Pulling my knees up, I closed my eyes against them. Breathe in, breathe out, repeat. In, out, repeat.
Edward’s hand came to rest ever so lightly on my head. It’ll be fine, that hand said, but I wasn’t so sure. The other shoe hadn’t yet fallen.
Keeping my eyes closed, I did my best to tune out the television. Those voices didn’t matter to me. The only ones that did were here in this room.
Liam’s voice came first. “Where do you think he’s taken Chris? Did he book a room here at the Inn?”
“Not under his own name,” replied Edward with a certainty that said he had checked.
Margaret spoke. “They’re at the Town Hall now, but it’s after seven. They have to eat somewhere. They have to sleep somewhere.”
“He’ll get the hell out of Dodge,” said Liam.
“With his son in the middle of a court case?” Mom countered. “He can’t just pick up and leave the state, can he, Edward?”
I had been listening with my eyes closed, trying to best absorb the confidence in Edward’s hand. When that hand left me, I opened my eyes to see him clasp his hands at the top of his head. The motion made his shoulders look all the broader, though that certainly wasn’t why he had done it. This was his frustrated pose. He was watching the screen again.
“The rules change when a US congressman is involved,” he said.
“That’s not fair,” complained Liam.
“Life isn’t,” my mother told him just as my phone dinged.
My heart pounded when I glanced at the screen. I held it up for Edward to see. Are you watching TV? Shanahan wrote. I warned you.
There it was, the other shoe. Talk about life not being fair? I had finally reconnected with the three people who mattered most to me, and, four months shy of the end of my probation, I would be nailed for having befriended a woman with a past. I hadn’t known who Grace was; I didn’t intentionally help her hide. But the facts would say that I did aid and abet an accused felon, just as they would say that Grace did kidnap her son.
Heartsick, I rose from the sofa. My face must have shown the extent of my distress, because Edward was quickly beside me. His large hand was warm at the back of my neck. “Where are you going?”
With my throat tight from holding back tears, a hoarse whisper was the best I could do. “Home. My pets.”
“They’re fine,” Liam called. “All fed and walked.”
If I’d been able to speak, I might have thanked him. But I was crushed. I needed my own world, at least until the last of it fell away. Wasn’t alone my default?
But my mother was sitting up in alarm. “Stay.”
It was just one word, but I heard the rest. Hiding won’t help. Don’t shut us out. And there it was, a return to the time when she and I understood each other without having to speak aloud, which was exactly what I’d wished for not so long ago. And then came her “please,” along with a look so vulnerable that my heart would never have let me leave.
But I did need a minute alone. So I gave the quickest little nod and simply went to my room. The door was barely shut before I began to cry. Swallowing the sobs as they came, I stumbled to the bed, climbed on, and curled up on the pillow with the scent of pine and my tears. Overwhelmed was one word for what I felt, but it didn’t capture the extremes. I didn’t think a person could feel so full and so empty at the same time.
The door opened, then closed. Had it not been for the click of her cane, my mother’s faltering gait would have been lost in the carpet. She eased herself down on the edge of the bed. I tried to stop crying, but her nearness only made it worse.
“I’m not good at this,” she said in a shaky voice. “You were always so strong.”
That got me crying again, all the more when I felt her hand on my shoulder. She didn’t tell me to stop, just sat with me until I finally quieted, sniffed, and brushed at my tears with the back of my hands. She left the bed then. I heard three pulls from the tissue box on the dresser—whoosh, whoosh, whoosh—then she returned and pressed them into my hand. I put them to my eyes, knowing they would come away mascara black, but what could I do?
I held my breath. No, she wasn’t good at this. Would she leave?
The pillow-top shifted lightly as she sat again.
I exhaled a shuddering breath. “For months and months I couldn’t cry. Now I can’t stop. I’m not strong. I’m weak.”
“You’re wrong about that, Margaret Mackenzie. People don’t cry because they’re weak. They cry because they’ve been strong for too long.” She touched my hair lightly, then caressed my whole head before pulling out a hairpin that must have been dislodged from the knot at the nape. “I’m sorry you had to be so strong.”
I shifted the tissues to my running nose and said a nasal, “Not your fault.”
“But it is. I wish I’d been a better mother. Softer,” she said as her hand again moved in my hair. “I wish I were softer.” She removed another pin and set it aside.
“You couldn’t be.” My father … expected. “I understand that now.”
“But I want to be softer,” she said with such paradoxical harshness that I almost laughed. Instead, absurdly, I cried. Again. She opened her whole hand on my head, then carefully, soothingly removed a few more pins before finger-combing my hair out of its knot.
“Is it too late to change?” she asked so quietly I wasn’t sure if she was speaking to me or herself. When I didn’t answer, she said, “There are two reasons people change. One is if they’ve opened their minds, the other if their hearts have been broken.”
“Heart,” I said.
“Mind,” she said, then added, “So we have that covered. Tell me about your broken heart.”
With a shaky sigh, I rolled to my back. “Oh God. Where to start? Lily. Always Lily.”
“Yes,” she said. Her silence urged me on.
“Lily, Dad, you, Liam, and Edward.”
“Not five years ago. Now.”
“You, Liam, and Edward. I like having you in my life.”
“You do?”
“Yes.”
“But?”
“But Shanahan will file a report, I’ll get a probation surrender notice, and everything I’ve found again will be gone.”
“Why gone?”
“Because I can’t put you all through that again.”
“Is it your decision to make?” she asked. In the old days, the question would have scolded with more than a little indignation. Hearing only calm now, I really looked at her. Her skin was pale with just a hint of natural color. Her hair, a darker auburn than it used to be, waved gently behind her ears. She seemed confident, like she knew exactly what she was talking about.
Then she smiled. “Do me a favor, sweetheart? Take off that makeup? It’s made a mess of your eyes.”
It was also irritating my eyes. So I went into the bathroom, removed it, rinsed, and moisturized. When I returned to the bedroom, my mother was sitting on the bench at the foot of the bed. She patted the free space beside her. Hungry for her touch, even for just a little longer, I sat close.
“Better,” she said as she studied my face. Her eyes first, then her un-casted hand went to my scar. “Better.”
“Will it ever be over?” The nightmare of Lily’s death.
“It’ll fade more each year.”
“But if a judge overturns my probation, and the press and the gawkers and the Mackenzie Cooper Law—”
“It’s a good law,” she broke in. “It’s probably saved more than a life or two. And it has your name. Isn’t that a good thing?” When I eyed her in disbelief, she moved right on. “No matter what happens, it won’t be like it was. This time you’ll have all of us behind you.”
“No—”
“Yes.”
“But I don’t want this. You can’t want this. It isn’t why you’re here.”
“Of course it is,” Margaret said, as though only an idiot would think otherwise. “I might have stayed back home. I could have managed—oh, not as well,
but I’d have eventually gotten going. Then you arrived and, in spite of my having been the worst possible mother to you at the worst time in your life, you invited me back here. That tells me something.”
I paused, waited, asked, “What?”
“That there was a method to His madness.” The light in her eye was a throwback.
I got it. Religion and Margaret had always been entwined, which was why what I had seen at her house—or not seen—had been so jarring. “God?” I asked.
She nodded. “I thought He’d forgotten about me. But there you were, walking into my living room and whisking me up here. I didn’t want to come at first. I don’t deserve your help. I don’t deserve Edward’s, either. I was fixated on that until it struck me that there was a sign in your coming. He was giving me a second chance. This time it’s just me, just me, and I’m not blowing it.”
Her fluency, her belief—all I could do was stare at her in amazement.
“And if you dare,” she scolded with indignation, indeed, “say you don’t deserve this, I’ll scream. If I can move past that, can’t you?” She didn’t give me time to answer. “Do you forgive me for what I did to you?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because I love you.”
“Then why isn’t it true the other way around? If I love you, why wouldn’t I forgive you?” She hurried on again before I could respond. “You’ve worked hard for this new life.” For a second, she considered. “Maybe I have, too, all those years of keeping the family going. I like it here, Maggie. I want to stay for a while—well, maybe not in this suite, because I still think it’s far too generous of Edward, and I have a business to run in Connecticut. I love that, too. I can go back and forth. But I want to be with you,” she said, and those spring-green eyes didn’t blink.
Gradually, they blurred, because I was crying again. She put an arm around my shoulder and drew me close enough to smell the one visceral scent that had been with me from birth.
I didn’t hear a knock at the door, but several beats later, she held me back. The end of her cast touched my cheek as her thumbs brushed at my tears. Then her full right hand cupped my cheek and, in a whisper she said, “It’s Edward. He’s a good man, Margaret Mackenzie. He loves you, too.”
* * *
Her words did something to me, though it was only when we were in the car that I felt the change, and then it was so subtle that I couldn’t put a name to it. I’m not sure I wanted to just then. Between the events of the last few hours and all that crying, I was wiped. The best I could do when Edward suggested taking a ride, was to put my arms in the parka he held and, without argument, walk with him out to the Jeep.
26
The night was quiet. Filling my lungs with moist, full-bodied April air, I felt soothed. If the press had been in the parking lot of the Inn earlier, they had either gone to bed or regrouped at the police station. We headed in the opposite direction. And yes, in sporadic moments, I thought of what lay behind. Grace had to be terrified. I had no idea what, if anything, they were telling her about Chris, and though I told myself that with the eyes of the world on the boy, he was physically safe, I couldn’t begin to imagine his emotional state. Jay had already talked with the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, but that was all we knew. I hadn’t heard from Michael Shanahan again. He would file a probation-violation report the next morning, at which point my fate would be in the hands of the same judge who had sentenced me five years before.
I should have been panicked. The worst was happening. I should have been terrified. As we drove north, though, the reasons why drifted off in the night. It wasn’t that I felt numb, certainly not mellow, though that word did come and go. Likewise, relief. With my greatest fear coming to pass, the wait was over.
But no, it wasn’t relief, either. What I felt inside was deeper. It was as if a part of me could deal with this new fear, as if little threads of hope were caging it in.
I wasn’t a total stranger to hope. I had felt it about many things in Devon. But this was different from finding a home for the holidays or realizing that I liked doing makeup. This was larger. Still, it remained just beyond my grasp as the tires spun over macadam and shadowed trees came and went.
I had no idea where Edward was taking me, hadn’t asked when we left the Inn, hadn’t cared when we left the Inn. Increasingly, though, the drive was a little too familiar. The farther we went on the Blue behind the headlights of this particular car, the stronger my sense of déjà vu.
“Sex isn’t the answer,” I warned over the engine’s hum.
“No sex,” came his deep voice. “I just want to show you something.”
“At your house? There’s nothing there.”
“There is.”
I studied him in the pale light of the dashboard. His jacket was open, collar down, turtleneck up. Above that, his profile was strong, those spikes of hair, his straight nose, and whiskered chin, but I saw nothing at his mouth, either smile or frown, to give a clue what “there is” meant. Then he reached for my hand, and something in the way he held it, squeezing and releasing, spoke simultaneously of excitement and concern.
Curiosity won over the purr of silence. “What’s there?” I asked.
“You’ll see,” he said but said no more.
So I refocused on the night. Being in transit was a good thing. It allowed me to float, which wasn’t to say there were no other random moments of thought.
“I have to call my lawyer in Boston,” I said during one.
“Already did,” Edward replied. “He says to let him know if the letter arrives.”
I was adjusting the heat vent when the next moment hit. “If?”
“I’m not sure Shanahan will act. Nothing you did was intentional. He knows that. If he makes a BFD about it and the judge rules against him, he’ll look ridiculous.”
I might have argued, because the judge had been stern handing down his sentence, like he was doing me a huge favor and You’d be wise to remember that, Mrs. Cooper. But I was feeling calm without consciously working at it. This was new. I didn’t want to jinx it.
After following the Blue for another mile, we crossed back over the river onto the lesser-used road that led to Edward’s house. Thirty seconds more, and there it was again, the sprawl of a farmer’s porch, shingled siding, and mullioned glass lit by the swing of his headlights as he turned the wheel. Pulling up at the side, he killed the engine and was jogging around to open my door even before I had my seatbelt released. As soon as I was out of the Jeep, he took my hand and drew me to the house.
Sensing in him the same anticipation I had in the car, I watched him unlock the door. When he stood back for me to enter, I hesitated. My last visit here had unleashed a firestorm of emotion. What with everything else going on back in town, I didn’t want that now.
“Please?” he asked on a vulnerable note, telling me I had a choice here this time.
But really, what choice did I have? I trusted the man. I adored the man.
Stepping in, I stood aside while he closed the door and flipped on a light. I remembered the kitchen as being small and unsettled. With its checkerboard floor and Formica cabinets, it looked more old now than small and with the clutter gone, simply sad.
The bedroom wing was at the back of the house down a corridor on the right, but, true to his word, we didn’t go there. Instead, he guided me left, through an open archway and into a room at the front of the house where moldings hugged ceiling and floor, and fluted columns separated endless shelves everywhere between. A smattering of books stood in random chunks, but far more remained in cartons below.
Edward’s desk was the focal point of the room. Standing smack in the center, it was modern and spare, a simple mix of glass and steel set on an iron tube frame. We had bought it for our last house, and while Edward had done his share of late night work there, Lily and I also used its large surface for art projects.
This desk matched the sleekness of our lives back then.
It didn’t fit here, not with the decorative millwork. But here it was. An oversized computer stood at one end. At the other lay long rolls of architects’ drawings in a pick-up stick mess. Seeming to know which of the rolls he wanted, Edward pulled one out, pushed the others aside, and unrolled it.
Then he rethought that. Letting go so that the edges curled up on themselves, he woke up the computer instead and pulled up the same plan, now in a full-color rendering. Positioning the desk chair, he urged me to sit—and oh, I knew that chair, too. I had sat in it many, many times with Lily on my lap. The memories warmed a little something in me. The familiarity of it was bittersweet, but not painful, as it once might have been.
Leaning over my shoulder with his free arm on the back of the chair, Edward moved the mouse. Starting with the front exterior, he talked me through the architect’s rendering of the house, which showed a repaired and cleaned-up version with stone on the façade and dormers added to the smaller second floor.
“Local granite,” he said, hovering the cursor over the stone, then sweeping it around a circular drive that was pictured with an artful gathering of plants and shrubs. “New drive, new landscaping. What do you think?”
“It’s beautiful,” I said. The drawing certainly was. I hadn’t yet seen the house in daylight, but I could easily translate my night glimpses into what was on the screen. “I can’t get my bearings. Where’s the river?”
“Out back.” He clicked to the next page to bring up a charming view that included a fieldstone patio, a large lawn dotted with trees, and a waterfront of sand and stones. The river itself was no more than thirty feet wide at that point. On the far side were woodlands. “Deer come out to drink. I’ve seen raccoons and once, at dusk, a really ugly cat—”
“Fisher.”
“Really ugly?” He was looking at me with Lily-eyed distaste.
I laughed. Totally inappropriate with the hell back in town. But I couldn’t help it. He was adorable. “Really ugly and mean, but not a cat, a weasel.”
“What does it eat?”
“My cats if they ever got out.”
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