by Linda Seed
The first thing he felt was a cold numbness that spread from his core out to his fingers and toes. The second thing he felt was a blow to the gut that made his world go swirly and dark before he steadied himself.
“What the fuck?” he said to the room, which was tidy and impersonal, stripped of all of her belongings, the way it had been before she’d come.
He walked through the living room and kitchen, and then the bedroom and bathroom, looking for any sign that she might still be staying there. Her clothes were gone. Her toiletries were missing from the bathroom counter and the medicine cabinet, the surfaces all clean and bare. There was no food in the kitchen; the refrigerator and pantry had both been emptied and wiped clean.
Feeling shaky, he left the house and went to the old barn she’d been using as her studio. He was relieved to see that the yurt was still there, but then the relief faded as he realized that it would be, wouldn’t it? It wasn’t like she could fit it in her car or take it on a plane.
His knees started to feel wobbly, so he sat down on the ground with his back propped up against the barn door. He dug his cell phone out of his pocket and called Gen.
“Hey, Liam,” Gen answered, sounding chipper.
“Did you know Aria was gone?”
“What?”
“Did you know?”
“What do you mean, gone? Gone where?”
Gen sounded so puzzled that Liam knew it was genuine—she didn’t know any more about it than he did.
“Aria moved out of the guesthouse. Either last night or this morning. The piece she was working on is still in the barn, but everything else … She’s gone.”
Gen was silent for a moment or two, and then she said, “Sit tight. I’ll be right there.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Liam met Gen at the guesthouse at a little after one in the afternoon. Gen, who’d always been so well-dressed when she was working, had on sweatpants and a T-shirt that had some kind of stain on the shoulder. The baby was in a carrier strapped to her chest. Her curly red hair, piled on top of her head in a messy bun, looked like it hadn’t been washed in a while.
“Are you sure she’s gone?” she asked before she’d even crossed the threshold into the house. “Are you sure she didn’t just … I don’t know … take a trip?”
“Come see for yourself.” Liam’s face was grim, his tone clipped and tight.
Gen followed him into the house and started looking around, much the way Liam had. She poked her head through doorways and into cabinets. The baby had started to make a little squeaking noise, and Gen patted his back rhythmically through the carrier.
“She’s cleaned everything out,” Gen said. She sounded like she could hardly believe it herself.
“She did.”
“There’s nothing left of hers. It looks like she scrubbed everything down. She even took out the trash.” Gen poked around under the kitchen sink, where the trash can stood clean and empty.
“At least she was considerate enough to clean up before she ran like hell,” Liam said. He was standing in the middle of the tiny kitchen with his arms crossed over his chest, his lips pressed into a tight line.
“Well … did you call her?”
Liam looked at Gen like she was an idiot. “Of course I called her. You think that idea never occurred to me? I called her right after I called you.”
“Well?” Gen prompted him.
“She didn’t answer. I texted her, and she didn’t answer that, either.”
“But … you said the yurt is still there?”
“Yep.”
They walked out of the house and down the path to the barn, where the yurt stood silent and alone in the center of the big space.
“She’s going to have to get in touch, then,” Gen said. “Plus, there’s a contract.”
“A contract?” Liam turned to her.
“Yes. When she accepted the artist’s residency, she signed a contract agreeing to produce a certain body of work that I would represent to the galleries. If she just leaves and doesn’t come back, she’s in breach of contract.”
Liam felt his face heat up. “That’s what your worried about? Your contract?”
“No, that’s not what I’m worried about,” Gen said, her voice gentle, trying to soothe him. “I’m just saying that she’ll have to come back, or at least call me. She can’t just be … gone.”
“Well, she sure as hell looks gone,” Liam said.
“But … what happened between the two of you? What did you say to her?” Gen lifted her hands in puzzlement, then let them fall to her sides.
“I just … I said I loved her.”
“Oh.”
To his horror, Liam felt his eyes fill with tears, and he blinked a few times to clear them so Gen wouldn’t see.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” Gen said. She put her hand on his arm.
He was torn between feeling grateful for that gesture of comfort and mortified that he was showing this kind of vulnerability in front of his sister-in-law. In the end, he opted for accepting the comfort.
“I’m an idiot.” He rubbed his eyes with his fingers. “I knew she wasn’t ready to hear it. I knew it. And I had to say it anyway. God, I’m a fuckup.”
“No, you’re not.” She stroked his arm a little. “You’re not a fuckup. It was sweet, what you said to her. She’s the idiot if she can’t accept what you’re offering her.”
“No.” He shook his head, having gotten himself back under control. “No, she’s just scared. She’s scared shitless, and I knew that, and I pushed her too far too fast.”
“Well … what are we going to do about it?”
Liam grinned despite his misery. “We?”
“Of course. You don’t think I’m going to let my favorite brother-in-law lose out on true love, do you?”
Liam raised his eyebrows. “I’m your favorite?”
“Colin was my favorite last month when he helped me with my accounting for the gallery,” she said. “It’s your turn.”
“I’m not about to turn down the help. What’s the plan?” he asked.
“Let me try to call her. Then we’ll see where we’re at.”
Gen’s strategy was to keep her call to Aria completely businesslike. That seemed like the best way to get a response, Liam thought, considering it was Aria’s private life—not her professional one—that had caused her to flee.
She waited a little while so her call would not come immediately after Liam’s. If she called right away, Aria would know that she was contacting her on Liam’s behalf.
When Gen’s call went straight to voice mail just as Liam’s had, the two of them reached out to Daniel Reed.
“She won’t take a call from me, because she’s scared. And she won’t take a call from Gen, because she thinks it’s really from me,” Liam told Daniel as he and Gen stood in the man’s studio, making their case.
“But it really is from you,” Daniel said, not unreasonably.
“What’s your point?” Liam said.
“Please?” Gen asked, her head tilted slightly in a way that probably got Ryan to say yes to just about anything she wanted. “She’s more likely to listen to you, because you’re not right in the middle of the situation.”
“I’m nowhere near the situation,” Daniel agreed. “I don’t belong in the same zip code as the situation.” He’d asked to hold the baby when they’d first arrived, and now he jiggled James in his arms to settle him.
“I know you like her,” Liam said. “I figure you want what’s best for her. Well, goddamn it, I’m what’s best for her. I know it and she knows it. I just have to get her to admit she knows it.”
“I don’t see what that’s got to do with me,” Daniel protested.
“Look. If you help us get in touch with her, Liam won’t go after her.”
“What?” Liam said. “But I—”
“You won’t,” Gen insisted to Liam, then turned back to Daniel. “We just want to make sure she’s okay. That’s all.”
“That’s all?” Reed looked skeptical. In his arms, James waved his little hands around, his face scrunched up as though he might start to cry.
“Yes,” Gen said.
They both looked at Liam, who glowered at them like he was trying to figure out whether he should rip somebody’s limbs off at the joints.
“Fine,” he said finally.
“Really?” Daniel said.
“I said fine, didn’t I? You calling me a liar, Reed?”
“Nope. No.” Daniel jiggled the baby some more. “I’m not saying that.”
“Good. Now, are you going to call her, or not?”
“I’ll call her,” he said after a moment of thought. “But I don’t know if I’m going to get any further than either of you.”
“All you can do is try,” Gen said. James had made good on his threat to cry, and Gen took him from Daniel and settled him in on her shoulder.
“Get your goddamned phone,” Liam told Daniel.
Aria didn’t pick up the phone for Daniel, either. But he left a voice mail message, and she called him back a day and a half later.
She knew he’d likely called at Liam’s urging, but she needed to talk to someone, and Daniel was good at listening when she had to hash something through.
“So, what’s the deal?” he asked by way of greeting when he answered the phone. His directness was one of the things she liked about him.
“The deal is … the deal is that people need to leave me alone.” She’d arrived at her apartment in Portland less than an hour before, after two days of marathon driving, and her phone was already full of text messages and phone calls.
“Fair enough,” Daniel said. “If that’s what you really want.”
She threw her free hand into the air, exasperated. “Why would I say that’s what I want if that’s not what I want?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Daniel replied thoughtfully. “Generally, when somebody runs like a scared bunny after somebody says they love her, it doesn’t indicate a simple desire for privacy. It indicates problematic feelings. At least, in my experience.”
“Really? Does it? And where did you get your psychology degree?”
“I filled out a form in the back of a magazine. Now that you mention it, I don’t think that’s how it’s usually done.”
Aria wanted to be mad at him, but it was hopeless. She laughed miserably and then plopped down onto the sofa in her apartment, just a few feet away from the pile of luggage she’d dropped in the corner. It was late, and the sky was dark outside her window. She’d only turned on one small lamp when she’d come in—her mood didn’t call for any more light than that—and the room was full of shadows.
“I just can’t handle any of this, Daniel,” she told him. “Liam, the Delaneys. They’re so … and I’m so …”
“They’re so what?” Daniel asked, pressing her. “Tall? Irish? Loud?”
“No, smartass. They’re so … so perfect! They’re too nice! Too well-adjusted!” It sounded stupid now that she was saying it out loud, but there it was.
Daniel launched into his counterarguments. “A, they’re not perfect, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone describe Liam as ‘nice’ before. And B, horrors! They’re well-adjusted! Obviously, that’s a deal-breaker.”
“Did I already mention that you’re a smartass?”
“Aria.” His voice was serious now. He was done joking.
“What?”
“Cut the crap. What’s really going on with you? Why did you leave Cambria before your residency was done? What scared you enough to make you do that? To make you throw away everything you’d worked for?”
“Liam. Liam scared me that much.” Her eyes grew hot, and a fat tear fell down her cheek. “Because people don’t stay. They don’t, Daniel. Not for me. And I’ve always dealt with that. I’ve always survived. But this time …”
“You don’t think you’d survive,” Daniel finished for her.
Her silence was all the answer she gave him.
“Are you familiar with the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy?” he asked.
“Daniel—”
“All I’m saying is, it’s not going to work out if you go out of your way to guarantee it’s not going to work out.”
Suddenly, she felt unspeakably tired, as though all of her muscles were made of lead. “I have to go.”
“Think about what I said?”
“Sure.”
She was about to tap the button to end the call when he said, “Aria?”
“What?”
“Liam’s the real deal. It pains me to say that, because he can be a real shithead sometimes. But he’s a good guy. If he said he loves you, it’s because he does. And if anybody’s going to stick, it’s him.”
Just thinking about Liam—good-guy Liam with his big heart and his earnest spirit—made her own heart hurt so much she thought it might stop beating. She hung up the phone, turned it off, and went about the business of living without Liam Delaney.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Liam spent the next few days nursing his broken heart.
He’d talked to Daniel, and he knew that Aria had gone home because she was scared of the emotional damage Liam might do to her. But what about the emotional damage she was doing to him? What about that?
He felt sorry for himself, and he figured he had a right to it, under the circumstances. He had a right to feel what he felt, and to wallow in it a bit.
A little wallowing was fine; too much wasn’t productive. Aria needed him, whether she realized it or not. For a lesser person, he might have walked away because the whole thing was too damned hard. But Aria wasn’t a lesser person.
He knew what he had to do; it was time to go do it.
Ryan wasn’t home when Liam went over there about a week after Christmas to ask whether he could get by on the ranch for a bit while Liam went up north to see Aria.
Gen was there with the baby, so he talked to her instead.
“Just tell him for me, will you?” Liam said as Gen walked around the living room picking up various baby-related items from the floor and every other available surface.
“Sure, I’ll tell him. But what are you going to do?”
Liam shrugged. “I guess I’ll figure it out when I get up there.”
“Hmm,” Gen said.
“Hmm what?”
“I’m just thinking,” she said. “You’re going to need an excuse.”
“An excuse?”
“A reason for you to go up there and see her. A reason she’s got to let you in the front door instead of closing it in your face.”
“Oh. All right.” From the sound of it, Gen knew more about this kind of thing than he did, and he wasn’t too proud to accept a little guidance.
“Hmm,” she said again.
Gen’s solution—and it was a pretty good one—was to have Liam drive the yurt and all of the related supplies up to Aria in Portland. Somebody had to do it. If it wasn’t him, it would be some anonymous delivery driver. Why not accomplish a necessary errand and help Liam meet his goals in the process?
Hopefully, she’d agree to see him when he got there without putting up too much of a fuss about it. If not, he could use her yurt as a hostage.
Because of the logistics of moving something as big and potentially fragile as the yurt without damaging it, Liam wasn’t able to get on his way immediately.
Gen had people she used for this sort of thing, and she called them. Since they were coming down from the Bay Area and they already had a full schedule, it took them a day or two to get there. Then, the whole process took some time: two guys in cotton gloves disassembling the yurt according to the drawings in a notebook they’d found in the barn, cataloging each piece, packing all of the various parts in protective crates, and creating large amounts of paperwork detailing what they’d done and how.
When that was finished, Gen had the guys pack everything into a rental truck Liam had gotten down in San Luis Obispo. T
he art handlers, who clearly left nothing to chance, strapped everything down in the back of the truck with such care that if Liam were to go careening off a cliff, the art would likely come through it undamaged even as Liam himself lay broken and bleeding in the wreckage.
With all of that done, Liam got ready to set off for Portland on a bright, clear Tuesday morning during the first week of January. He had Aria’s address—provided by Gen—in his Google Maps app, he had bottled water and some snacks in the cab of the truck, and he had a bag packed with some spare clothes and his toothbrush. He hadn’t packed too much, because he figured if he couldn’t close the deal within a day or two of his arrival, it wasn’t going to happen at all.
“Well, I guess that’s it, then,” he said as he stood awkwardly by the driver’s side door, Gen and his mother waiting to see him off.
“Now, you drive careful,” Sandra said, reaching out to fix the collar on Liam’s flannel shirt. “You get up north a ways, it rains more than it does here. A big truck like this, it might be hard to handle on slick roads.”
“I know, Mom. I’ve driven in rain before.”
“But the truck—”
“I’ve driven a U-Haul before.” He kissed her cheek and gave her a quick hug to reassure her that he wasn’t going to die in a ball of flames after a head-on collision.
“Listen, you can do this,” Gen said. She wasn’t talking about the truck, or about the weather. “Aria wants this. She just doesn’t know how to say yes to it. You just need to … you know … give her a little nudge.” Gen pantomimed the nudge, her hands pushing an invisible Aria.
“Yeah, yeah.” Liam felt embarrassed to be getting the advice and concern of the two women, who both undoubtedly had other things to do. Still, it was nice, having people care about him. It was something he’d always had, something he’d taken for granted. Aria had never had love so constant that she didn’t have to give it a thought.
Well, now she would, and she would just have to get used to it.
Liam climbed into the truck, fired up the engine, and got onto the road headed south to State Route 46, then east toward Highway 101. The drive was going to be long enough that he figured he’d have plenty of time to figure out what he was going to say to Aria when he got there.