“I want to help you. I owe it to you.” She didn’t want to hear the empathy in his voice. “You don’t have any other options, El. Not in this market. Not unless you’re willing to sell to my dad.”
Ellie’s stomach rolled. It was tempting. She couldn’t hide that from herself. But the rock solid stubbornness that had been forged the day she’d been abandoned at Estelle’s reasserted itself within seconds, and with came the desire for sheer mutiny.
“You can have the money within a week. Go back to the life you really want.” The faintest of sneers curled his upper lip, and a white-hot haze settled in front of Ellie’s vision.
He wanted to buy the shop to appease his own conscience, which was troubling him, knowing he’d been so wrong about her all these years. If she granted him what he wanted he’d be able to move forward and forget the pain of what they had made together and lost.
She never would. And she knew that it wasn’t fair—that he’d had the choice taken away from him. But what had happened to her wasn’t fair, either.
“No.” Ellie knew that she might regret it later, but in that moment she was absolutely certain. “I won’t. Not ever.”
“Ellie!” Gabe exploded with irritation, gesturing with his arms. “You won’t sell this place. Florence isn’t a rich town. It isn’t a necessary service. And you can’t afford to make this place saleable. Take my offer. Walk away.”
Wouldn’t that just make his life perfect? His conscience appeased and her far away.
Tucking a strand of hair encrusted with dried blue paint behind her ear, Ellie stood tall, stiff. Rigid, just like Estelle had been.
If the realization shocked her, well, that was best tucked away to examine later.
“I’m going to list the shop for sale tomorrow.” A clammy sweat dampened her palms, her forehead, despite the lingering heat of the day. “I’m going to spend the next few days getting it into the best shape that I can. And then I’m going to leave. It will be best for everyone.”
The one hand on his hips, the way he rubbed the other over his nose... the tightening of his lips and the small shake of his head.
He was disappointed in her. Though she told herself it was just a tantrum from the man who had always been the town’s golden boy, deep down... she knew.
And it made her disappointed in herself. Her skin suddenly feeling like it was too tight to contain her body, Ellie took one last look at Gabe before turning to walk away.
Lord, but he was handsome. She knew every bit of him by heart, too.
It wasn’t enough.
“Ellie.”
She hesitated, but didn’t turn around.
“Just because my grief can’t be the same as yours, doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
The words shamed her because she was beginning to understand that maybe, just maybe, they were true.
And yet she walked away.
Chapter Seven
The next day Ellie waited for Gabe to show up at the shop, to try to persuade her to see things his way
He did not.
She waited another day. And another one. She bought another can of paint, and finished coloring the walls of the small apartment with glossy baby blue.
The color just made her think of the son that had never gotten a chance to live. It made living in the apartment nearly unbearable.
And yet she stayed, each day finding yet another excuse to put off listing the shop.
Five days after she’d walked away from Gabe, feeling that weighted stare burning into her back, she gave in and called Billy Huggins.
“I’d like you to draw up a bill of sale.” A huff of surprise came from the other end of the line, and Ellie squeezed her eyes shut, praying that the realtor would hurry up before she lost her nerve.
Not like she had any other choice. Gabe had been right about that.
“But you haven’t even listed the property.” In Billy’s voice Ellie heard all of the small town curiosity that made her skin crawl. “How did you find a buyer?”
“Let’s just say that the opportunity fell into my lap.” He began to drone on, about commissions and property taxes and assessing value. Ellie couldn’t have cared less.
She was going to let Gabe win, let him have this small victory so that she could get on with her life and forget that this entire town even existed. Which was what she wanted.
If the thought didn’t sit as solidly as it always had, it was just because of the stress of the last week.
Abruptly, she cut Billy off. “Look, I don’t care about any of this. I just want you to give the bill to Dominic Gabriel, get his money, and give it to me.” Which she would promptly give away. She’d never be able to spend it.
“The sheriff is your buyer?” When Billy spoke, Ellie heard curiosity and a bit of caginess that told her the gossip mongers of Florence had been busy rehashing the doomed love of that wild Kendrick girl and the sheriff’s son so many years ago.
“Yes.” Thoroughly exasperated and not seeing any point in carrying the conversation on any longer, Ellie hung up the phone, wincing as she realized how abrupt she’d been.
“Who cares?” Trying to grasp hold of some tendril of elation—she was free now—Ellie padded away from the hateful blue walls and to the fridge, where she treated herself to one of the six pack of beer that she’d purchased at the liquor store up the street, the one where she’d once bartered with the barely legal cashier on the night shift-- a lackluster groping session in the back alley would net her a six pack of this very beer.
Until she’d met Gabe. She’d loved him too much to ever think of cheating on him. Loved him so much that she’d dreamt about the day they would leave Florence together.
In the end, she’d left by herself. Just like she would be doing again, now. As soon as she had the money from the sale.
The beer was bitter on her tongue, her adult palate insulted by what had been perfectly acceptable as a teenager. Grimacing, she emptied the can down the sink, then began to pace the length of the small apartment, feeling at loose ends.
Days had passed since Gabe had stood here, offering to be her saviour. She might have said he had a hero complex...
But when he’d reminded her that the intensity of her grief didn’t diminish his own... Ellie’s eyes had opened. He’d given her plenty of time to ruminate, to chew on how wrong she’d been.
She owed it to him, to share the full story of what had happened between them, why they’d been torn apart in such a painful, life altering way. She could grant that he’d been absolutely right about that.
But spitting those words out?
She couldn’t actually leave until she had, or it would worry at her forever, a wound that might heal over but would never be free of the source of infection.
And yet... she just didn’t think she could do it. Didn’t know how she could talk about that beautiful baby boy to the man who had helped her create him, without losing herself in the process.
“Ugh.” Tangling her hands in her hair, Ellie tugged just hard enough to clear her mind. “Nine prisons we have. Nine, and not a single psychiatric hospital.”
Which was probably a good thing. Because she was feeling very much like she should be committed.
As she paced, Ellie caught sight of the door in the ceiling, one she’d forgotten about, out of her line of sight as it was. If she remembered correctly, there was a small attic over the apartment, the top of the building. Estelle had never permitted her to go up there, and in her defiance, Ellie had convinced herself that she didn’t want to.
Well, this was her last chance. In a few days this would be Gabe’s attic. It was probably empty of everything but dust, and even if there were things that might be important to normal families, Ellie knew that she wouldn’t want them.
But she desperately needed something, anything, to stop her mind from circling around and around, an endless cycle of guilt and fear and confusion.
“How the hell do you even open this thing?” Standing directly
underneath it, Ellie saw no handles, no latches. Brow creased, she dragged a rickety old kitchen chair over, its legs squeaking on the worn linoleum, then climbed up.
To her surprise, the hatch lifted with a light press of her fingers, opening up and inside.
It was too easy. Nothing in her life with Estelle had ever been that easy, and Ellie felt trepidation roll slowly down her spine.
Looking up, she saw nothing but unfinished wood, support beams and the angled slant of the roof. Dust danced thickly in the dim light that filtered in through what Ellie knew from the outside of the building was a small, round window divided into equal sections with crossbars.
It was twilight, and Ellie had no idea if there was any kind of electric light up there. If she wanted to explore—and she did, since she had nothing else to distract her from her thoughts of Gabe—she’d better be quick.
Stretching up to her tiptoes while balancing on the chair, Ellie was able to slide just her fingertips around the edge of the frame, but didn’t find a rope, or a ladder, or any other way to get up into the attic. Growling with frustration when she got a stitch in her side, she glared up at the gaping hole in the ceiling.
If she wanted up, she was going to have to hoist herself up by her hands. And that meant that there was probably nothing up there, because she sure couldn’t picture Estelle swinging like a monkey to go hang out in the dust.
“Or she had a ladder, dummy.” Almost certainly so. But it was long gone now, so Ellie sucked in a deep breath, clasped the ledge above her head and jumped. She swayed for a moment, legs scissoring as she tried to get enough momentum to hoist herself upwards. She had strong arms from years of hauling heavy buckets around, but her biceps and shoulders screamed as they supported her full, if slight, weight.
Just when she thought she’d have to let go, she managed to get her forearm in. Then the other, then her shoulders. Panting, she wormed her way into the small space and laid full length for a moment, panting with exertion.
Nothing worth having comes easy. Estelle’s voice seemed to echo all around her, and it did nothing to improve Ellie’s mood.
“Nothing I’ve had ever has come easy,” she muttered as she rolled to her back, then sat up and surveyed the interior of the attic.
The space was small, so much so that she would have to stoop if she wanted to stand, and she was only five four. The walls were lined with boxes, with surprised Ellie until she started cracking them open and found a wealth of old florist supplies that Estelle had been hoarding probably for the simple reason that she couldn’t abide throwing things away.
Except for her granddaughter.
Don’t go there.
Boxes full of small holiday ornaments on sticks... bits and pieces of oasis foam, shedding green dust... water picks so old that the plastic had yellowed. Ellie’s fingers itched to organize, to bury herself in the work of clearing out Estelle’s mess.
But at the end of the day, she just couldn’t bring herself to care about it. She’d leave it, let Gabe deal with it.
He’d wanted to buy a flower shop. He’d get every last bit of it.
Still, curiosity had her opening boxes, riffling through the contents before sealing them up and setting them back in their place. An abstract part of her thought it might be neat to find some vintage floral design books, or maybe funky vases from the seventies, when Estelle had opened her shop.
Instead there was just box after box of junk. And she couldn’t quite hold back her smirk, thinking of Gabe sweating as he hauled all of this crap down and out.
Sweating. Shirt off. Muscles rippling.
It just wasn’t fair that a man who had so much power over her emotions had turned from a handsome boy into an absolutely stunning man.
Frowning over that, Ellie reached for one of the last two boxes. They’d been set away from the rest of the pile, almost hidden in a dim corner.
They were ordinary cardboard, covered with a layer of dust thick enough to make Ellie cringe. She blew on it, coughed as the thick motes tried to climb into her throat.
And then her heart stopped, because she saw her own name, scrawled across the top of the box in Estelle’s spidery cursive.
“Probably just the things I left when she kicked me out.” But Ellie’s heart throbbed as she slid her fingers under the cardboard flaps and pried them open.
On the top of the box was a piece of construction paper that looked like it might have been red once upon a time. The meaning of the childish drawing was lost in the scrawls of inexperienced fingers, but the neat penmanship on the back proclaimed “Eleanor, age six”.
Age six. That was before she’d ever come to live with Ellie. Before her mother had decided that a child was just too much trouble.
Ellie studied the page, unease bubbling in her stomach in a way that made her feel ill. She wanted to tell herself that it was a mistake, this drawing being tucked away in Estelle’s things, but she knew, somehow she knew that it wasn’t.
Setting aside the drawing, she lifted out the next item, a bundle of photographs held together with a rubber band so old and brittle that it snapped when Ellie touched it.
School photographs... every one of Ellie. One for every year since she’d come to live with her grandmother.
A stack of report cards. A Christmas ornament made of macaroni and bric-a-brac glued onto a cardboard tree. An entire box full of little memories that Ellie had suppressed, because she’d been sure they hadn’t been noticed or appreciated.
A fist took hold of her heart and began to squeeze. Estelle had kept all of these things, even after she’d kicked Ellie out of the house. Why?
The woman had been disgusted with Ellie’s teenage pregnancy. And Ellie couldn’t entirely blame her for having reached the end of her rope.
Ellie had done her absolute best over the years to prove herself unloveable, so certain, deep down, that it was the truth.
Seeing these things, so carefully tucked away... was it possible that Estelle had cared about her after all? Even if she hadn’t had a clue how to show it.
This challenged everything that Ellie knew about her grandmother. Her head hurt, trying to process it. So she set the box aside and eyed the second one with trepidation.
That first one... well, that was enough of a shock. What on earth would be in here?
The cardboard sliced her thumb as she slid open the flaps. Hissing, she sucked on her thumb as she inhaled deeply and decided to just go for it.
A framed photo lay on top. The glass had yellowed, and the glue holding the sides together disintegrated as Ellie gingerly picked it up. Setting the separated pieces on the floor beside her, she pulled the photo free.
It was a picture of a man, and from hair and clothing styles, she judged that it had been taken some time in the eighties. The man...
She knew who he was immediately, though it had been years since she’d seen him. The reddish gold hair and full beard, the blue eyes...
Her mother had once told her that she’d gotten all of her looks from her father.
Estelle said nothing about the man at all, ever.
For a long moment Ellie just looked at that photo, tracing her fingers over the features that were both familiar and alien. Her heart ached and she quickly set the picture aside.
Another was underneath it. This one featured the same man, his arm slung casually around a pretty, bright eyed blonde that Ellie remembered with perfect clarity—Hannah, Ellie’s mother.
The back was labelled in Estelle’s shaky writing, and it read Joseph and Hannah, 1983. They looked so happy, grinning in that moment frozen in time. And their happiness gave Ellie the sudden urge to throw the frame against the wall and watch it shatter.
These people could have made her life so very different, if only they’d loved her, rather than leaving her to the care of an old woman who hadn’t had any interest in raising another child.
What would her life have been like, growing up in Florence, with two loving parents? Would she have st
ill felt the need to rebel, or would she have been one of those other kinds of girls that she’d watched with envy? Maybe she would have been Eleanor, studious and serious. Or maybe she still would have called herself Ellie, but would have cheered on the sidelines of the high school football team, making eyes at the quarterback—at Gabe.
Would she and Gabe ever have connected, if her childhood had been different? Would their baby ever have been created?
No matter how easy it might have been to say it would have been better that way, Ellie couldn’t wrap her head around that. That tiny, perfect creature had existed, even if he had only ever really been a reality to her.
She couldn’t wish that he had never been conceived. He’d changed her life and besides, what was the point in wishing herself back? She’d tried—for long, grieving years she had tried, every fibre of her being trying to force herself back to just a few days before he had died. And in that reality, she knew what would happen, and she gave birth before the single most defining moment of her life occurred.
But she couldn’t go back, not for her son, and not for these parents who had discarded her like trash. So she set this photo aside, too, and pick up the next.
“What’s this?” This one... this was puzzled her. The photo again showed her father. But styles had changed somewhat... his beard was gone. There were fine lines around those blue eyes that hadn’t been there in the previous shot.
And on his lap was a little girl who couldn’t have been more than about two. Rather than looking at the camera, she was looking up at Ellie’s father with wide, serious grey eyes.
Her hair was the color of cinnamon, glossy and sleek and held back at each side with a small pink barrette. Her sweater was pink too, a sweet little cardigan that looked miles more expensive than anything Ellie had ever worn.
Her heart knocked painfully against her ribcage. Who was this girl, who her father—Ellie’s father—was looking at with such affection? Such love?
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