“Luke is your boss?”
She nods and wraps her hands around the still-warm cup of tea he made for her, saying it would calm her nerves. It hasn’t. At this point, she can’t imagine what will.
“Just tell him what happened, Rose. If he’s human, he’ll understand.”
“I doubt it. He might be human, but he isn’t a parent. He can’t possibly—”
“I’m not a parent, and I understand.” Hitch reaches out and touches her arm.
She looks up at him, surprised—especially when she sees the expression in his eyes. Mingling with his compassion is something else, a sweet tenderness that she’s never glimpsed there before.
“Rose, you’ve got so much to deal with. I wish you’d ask me for help. I wish you understood how much I really . . . I want to be here for you.”
“Hitch, you are here for us. Just like you said at Sam’s funer—”
“Not just for all of you. I mean . . . for you,” His fingers tighten slightly on her arm.
The teacup shakes in her hand, sloshing warm liquid over her fingers.
She pulls away from him, reaching for a napkin, nervously wiping the spill.
“I’m sorry,” he says softly. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
You didn’t say anything, she thinks, rising to toss the soggy napkin into the garbage beneath the sink. At least, not what I wanted to hear.
Wanted to hear?
Does she want Hitch to be interested in her?
Confusion whirls through her, stirring long forgotten needs along with a wave of caution.
Was it her imagination, or was Hitch implying that he’s interested in her? It’s been so long since she tried to read between the lines when talking to a man.
Sam was never good with words. After years of marriage, she knew how to interpret him, knew how he felt about her.
It was like this in the beginning, though, she reminds herself, turning on the faucet at the sink, reluctant to again face the man sitting silently at her table. Sam was like Hitch. He would say things, things that would make my heart skip a beat, things that would make me wonder.
She absently squirts liquid soap onto her hands and holds them beneath the warm stream of water, pondering her own reaction to what she believes—or maybe wants to believe—Hitch was trying to convey. To her surprise, she can’t deny, try as she might, that his cryptic words have sparked a familiar warmth somewhere inside of her, in a place left cold and vacant with Sam’s death.
If I turn toward him again, will that look in his eyes be gone?
Slowly, she turns off the water and dries her hands on a dish towel, then turns to face Hitch again.
Her breath catches in her throat.
He’s still looking at her that way. As though . . .
As though he cares about her. As though he longs to offer her more than friendship.
She catches her lower lip beneath her teeth, uncertain what to say, what to do, but knowing the next move is hers.
Go for it, a voice commands her.
Sam’s voice, she realizes.
Sam would want this. If I was going to give any man a chance to live up to Sam, he’d want it to be Hitch.
She crosses to the table and takes a deep breath. “Hitch—”
The back door bangs open.
The puppy scampers in, trailed by Jenna and Leo, with Leslie behind them calling, “Wait! You guys are all muddy! Rose, sorry, I told them to wipe their feet.”
Surrounded by chaos, Rose looks at Hitch. He’s grinning at something Leo is saying as he climbs onto his lap.
The moment has passed.
And now that it has, Rose isn’t at all sure she wants it to come again.
With tapering snow flurries dusting the windshield of his car, David pulls up to the cabin. He turns off the ignition and opens the door, taking a moment to breathe in the pure mountain air and absorb the absolute silence.
There. That’s better. Much better.
His boots make a pleasant crunching sound in the snow as he walks up onto the porch. He stands on his toes to remove a loose plug from a knothole high in the wall beside the door. After fishing the key from its hiding spot, he unlocks the door, then replaces the key in the knothole.
One of these days, he thinks, as he has countless times before, he should probably take it with him instead of leaving it here.
Then he asks himself, as he always does, why bother? His family has used that hiding place for the key for a good fifty years, and nobody has ever stumbled across it before. Even if somebody did, there’s nothing of tremendous value in the cabin that anybody would bother stealing.
That was part of the reason Angela never really liked this retreat in the Catskills. Roughing it held little appeal to a girl who’d grown up in a shabby two-bedroom, one-bath ranch on the wrong side of the tracks in Jersey. Plus, she claimed the two-hour drive up here from the city made her nauseous, and that the cabin smelled like mildew.
Maybe it does smell like mildew, he acknowledges, as he opens the wooden door and steps over the threshold, but he’s never minded.
The scent reminds him of childhood summers spent here with his grandfather, the family patriarch, a man who owned fabulous, professionally decorated mansions filled with exquisite antiques in Manhattan, Palm Beach, and Monaco. But Pop preferred this old log cabin he’d built himself, in his youth. When he died, he left David the cabin, along with an equal share of the vast family wealth—split among all twelve grandchildren, of course.
The Brookman money has granted David a successful, respected lifestyle, but it’s the cabin that has saved him. Saved his sanity, saved his marriage, and after he lost Angela anyway, saved his soul.
He closes the door behind him, shutting out the frosty air, then wipes his boots on the mat in front of the door.
The place looks the same as it did last week; the same as it has for the last fifty years, he’d be willing to bet.
He wanders the main room with its two-story vaulted ceiling, rustic wooden furniture, and braided rugs. On the wall are framed photos of various family members posing on the front step of the cabin—mostly Brookman men, as Angela pointed out the last time they were here together.
“That proves it. I knew I couldn’t possibly be the first woman in the family who isn’t crazy about this place,” she said with a grin.
He laughed. “At least you’re willing to come up here with me. My mother was here once before the divorce, saw a snake in the yard, and never came back.”
“Oh, I’ve seen snakes,” Angela told him. “I’m a country girl, remember?”
Yes, he remembered. She was a country girl when he met her—if you considered western New Jersey the country—but it didn’t take her long to become an uptown girl. Uptown, downtown, all around the goddamned town.
He was so crazy about her that he refused to wonder whether she married him because she loved him, or because she loved his lifestyle. He so didn’t want their marriage to be that cliché . . .
But it was exactly what they became, on the spring evening when he saw her in the Village with another man.
David sighs. The old oak floorboards creak beneath his feet as he walks across the floor to the fireplace.
He lays a fire the way Pop taught him, with patience and precision, then ignites the kindling. As he waits for it to burn, his thoughts drift back to that weekend, the one after Thanksgiving. The one that saved his marriage.
He brought her up here because he couldn’t stand it anymore. He could no longer pretend he didn’t know what she was doing behind his back, and he could no longer bear the thought of her in another man’s arms.
He brought her up here to confront her, to give her the option of leaving him, or staying—on the condition that she give up her lover.
He expected—maybe he even wanted—her to deny the affair.
That she didn’t filled him with resignation. So it was irrevocably true.
He expected her to walk out the door.
<
br /> That she didn’t gave him hope.
She cried. She apologized. She begged him to forgive her.
David jabs at a red-hot log with a poker; sparks fly dangerously close to the rug beyond the open hearth. He ignores them.
“Who is he?” David asked her, at one point that weekend.
“Just someone I met. Just . . . nobody. Nobody who matters. I promise I’ll never see him again, David. Never.”
He believed her.
David tosses the poker aside and turns abruptly away from the fireplace. His gaze falls on a nearby table.
He crosses to it and picks up Angela’s snow globe, remembering . . .
At one point that Thanksgiving weekend, they left the cabin to go into the nearest town for food and other supplies.
There’s a ski resort nearby; naturally, gift shops have sprung up around it. Angela insisted on stopping at a few. He remembers how he teased her about how she could find a way to indulge her shopping habit even up here, in the middle of nowhere.
In the corner of one country store, he found her shaking a snow globe with childish fascination. In that moment, he felt as though a tremendous weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Things were back to normal at last. Angela was herself again—not the furtive, distant creature who always seemed on guard around him.
“Look, David . . . it’s an angel,” she said, holding it up to show him.
Sure enough, as the artificial white flakes settled at the bottom of the dome, the figure of a cherub emerged.
He bought it for her.
And when they emerged from the little country store, the winter’s first snow was coming down.
He picks up the snow globe now and shakes it, watching the fat, lazy flakes dancing behind the glass.
That last day here with her, on the very spot where he’s standing, before a roaring blaze, he made passionate love to his wife. Then they made plans to get away from it all, to go to the islands for a few days, where they could have a fresh start.
They returned to New York on Monday and flew right to Barbados, just as they had for Angela’s March birthday. This time, she never once slipped away from David in the airport to make a mysterious phone call. She seemed focused entirely on him, on renewing their relationship. He allowed himself to believe that the nightmare was over.
Less than a month later, she was dead.
What a waste. What a goddamned waste.
He looks down at the snow globe in his hand.
The flakes have settled once again.
The angel gazes at him with a frozen smile from behind the glass.
David curses and raises the globe, prepared to hurtle it into the fire.
No! Don’t. Don’t destroy it. It’s all you have left of her. At least, here, in the cabin. It’s the only thing that proves Angela was ever here.
He lowers his arm and sets the snow globe gently back on the table. Sinking into a nearby chair, he stares into the crackling fire.
“Your wife can live on, Mr. Brookman,” the woman at the hospital told him. “If you make a gift of her organs, she will live on through others. You’ll be saving lives.”
It took him a long time to make that decision.
He made it, not because he was certain it was what she would have wanted, or because it was the noble thing to do, but simply because it was the easiest thing to do. They kept asking, gently but persistently; they kept reminding him that she was already gone, that only the machines were keeping her heart beating.
In the end, blinded by grief, wanting it to be over, he simply signed the papers.
They told him, later, what happened.
Angela’s eyes went to a young blind woman from Staten Island.
Her lungs went to a middle-aged woman in Westchester.
And her heart went to a mother of two on Long Island.
Yes, David thinks dully, Angela lives on in three strangers.
All of them wrote him letters that were forwarded to him through the donor agency. The first arrived just as spring tulips were obscenely bursting into bloom on the Park Avenue island; the other two around Christmas and the one-year anniversary of Angela’s death. He never bothered to open any of them, just tossed them into a desk drawer. They’re still there somewhere, he supposes.
Until now, he’s never felt the need to open them.
But maybe, when he gets home, he’ll consider it.
Maybe that will bring him the closure he so desperately needs.
When Rose pulls up in front of Bayview Books, Emily is on the sidewalk in front of the bookstore, huddled under the narrow awning in her too-short, too-thin leather jacket. She’s leaning with one leg bent and her foot braced against the redbrick wall, her shorn, maroon-tinted hair looking damp and more unkempt than usual.
Now, as Rose hurries toward the store, sidestepping puddles on the sidewalk, she glances at her watch. Emily must have arrived here at least fifteen minutes ago. She doesn’t seem to be perplexed, though, or harried. She simply looks resigned, almost as though she’s been waiting patiently for Rose to return.
“Rose! There you are!” Emily pushes her foot off the wall to stand up straight, her eyes narrowing beneath her multipierced brows. “Where were you?”
“I had an emergency at home with the kids.” Rose fumbles with her keys, jabbing the wrong one into the lock and nearly breaking it off trying to turn it. “I couldn’t get hold of anyone to watch the store so I locked up while I ran home.”
“Is everything all right now?”
She nods, unlocking the door, holding it open so that Emily can step past her.
Yes, everything is all right, except that she acted like a lunatic, practically accusing her neighbor of kidnapping her children.
“She can’t possibly blame you for that, Rose,” Leslie said, once Hitch had gone and the kids were settled in front of a cartoon and Rose had pulled herself together.
Leslie shook her head. “She had no right to take them someplace without telling you. You did what any worried mom would have done.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I overreacted. She was doing me a favor by taking the kids. And I never said not to go anywhere with them.”
“It’s common sense that she’d ask first. I always call you or page you to check, and I’m their aunt, for Pete’s sake.”
Maybe I’ll call Christine later and apologize, Rose decides. Now, with her children safe at home in Leslie’s capable hands, and her resolve to put the unnerving episode with Hitch behind her, it’s easier to think clearly. And with clarity comes a twinge of guilt.
“Hey, I’ll call Luke and tell him you’re back.” Emily’s voice intrudes upon her thoughts.
“Luke?” Rose jerks her gaze toward her coworker, who has shed her jacket to reveal a purple velvet catsuit that clashes with her hair. “Luke knows I was gone?”
“I called him on his cell when I got here and found the store locked. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Was he angry?”
“He’ll get over it.” Emily is maddeningly casual, flipping open a compact and reapplying her rust-colored lipstick.
“So he was angry?”
Emily shrugs and puts the compact back into her leopard-print bag, which she tosses on a shelf beneath the cash register.
“You should put that in the back room,” Rose advises. “Somebody can steal it from up here.”
“They can have it. There’s nothing in it.”
Nothing, Rose suspects, but her cigarettes and lighter. Bill is convinced that Emily keeps her purse under the register so that she can sneak smokes when business is slow and she’s alone in the store.
Rose changes the subject, asking, “What did Luke say when you told him I wasn’t here?”
“He said he’d be right over.”
“I thought he was out of town.”
“Well, he can’t be far if he’s on his way over. Hey, there’s his car now, isn’t it?”
Rose looks at the store window in time to see
a silver Jaguar pulling into a diagonal spot across the street.
Emily promptly heads to the stock room with her jacket as Rose checks her watch again. Her shift is technically over, and she told Leslie she’d be home shortly.
Luke is stepping out into the street and putting up an umbrella.
Should she stand here in her coat with her keys in her hand? Or should she hurriedly stash her stuff in a locker and make it look as though she’s busily working?
Dammit.
He’s striding across the street toward the store, and he doesn’t look as though he’s in a pleasant mood.
Rose lifts her chin and stands her ground, figuring she might as well face him head-on. If he fires her, he fires her.
“Rose! Where were you?” he demands, blowing into the store on a gust of wet wind.
“I had to run home. There was an emergency with my children.”
“What kind of emergency?”
She hesitates. “They were missing.”
“Missing!”
“But they’ve been located.”
“Good.” His tone, while still gruff, is laced with concern. “You must have been pretty worried.”
“I was,” Rose admits, startled that he’s human after all. “I’m really sorry that I left the store untended. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t reach Bill, and—”
“You could have tried me.”
“I thought you were going out of town.”
“I was in the city this morning but I’ve been back almost an hour. And I always carry my cell phone with me.”
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs again.
He surprises her, flashing an understanding smile. “Luckily, it’s a slow day. So no real damage was done. But next time you have to find it necessary to run out of here, at least call and let me know what’s going on.”
“Hopefully there won’t be a next time.”
“Hopefully not. Where’s Emily?”
“In back. And my shift is over, so . . . can I leave? I never got a chance to eat lunch, and—”
“Neither have I. Come on across the street to Milligan’s with me. I’m going to get one of those wrap sandwiches and some coffee.”
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