“Then I told you about the…” She couldn’t say it. Didn’t recognize the haunted voice that was talking – was that coming out of her?
“End.” Jackson finished. “Yes, yes you did.”
She stared off into space, not wanting to look at him, resting her head against his shoulder as the pain crashed over her. Just the thought brought tears to her eyes; she tried valiantly to blink them away. “Why are we talking about this?” she asked on a whisper.
“Because I looked into it.”
Her head whipped up to glare at him. “What do you mean you looked into it? Who did you talk to? That doctor? Dus – ”
“No, not that part.” Now it was Jackson’s turn to stand. He pulled at the knot in his tie, and Faith gulped, suddenly fearing the worst. “About the wedding.”
Faith never thought about her wedding. Her marriage didn’t exist – it had been cancelled out by bad luck and fear. There was no marriage; there had been no wedding. It had all just been a hazy dream. “What about my wedding?”
“On your birthday, drunk as a skunk, you told me about that day. How it had been both the worst and best day of your life. How you prayed every day that it never happened.” She winced and wanted to look away but couldn’t.
“And you told me that it wasn’t legal. That you could go on with your life and pretend it never happened because you never filed the marriage license. You called the justice of the peace, and he didn’t either, and it was a day that you’d just erased like it never was.”
“That sounds like something I’d say.” She could barely get the words out.
“Faith, it doesn’t work that way.”
She looked at him, perplexed. “I know you can’t really erase a day, but cut me some slack, Jackson; it’s just a figure of speech. I – ”
“I’m not talking about the wedding. I’m talking about the marriage.”
“I didn’t file the marriage license,” she said simply.
“Yes, but the justice of the peace did.” His voice softened at the quick denial shining in her eyes. “I went back ten years looking at the records and called the man myself. He remembered you, says he always remembers the ones so in love.”
Faith’s heart splintered into a million pieces. She bent over in agony, like it was a physical pain slicing through her. Jackson was beside her, a comforting hand on her shoulder, and she was too distraught to pull away as the memory came flooding back.
She’d pulled over at a rest stop, the side of the road, tears so thick she couldn’t see the highway any longer. She wouldn’t mind dying, then the pain would end, but she didn’t want to crash and take someone with her.
She sat in the car for an hour until she was all dried up, until she could feel the hole inside of her where it had all been. Until she knew he wasn’t coming after her. And just when she’d reached the end of her rope, knowing that she could never go back, she’d seen it. A phone booth with a light shining down, as if waiting for Clark Kent to enter and spit out Superman. She wanted to be a new person, get a new identity, become someone different, anyone but this girl in so much pain.
So she’d run, streaking through the rain she’d sworn was lucky just twelve hours earlier, and pulled the door closed behind her, soaked down to the bone. How she knew the number was a mystery, but she dialed it, almost crying in relief when the minister answered.
She told him the story, or as much as she could get through, repeating over and over not to file the marriage license until she couldn’t speak anymore. And she’d believed for the last ten years with the foolishness of youth and self-assuredness of a girl who got what she wanted, that he hadn’t. Never once had that been the part of the story she’d doubted.
“What are you saying, Jackson?” She could feel her illusions crashing down around her.
“That for the last ten years you’ve been Mrs. Dustin Andrews even though neither of you knew it.”
Chapter 5
“Weird stuff is going on around here.” Harmony closed the door to her bedroom and sat cross-legged on the floor, looking at her sister’s video feed on her phone.
“You always think weird stuff is going on. What book are you reading right now?” Melody asked.
“Not that kind of weird. Uncle Dust’s acting weird. Did anything else happen when he came to see you?”
“No. Pretty sure I told you everything. Came by my dorm, took me out to lunch, met Eric, saw famous people, went and bought me snow tires for my car, that was pretty random actually, ate frozen yogurt at the park, and then he left right before my night class.”
“Hmm.” Harmony stared off into space, lost in thought.
“Well, what’s he doing that you think is weird?”
“Um, he got drunk right after he got home yesterday and was super hungover this morning. The only time he ever gets trashed is when people die, right? But Dad was not acting like we should pull out the black dresses. And no one would talk to me about it. It was just all around weird.”
Melody rolled her eyes. “Harm, you’re like the only one in our family that likes to talk about stuff.”
“You’re a psych major. Don’t you want to hear people’s problems?”
“So I can help them, not so I can solve them. Our relatives are not puzzles for you to solve, Nancy Drew.”
“Okay, let’s talk this out,” Harmony said, ignoring Melody’s assessment. “Either something happened when he was with you, or something happened on the way home. But I checked, and his car is not dented like he was in an accident. Maybe he witnessed an accident? But no, why would that cause him to get plastered…”
Melody sighed and decided to play along – it was always easier than arguing with her sister. She’d just steamroll over any objections anyway. “Maybe he’s just sad ‘cause it’s that time of year.”
“Yeah, but he never gets wasted. He builds things, remodels things, demolishes things. He doesn’t get hammered.”
“Are you trying to use every euphemism for drunk that you know in this conversation?”
“Ha ha. I’m totally serious, Mel. I’m worried.”
Melody’s expression sobered. “I know.”
The line was quiet for a moment, both of them lost in thought. “Why would he buy you snow tires?!” Harmony burst out first.
Her sister shrugged. “I don’t know. We finished lunch, and he asked how my car was. I told him everything was fine, but he just kept pushing it. It was like he was running down a list of all the things that might be wrong with it, like he wanted there to be something he could fix.”
A wide smile appeared on Harmony’s face. “I knew it!”
“What?”
She rolled her eyes. “Aren’t you supposed to be the logical one? Shouldn’t you know what Uncle Dust wanting to fix things means?”
Melody looked startled. “You’re right. I can’t believe I missed that.”
“Well, I’ll cut you some slack. You haven’t asked for a bedtime story in years, Miss College. I, on the other hand, channel my childhood way more often.”
“He always wants to fix things after he tells us about Ally.”
Harmony smiled. “Ally and the Truly Remarkable Happily Ever After. God, he was bad at bedtime stories the first time he told us that.”
“I’m pretty sure he’d never told one before.”
The sisters shared a look, both of them remembering the same thing. Just a month after their mother died, still unable to sleep through the night in their new home, their new uncle, the one who liked to growl a lot, took them upstairs to tuck them into bed so they wouldn’t see Peter crying. He tried to get them to sleep and ended up with a story none of them would ever forget.
“He cried that first time,” Melody said. “Never did it again though, no matter how many times we made him tell it.”
“Which is why we always thought the girl was real.”
“So what are we saying?” Melody asked.
“Something must of reminded him of Ally when he was vi
siting you. Reminded him hard. Maybe Ally looked like your idol Madison Duncan?”
Melody rolled her eyes. “Wouldn’t we have noticed if he squirmed every time we made him watch one of her movies?”
“You’re right. More likely she looked like Eric.”
Melody laughed. “Now you’re reaching. Mystery not going to get solved tonight.”
“You’re right again. Uncle Dust could totally land a hottie.”
“He’d have to growl a whole lot less.”
“Maybe he used to.”
Faith stood in the kitchen and stared at the plate in the sink, her mind still too jumbled to think anything even resembling straight. Things had been fuzzy and incoherent since Jackson dropped his bombshell. Her fretful night of sleep hadn’t helped at all. She was completely useless now – a software update that crashed all the servers. Where was she supposed to go from here?
She was married. She was someone’s wife. This was not the way she saw herself when she looked in the mirror. She was a single, carefree pop singer. The most connection she had to another living thing was her cat, and she outsourced most of Citrus’ care to people that didn’t wander for a living. How the hell was she supposed to be part of a unit now?
Which didn’t even take into account who she was paired up with. Only the most dangerous guy she knew. Not because he was deadly with a weapon; he was deadly to her sanity. That rainy day she’d left and vowed never to go back; the part of her that wanted a family and a brooding man and a lemon tree, that died. She’d had to bury it, or she’d never been able to get up off the floor. Now she was friendly and encouraging, optimistic and dedicated, sunshine and unicorns; she dealt with the other angrier things when she couldn’t ignore them, a steam kettle that whistled to signal the angst was ready.
She was never supposed to see him again. And then ten years later, right on cue, as if she had been planning on a reunion, he popped up in a restaurant. But she’d escaped that. She didn’t have to talk to him or look at him or admit she knew of his existence long before now. She’d survived that. Ahh, but the universe, her very best friend, had better revenge than that. She couldn’t escape acknowledging him now. Now that they were linked with a big ampersand between Mr. and Mrs. – Decade-Ago-Faith still living down an abominably bad mistake.
“Morning!” Faith practically jumped at the cheery male voice breaking into her reverie. She closed her eyes, counted to three, and turned, hoping she looked a hell of a lot better than she felt.
“Morning. Coffee?”
Trevor beamed. “Yes, please. I have become way too accustomed to good coffee in the morning, and Mady banned the really good stuff when she had to stop drinking it. If she had to grow a human without caffeine, then I could manage fixing computers without it.”
“Am I going to get in trouble for fueling you?”
“Nah. You saved us from temporary homelessness; you get a pass.” Trevor’s eyes twinkled with easy comradery. Faith turned away to get a mug and blanched – where was the sunshine and unicorns now?
“I didn’t stop you from getting turned out on the street, you know, so you can stop pretending like I’m your savior. I belong on no pedestal.”
“Well, if we stop pretending that, then I have to stop pretending the real reason we took you up on your invitation was Sophie’s termites. Sometimes denial is useful.”
“When?” she asked as she returned the coffee pot to the counter.
“All sorts of times. Denial can make things seem less monumental, insane situations a little easier to handle. Denial kept me from freaking out when I fell in love with a famous movie star. It was a little less useful when I met my childhood hero, but it’s not duct tape, can’t fix everything.”
Trevor paused for a moment and took a sip of his coffee. He smiled in appreciation before his face became more serious. “If we spent all of our time obsessing over all the bad things that could happen, no one would ever get up in the morning. Or leave their house. Or go to work when people are following you around hoping they can get a picture of a baby bump and not caring who they put at risk to do it.”
Faith took a sip of her own coffee, the conversation veering into territory she didn’t expect. “Madison told me about that.” About being followed all the time because pregnancy shots sold tabloids. About being hounded anytime she stepped out of a building. About her bodyguard almost hitting a guy with the car. Madison had looked so shaken up about having to spend the next few weeks in a hotel that Faith had offered her house on the spot.
Trevor’s irresistible smile was back in place. “I know. And I’m going to put you on a pedestal, as big as I like, for as long as I want, for opening your home to us. Just you try and stop me.” He winked, and Faith couldn’t stop the laugh from coming. “Now I need to go get to work on your home studio to show my gratitude before I head out to the office. A tech guy’s work is never done.”
He was almost out the door before she asked, “You really think denial is good?”
“I think denial is a good thing to have in the toolkit. You should never underestimate the ‘run straight at the problem and damn the consequences’ maneuver though. Always produces immensely interesting results.”
Dustin parked his truck behind the stables and jumped out, grabbing his baseball hat and sunglasses from the glove compartment. He had tried to work on his remodeling project but was having trouble with his concentration. He’d checked in at the other worksite, made some notes on old invoices, and even went to give a quote on a gazebo, but none of that could realign his thoughts. So he did the only thing he could to find any semblance of peace.
“Here to see a man about a horse?” a female voice chided as soon as he entered.
“Or a woman it looks like,” he replied, leaning over to give Maya a peck on the cheek. He started grumbling on the inside though; he’d just wanted to grab a horse and go for a ride, not be confronted with another blast from the past, not this week.
“I haven’t seen you for a while. Whatcha been up to?”
“Same old, same old,” he murmured, hands thrust deep in his pockets. “Which one of these guys are you finished with, Doc?”
“Ronaldo here is good to go,” Maya said, stroking his mane and feeding him a carrot from her pocket. “But you know the rules. Have you been over to see Bea?”
He let out a puff of frustration. “No.”
Maya raised an eyebrow at him. “Care to elaborate?”
“No.”
She shook her head. “For a man trying to convince me to let him steal a horse, you’re doing a bang up job.”
“Borrowing,” he argued, “not stealing. And as long as my face is on a billboard, I can ride whatever horse I want.” He grabbed the reins from her hand and walked the stallion away from the veterinarian.
“Have a nice ride,” he heard Maya yell after him.
“I plan on it.” He saddled the horse in record time and jumped on, cantering down trails barely used anymore. He was chasing after solitude, the kind that expands to fill the empty spaces, the kind he couldn’t get in his own head. The complete quiet necessary to evict a pop star from his thoughts was only found on the back of a horse with the wind blowing against his skin.
Faith lay in the middle of her backyard, grass tickling her arms, and stared up at the canopy of greenery. She watched the leaves dance in the breeze, gently waving at her, and tried to get her mind in order. For the first time in a long time, her problems couldn’t be solved by the strum of the guitar – she was too mixed up for even the music to find the point.
“There you are.”
Faith looked up and groaned. “Jackson, what are you doing here?” She threw her hand up over her eyes, childishly pretending that if she couldn’t see him, she wouldn’t have to deal with him.
“Looking for you. Pearl said you were out here, but I almost missed you.”
“What caught your eye? So I’ll know how better to camouflage myself next time.” And to coach that chef of hers on th
e definition of ‘do not disturb.’
She heard Jackson lay down beside her and sighed, knowing she wasn’t going to be able to wish him away. “It’s always so beautiful back here. Though I’d prefer a bench.”
“I can’t take any more surprising news, Jackson. If you’re here to rock my world again, I suggest keeping it to yourself.”
“Hmmm, I rocked your world, did I?” His voice was teasing, and it took a moment for her to hear the innuendo. Jackson was nice, compassionate, and handsome, but they’d never gotten into any world-rocking – her heart had always held out hope for her husband it seemed.
Faith smacked him in the arm, never even opening her eyes. “I definitely felt the earth move under my feet.”
Jackson laughed, and she smiled. “Don’t worry. I have no more bombshells to drop. You don’t have any other secrets that might be biding their time, do you?”
“You’re well-versed in all my secrets now.” The mood morphed from teasing to heavy, Faith’s unease growing into a living thing.
“So,” Jackson said, “what do you want to do about it?”
“I have no fucking clue.”
“No Fucking Clue. Andy Peters' chart-topping song four years ago. Great hook. Catchy lyrics. Not applicable to this situation.”
“Well, unless I can buy clues like people buy vowels on game shows, I’m tapped out,” Faith said. “I haven’t even begun to process this, let alone react to it. I have nothing. I have literally nothing.”
“Literally Nothing. Andy Peters – ”
“Jackson, stop!”
“I’m just trying to lighten the mood.”
“It isn’t even close to working.”
“Faith.” He pulled himself into a sitting position and paused, waiting for her to respond. “Faith, look at me.” She uncovered her eyes, taking one last glance at the peacefulness of the tree, and sat up, running her hand through her unruly curls and clearing away the stray pieces of grass. “It’ll be okay.”
“I’ve heard that before,” she mumbled.
“I know. From me. And I always keep my promises, right?”
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