavis said plainly. “He was my big brother’s best friend. I didn’t think to look beyond that until a few weeks ago.”
“You haven’t carried a torch for him like I did for Kyle all those years.”
“No.”
Harmony closed her eyes briefly, relieved. “So what changed?”
“I was like a lot of other people we know,” Mavis told her. “I never looked at much but what was on Gavin’s surface, or what he projected.”
“Even you,” Harmony said with surprise. “The observer.”
“He didn’t want anybody to see the real things. He didn’t want me to see, either, but when he came back, I don’t think he was at the point anymore where he could hide them.”
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