Alliance

by Leigh, Trisha

  “Eh?”

  “Did you eat breakfast?” I ask, a little louder.

  He shakes his head, which means he hasn’t eaten, or he doesn’t want to eat, or that he didn’t hear me. I’m worn too thin to ferret out the correct interpretation, even though the primary motivation for my return to Heron Creek is taking care of Gramps. Mrs. Walters had called my Aunt Karen, threatening to contact the authorities about putting him in a home if we didn’t do it ourselves.

  My aunt has no intention of leaving Charleston, ever. When I got wind of Mrs. Walters’s threat during a weekly phone call with Gramps, it happened to be the exact same day I caught my fiancé fucking his teaching assistant. On the desk in his office. During school hours.

  The decision to move back here to take care of Gramps and get the hell away from anyone and everyone who knows both David and me—people who knew about his affairs, plural, for years and never said a word—made itself.

  Maybe I’m technically running away, but since Gramps needs me, or someone, I’m running toward something, too. A new life, my old pre-David one, it doesn’t matter. I can hide here.

  We wander into the living room, and Gramps eases down into his worn, comfy recliner, one that’s tan and shiny in the bald spots, before pinning me with his perceptive blue gaze. “You come to put me in a home, Gracie-baby?”

  “Don’t be silly, Gramps. You’ll probably have to put me in one first.”

  He nods, his expression serious except for the sparkle in his eyes. “I can see that by the looks of you. Gonna be a crazy home, or one for booze hounds, though, not a place for old folks.”

  I’m ready to collapse, spent from the night of driving and the bottles of wine, not to mention the sunrise wake-up call. Or the contents of the past two weeks of my life. Either way, I can’t find the energy to argue with him, especially because he’s not wrong, the way things are going.

  “No need to answer. You should never defend yourself, girl. Those people who would believe you already know better and those who won’t aren’t listening anyway. Best to keep your mouth shut.” He huffs. “At least something your Grams and I taught you lodged between your ears.”

  “Oh, come on. I learned more than that around here. How to make applesauce, how to make every person in a twenty-mile radius love you unconditionally, that it’s okay to shoot things that annoy you.”

  “That last one is all your grandmother.” The wistful sigh in his voice tears at my heart. He’s lonely, and no wonder. We are all terrible people for having left him alone.

  I need a few minutes, an hour, a week, to try to find the chunks and strips of myself that have ripped off, floated away. Hopefully they’re still tied to me, like balloons, and can be tugged back. “I’m going to take a shower and get some things from the car. I’ll make lunch in a few hours, okay?”

  He waves a hand my direction and nods, his eyes glued to the Creek Sun he picks up from the end table. I take my cue and head for the foyer, but a rustle of newspaper and the sound of my name turns me back around.

  “Yeah?”

  “Karen called yesterday. Amelia’s pregnant again. Three months along this time, so they’re hoping it’s going to stick.”

  The mention of my cousin’s name seizes every muscle in my body. We grew up here together, more sisters than cousins, but it’s been five years since we’ve spoken. Since the night of her bridal shower.

  Through my pain, layered thick with the loss of Amelia close to the bottom, comes a geyser of joy. Amelia never wanted anything more than to be a mother, and there have been four miscarriages. That I know about. It had killed me to not be there for her when they happened, but our rift had been Millie’s choice, not mine.

  There have been an inordinate number of miscarriages and stillbirths, going back to at least our great-grandmother. Odd, but it had never occurred to me to worry. Amelia was the one who always wanted kids.

  “That’s great news,” I manage, the words a little strangled but sincere.

  Gramps huffs, his gaze wandering back to what passes for news in a town of less than two thousand. “I’m disappointed you two still haven’t put aside whatever came between you, Gracie-baby.”

  My heart sinks, his words carrying the same impact as they have for all of my twenty-five years. “It’s hard to talk with only one person in the room, Gramps.”

  He doesn’t answer, and this time I’m pretty sure he’s pretending not to hear me. He has a point. “She won’t talk to me” isn’t much of an excuse, but like everything else in the shambles of my life, thinking about actually taking steps to fix it makes me so tired I almost curl up on the carpeted steps climbing upward from the foyer.

  Fat pants, clean underwear, maybe a toothbrush, then no more requirements until lunch.

  My old Ford waits in the driveway, as patient and loyal as ever. Better than any dog, I used to tell David when he wanted to bring home a puppy. Not that I have a problem with dogs, but he would’ve gotten bored within a week and all of the cleaning and walking and playing would have fallen to me. One day, I’d promised myself, he’d be more reliable, I’d be done with grad school, and things would be different.

  Well, I’d finished grad school. Maybe one out of three isn’t bad.

  I rummage through the backseat in search of my necessities, coming up with my toiletry case and yoga pants before finally discovering clean underwear stuffed inside a ratty pair of running shoes. My skull cracks on the car’s frame on my way out, making me rethink the loyalty of my hunk of junk. I pause to rub at the pain and catch myself staring into the woods toward the creek.

  Heron Creek is situated around an intracoastal waterway about twenty miles from Charleston. There’s a dock at the back of my grandparent’s five-plus acres, and the town itself has three public access piers.

  Even now, I can see Amelia and I streaking into the morning, our bellies full of Grams’s banana-and-honey pancakes. A warm, muggy mist curling around our tiny bodies, lifting us to Mel’s porch down the street, and then sweeping up Will from the big house along the water. We laughed away entire days, lazing in the sun, splashing in the salty river, making up a variety of adventurers that most often ended up in the old graveyard.

  I would never have believed when I left my childhood behind that not a single one of their friendships would follow me into the future. My heart split in two at the memory of Will, even though I had been the one to let go.

  Mel and Amelia…the miles that separate us are more complicated.

  Closing my eyes does nothing to erase the years of memories twirling through the early morning fog. Turning my back helps a bit more, and once the front door clicks shut behind me, I almost believe I’ll be able to shut out the painful days of my past as easily as the piercing sunlight. That I’ll be able to live in Heron Creek and cherry-pick the pieces of the past that comfort, not the ones that remind me that the person I’d dreamed I’d be is not the person the mirror says I’ve become.

  I don’t remember falling asleep, but the smell of my hair on the pillow insists I didn’t make it into the shower, or out to unload my car, before stretching out in my old room. The scent of fresh linen—the same laundry detergent and fabric softener Grams used—permeates the crisp, light blue sheets and handmade quilt. The sight of the blues and creams, the gauzy curtains blowing in the salty late-spring breeze, had stolen the last bit of my will to act like a grownup.

  My stench, a faint trace of salt and fish, forces me to shift, at least enough to remove my nose from my armpit. Something black shudders in the corner of the room, and I shriek, sitting up and scrambling backward, pulling a fluffy sham to my chest. My heart pounds, and the stink in the room increases, morphs into an unfamiliar odor that’s impossible to place.

  No matter how hard I stare into the shadowed recesses of my familiar room, they remain empty.

  I shake my head, snorting at my panic. It’s like I’m ten years old again, clutching at sheets and straining to make out invisible faces after a night of Ameli
a’s impressive retellings of local legends. Like every small Southern town, Heron Creek’s chock full of ghosts. Supposedly. As hard as we’d tried, as many hours as we’d spent in cemeteries, none of us had ever seen one.

  The sound of Gramps shuffling around downstairs propels me out of bed and into the bathroom, my legs hot and tingly from the unexpected nap. I’d slept the better part of the past twelve hours, which, while not uncommon for me in the past week, was pretty much unheard of during the six years before that. Not that sleeping drunk in the front seat of a car is particularly restful. Or good on my twenty-five-year-old lower back.

  The mirror reveals an atrocious rat’s nest of dark waves and an impressive array of pink crease marks on the right side of my face. My eyes look as though they belong in the face of a girl who drove nineteen hours, guzzled two bottles of gas-station wine, and passed out in the car, so at least the mirror doesn’t lie.

  I’m not tempted by the shower, instead choosing to wrestle my hair into a lopsided bun, then brush my teeth and throw on some deodorant. It won’t fool Gramps, but he’s not going to get on me about it. Today. He’s an advice giver but has a knack for knowing when a kind word will help or push me over the edge. I’m already dangling.

  Soft snores fill the living room, even though it only took me about fifteen minutes to get downstairs. Gramps’s mouth hangs open, head drooping onto his shoulder while an Atlanta Braves game blares from the television. I turn it down and head into the kitchen, deciding to whip up something fancy, such as grilled cheese sandwiches. He’s awake when I return; I plop a plate of gooey goodness on his lap and a grape soda on the end table next to him, then settle on the couch.

  “Have a nice nap?” I ask.

  He nods. “How was yours?”

  I don’t know why I’m embarrassed about napping mid-morning. Maybe because I’m a girl in my mid-twenties with a doctorate, not an infant. “Yes. I didn’t mean to fall asleep, but there’s something about that room. It still smells like Grams.”

  “The woman buys the same laundry detergent.”

  “I’m pretty sure her name is Laura,” I venture around a steaming bite.

  He grunts, swallowing half of his sandwich in a couple of bites, then taking a swig of his soda. “There’s a new couple down the street, invited us to dinner tonight. Not new to me, new to you. Been here about five years.”

  “I don’t really want to—”

  “Already said we’d be there. I can roll my old ass down the street with my walker alone, if you’d rather.”

  I roll my eyes. “Fine. What time?”

  “Five.”

  Old people and their eating habits. I’m going to have to start eating lunch at ten-thirty in the morning if my meals are going to be taken with Gramps and his friends. Which, since I have none of my own and little desire to leave the house, seems likely.

  “Braves are winning,” I observe, setting my empty plate on the coffee table and snuggling back into the sagging cushions. They smell like my Grams, too, among other vestiges of the past.

  “They’re ahead, sure.”

  We watch in silence, the easy togetherness warming me in exactly the way I’d dreamed since deciding to come back here. He doesn’t ask me what happened with David, why there’s a pale ring of skin on my finger instead of the flashy diamond I’d worn to Grams’s funeral. I don’t bug him about his diet, or needle him about being nicer to his cleaning-slash-laundry-slash-grocery-shopping woman.

  There are a million questions surrounding me, waiting not so patiently on the sofa at my hips and thighs, that need to be answered. What I’m going to do with myself, with my graduate degree in Archival Studies here in Heron Creek. When I’m going to take a good hard look at my part in what happened in Iowa City, because there’s always two sides. Whether I’ll be able to live here without falling so deep into the past there’s no way to generate a future. But for this afternoon there is acceptance from Gramps, and the scents of my childhood, and these things allow me to pretend those little piles of insistent words and letters don’t peer up at me.

  And the Braves. There’s always them, too.

  Read more!

  Also By TRISHA LEIGH

  Whispers in Autumn

  Winter Omens

  Betrayals in Spring

  Summer Ruins

  Gypsy

  The Historians (Bloomsbury Spark, 2015)

  Adult titles written as LYLA PAYNE

  Broken at Love

  By Referral Only

  Be My Downfall

  Staying on Top

  Living the Dream

  Going for Broke (published in Fifty First Times: A New Adult Anthology)

  Not Quite Dead

  Not Quite Cold

  Not Quite True (April 21, 2015)

  Mistletoe & Mr. Right

  Sleigh Bells & Second Chances (Bloomsbury Spark, 2015)

  Acknowledgements

  It’s been longer than I intended since the release of Gypsy, but this book was a difficult journey for me, one that I was determined would end in a product that would not only satisfy, but delight the readers who fell in love with Gypsy. Several people helped me get it to a point where I feel confident putting it into your hands, and I can’t thank them enough.

  First, my developmental and line editor, and friend, Danielle Poiesz. You and I have worked on so many projects together now, but I continue to be amazed and energized by both your insight and your delivery. I hope we work on many more projects to come, because I can’t imagine doing this without you, no matter how much or little teeth gnashing goes into the final product. Thanks to Shannon Page, who stepped in to copy edit this one for me. Mary Ziegenhorn (hi, mom!), Cheryl Heinrich, and Gay Halsey are fantastic proofers with an eagle eye for mistakes that comes in handy.

  Nathalia Suellen makes the prettiest covers in the business, and working with her continues to be a delight. Eisley Jacobs handles my graphic and website design, which means fielding lots of annoying questions and requests, all with a smiley face and a laugh. I appreciate you.

  My early readers, whose opinions and friendship are priceless—Amalia Dillon and Leigh Ann Kopans—I am, as always, in your debt. Denise Grover Swank is my friend and critique partner, and a hundred things in between that are irreplaceable.

  My family is, as always, the best thing about me. Even when they do nothing to further a book, they do everything. Because I am the person capable of writing a story because of them.

  Last, but not least, to my boyfriend Paul who puts up with me with more patience and love than I deserve.

  About the Author

  Trisha Leigh is a product of the Midwest, which means it's pop, not soda, garage sales, not tag sales, and you guys as opposed to y'all. Most of the time. She's been writing seriously for five years now, and has published 4 young adult novels and 4 new adult novels (under her pen name Lyla Payne). Her favorite things, in no particular order, include: reading, Game of Thrones, Hershey's kisses, reading, her dogs (Yoda and Jilly), summer, movies, reading, Jude Law, coffee, and rewatching WB series from the 90's-00's.

  Her family is made up of farmers and/or almost rock stars from Iowa, people who numerous, loud, full of love, and the kind of people that make the world better. Trisha tries her best to honor them, and the lessons they've taught, through characters and stories--made up, of course, but true enough in their way.

  Trisha is the author of THE LAST YEAR series, THE CAVY FILES, the WHITMAN UNIVERSITY books and the LOWCOUNTRY GHOST stories. She's represented by Kathleen Rushall at Marsal Lyon Literary Agency.

  To learn more about Trisha Leigh, please visit her at http://www.trishaleigh.com and sign up for her newsletter for access to news and exclusive content.

  If you enjoy New Adult books or a good contemporary romance, please check out her pen name, Lyla Payne, at http://www.lylapayne.com.