“‘Conceal me what I am—’”
“Stop!”
I looked up from my English assignment at Quentin’s sharp direction. He glared at the small stage where Eddie and Gwyn were rehearsing the end of act one, scene two of Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare. Eddie was playing the Sea Captain, and Gwyn was Viola. As Viola’s understudy, I should’ve been paying more attention but I was trying to finish a paper due at the end of the week. And honestly, I knew this play like the back of my hand.
Quentin glowered at Eddie. “Stop looking at her tits while she’s speaking. You’re the captain, her guide, her support! You do not perv on a young lady, you licentious hound!”
I covered my mouth to stop my snort. When I joined the Tollcross Amateur Theatre Company last September, I’d been somewhat intimidated by its quintessentially melodramatic, Welsh-born director Quentin Alexander. However, over time I’d gotten more comfortable with him, especially because he made me laugh without even trying to.
“They’re right there,” Eddie complained, gesturing to Gwyn’s rather impressive breasts. She wore a tight sweater with a low neckline showcasing her badass cleavage. “Tell her to dress more appropriately.”
Gwyn sneered at him. “You do realize everything that just came out of yer mouth is the reason feminism was born, right?”
“Man up,” Quentin snarled in his upper-crust accent that sounded more English than Welsh. “You querulous wretch. Say the line without looking at her tits or I swear to the gods of Shakespeare, I will get myself another captain.”
Licentious hound, querulous wretch. My lips trembled as I tapped my pen against them. Quentin was on fire today.
“I don’t have to take this kind of abuse,” Eddie huffed.
“Then get off my stage.”
He didn’t get off his stage. They started the scene over and I looked back down at the assignment.
“I assume you know the lines … since you’re not paying attention?” Quentin murmured. I startled to find him standing above me.
I gave him an appeasing smile. “Every single one.”
“What are you doing?” He nodded to the refurbished MacBook in my lap and the notebooks scattered on the chair beside me.
“English lit paper.”
“Well, at least it’s productive, which is more than I can say for whatever it is Amanda is doing.” He nodded behind me and I looked over my shoulder to see my fellow understudy Amanda giggling at whatever Hamish (our Sebastian) was whispering in her ear.
“I can only hope nothing happens to Jane, or this play may be the cause of a divorce,” Quentin muttered before whirling back around to pay attention to his actors on stage.
Jane was our Olivia, and Amanda her understudy. While Jane was mature, professional, and madly in love with her wife, Amanda was a senior at Edinburgh University, smart but immature, single, a self-proclaimed flirt, and she loved being the center of attention. Olivia and Sebastian were love interests in Twelfth Night. Not a problem for Jane and Hamish.
If Amanda were to take over the role, however, I wasn’t sure how that would work out for Hamish. He was fifteen years older than her, married with two kids, and apparently bored by that because the man clearly did not have the willpower to resist Amanda’s charms.
I frowned at them, shaking my head in disgust. Amanda and I didn’t exactly rub together very well. I’d watched her go through a shit ton of men since meeting her last September. A lot of them were already with someone else. It would seem that she got off on being able to capture men’s attention from their girlfriends and wives, and as soon as she’d won, she dumped them, bored.
Poor Hamish.
What an idiot.
I looked down at my laptop, thinking it shouldn’t have surprised me that joining a theater company would throw me into so much drama on stage and off.
However, it wasn’t my offstage drama, and that’s all I really cared about. My life was officially drama-free and it had been for a while now. It was exactly how I liked it.
I was content. Finally.
It hadn’t been an easy road to get here, and by God, I would hold on to what I had with everything I had.
“Okay, where’s my Valentine and Duke?” Quentin called out.
Duke Orsino was being played by Jack. He was a good-looking guy a few years older than me, medium height, athletically built with lovely dark eyes that constantly glittered with mischief. He was a flirt like Amanda, except he stayed away from attached women and he was actually more a serial monogamist than an outright player. He’d had two girlfriends since we’d met, dating each for a few months before breaking it off. While he was with a girl, he was with her, as far as I was aware, but that didn’t stop him from flirting with every breathing female in Edinburgh.
Except Amanda.
He made it obvious she irritated the hell out of him.
Jack was a car salesman but he really wanted to be an actor. He’d been an extra in movies, had small, one-off parts in TV shows—he’d even done a couple of commercials. But nothing that would pay the bills on a regular basis.
Still, he persevered and got his acting fix as a player in this company.
He’d been sitting a few chairs down from me, his legs up over the seat in front of him, ankles crossed lazily. He and Jane, our Olivia, had been sitting watching the rehearsal in between playing with their phones. Other cast members with smaller parts were scattered around the small theater, waiting for Quentin to call them up.
I shifted to the side, holding my MacBook out of the way as Jack shuffled along the aisle to get out. He smirked down at me as our bodies brushed and tapped the top of my laptop. “This is why ye’er single. Too much work and not enough play makes Nora a dull girl.”
I gestured for him to move along. “I’m single because I want to be single, Jack.”
“Oh, that’s obvious, gorgeous.” He winked as he stepped into the aisle.
“Make haste, Orsino,” Quentin snapped. “We haven’t all bloody evening.”
Will, who was playing Valentine, was already up on stage with Gwyn.
“Okay,” Quentin said, once Jack was standing offstage ready to enter. “Act one, scene four.” He pointed to Will.
Will strode out to the middle of the stage with Gwyn. “‘If the Duke continues these favors towards you, Cesario, you are like to be much advanced; he hath known you but three days, and already you are no stranger.’”
Gwyn looked blankly at Will.
He whispered something to her and she flushed, turning to Quentin with an apologetic look. “Line?”
Our director rolled his eyes to the heavens.
Before he could feed her the line from the script book rolled in his hands, I called out, “‘You either fear his humor or my negligence, that you call in question the continuance of his love. Is he inconstant, sir, in his favors?’”
“Thanks!” Gwyn called back. “I remember now.”
Quentin shot me a thoughtful look and then swung his attention back to Gwyn. “No doubt you can guess how I feel about the fact that your understudy is feeding you your lines, Viola.”
“She has a script,” Gwyn argued.
“No,” he shook his head, “that was from memory.”
I flushed at the frown she sent my way, my eyes flickering to Pete who looked bored, and then Jack who was grinning at me like I was in trouble. Ignoring him, I concentrated on my paper.
Never feel ashamed about being smart, Nora. I should have encouraged it more. I’m sorry.
My mom’s voice echoed in my head and I looked back up at the stage. It wasn’t my fault I knew the part inside and out. I wouldn’t let Gwyn make me feel bad about it. I was over self-recrimination. Every day I had to remind myself that I wanted to be a different person from the one I was eighteen months ago.
The change had begun that fateful morning I lost what felt like everything. As I’d been overcome with the kind of pain I’d never experienced before—the agony of losing someone because they wanted to be lost—Seonaid came to my rescue. She pulled me together and told me no man was worth it. She told me it was time to take control of my life.
And her fierceness mixed with my anger at him had lit a fire inside me.
I wanted to be the strong person she swore I could be, so I’d packed some clothes in a backpack, borrowed enough money from Seonaid to get a cheap flight home to Indiana, and I’d gone in search of my parents. It all started with them and I knew if I wanted to begin my life over again, I needed closure. I needed to know I was forgiven. Or not.
I had no way of knowing if I’d ever be able to afford to come back to Edinburgh but Seonaid said she’d make it happen, that she had to because Angie and Roddy were going to kill her for putting me on a flight to the States without saying goodbye.
But she could see in my eyes how I felt.
I needed to do it then, to have something to focus on, something to get me through having my heart broken by the man I loved.
Confused, I frowned at the woman who was standing in my parents’ front doorway on West Washington. If it had been any other street in any other town, I might be forgiven for knocking on the wrong door due to jet lag and grief.
But this was Donovan and my parents’ house stood out for its smallness on the street. And there was the matter of the big-ass tree in the front yard.
The lady was perhaps in her early forties and vaguely familiar. She scowled at the sight of the bedraggled young woman on her doorstep. “Can I help you?”
“Um … I’m looking for my parents. O’Brien?”
Surprise pulled her eyebrows up toward her hairline. “You their kid who ran off?”
The joys of living in a small town. “That would be me.”
Her lip curled in a sneer. “Well, your momma doesn’t live here anymore. She lives out on Willow, east of the Northwood Farm. She built it. Called Willow House.”
Her words swirled around in my head but I didn’t get a chance to ask anything further because she’d shut the door in my face. I stumbled off the small porch and almost tripped over my own feet as I walked down the garden path. How on earth could my mother afford to build a house on land not far from our very first home? And why did the woman make it seem like my mother had done it alone?
Where was my dad?
Pulse racing harder than it already had been, I walked.
At first, I was glad for my coat because it was a chilly forty-eight degrees and there was a blustery wind trying to blow me back the way I’d come. However, after fifty minutes of marching toward Willow on the outskirts of Donovan, I was sweating. The fact that I was nervous as hell might have had something to do with it.
I was worried about missing the house if it was built off the main road, but as I walked, I saw Willow House. It was larger than the home on West Washington but still modest. Two stories and clad in white shingles, it had a porch that wrapped around the whole house and a pretty garden out front that looked like someone actually tended it.
Feeling my palms slick with cold sweat, I stopped. It was like my feet had a mind of their own and they did not want to walk up there. Pretty curtains hung in the large dual picture windows at the front, a vase of lilies and roses in one.
A newer, cherry red Jeep Renegade in the driveway at the far side of the house caught my eye. Very cute.
Very not my mother.
Definitely not my father.
What the hell?
I was jolted out of my confusion by the sound of a deep bark. The front door opened and a big black dog burst out of it, throwing open the screen door and loping toward me. Fear unstuck my feet and I stumbled back as the black Labrador came at me.
“Trixie, stop!”
The lab skidded to a halt at my feet, her tail thumping the garden path as she peered up at me with excited brown eyes.
I raised my gaze from the dog to its obvious owner.
And I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
It was my mom, but it wasn’t.
She wore skinny jeans that fit her still-slender figure and a big slouchy green sweater that was a great color on her. Her dark hair, rather than being scraped back from her face, hung in loose, attractive waves around her shoulders. And although she looked startled and wary to see me standing outside her house, the tired, pinched expression she used to wear, like they were a permanent part of her, were gone.
“Mom?”
My voice prodded her into action and slowly, as if in a daze, she made her way down the porch stairs toward me. I couldn’t read her expression, so I tensed, bracing myself for vitriol. She passed the dog and kept coming. She walked right into me, our bodies colliding as she wrapped her arms around me so tight.
Shock stunned me for a second.
My mom was hugging me.
Hugging me.
“Nora,” she whispered, sounding choked.
The fear I’d been holding onto for years shattered and I half laughed, half cried as I hugged her back.
We held each other until Trixie started to get impatient and jumped up on Mom. She laughed and let go of me. “Down, you silly girl.” She pushed the dog’s head away playfully and I studied her, thinking once again, Who is this person?
Seeing the questions written all over my face, Mom’s laughter died. “Come on inside.”
“Where’s Dad?”
Avoiding my eyes, Mom turned on her heel and walked toward the house. “Inside, Nora.”
It wasn’t until we were standing facing each other in a stylishly decorated front room I never imagined would belong to my mother, all soft grays and buttercup yellows, that I got the news I’d been dreading for the last hour.
“Your dad is gone, Nora. He passed away about nine months ago. Heart attack.”
It was too much.
It was all just too much.
“Malvolio!”
I gasped, coming out of the memory, and flushed, horrified at the thought of having been heard. But no one was watching me, and Terence, our Malvolio, was climbing over chairs to get to the stage.
“There is an aisle for a reason, you miscreant,” Quentin scowled.
“I hardly think climbing over a few chairs warrants the insult. I, sir, am no villain. Well … I am when you want me to be.” He winked at him.
Suppressing a giggle, I watched as Quentin struggled not to smile. It should be mentioned that Terence was Quentin’s lover and had been for three years. He was younger than Quentin by thirteen years and to the outside world, they seemed as different as apples and oranges. While Terence was playing the stoic, almost puritan Malvolio, in real life he was anything but. He was fun, sarcastic, a little wild, and gregarious, the opposite to Quentin who could be a wee bit uptight.
However, that was probably why they worked so well together. Terence was the light Quentin needed, and Quentin forced Terence to take life a little more seriously.
“Begin!” our director demanded.
Derek, who was playing Clown, strode onstage with Olivia and Malvolio.
“‘Wit, and’t be they will …’”
I let them drift off in the background, trying to read my notes again when Quentin pulled me out of my concentration. “It’s your debut line, Malvolio.”
“I can’t remember it,” Terence said, giving him a boyish smile. His eyes flew past his boyfriend to me. “Perhaps Nora knows it.”
“How can you not remember your first line?” Quentin asked.
He did remember it. He was just being annoying. “C’mon, Nora. Show off. I bet you know every line in this play.”
“As impressive as that would be,” Quentin said, “we do not have time for this. Line!”
But Terence smirked at me, taunting me. I huffed, sure I could see smoke billowing out of Quentin’s ears. “‘Yes; and shall do, till the pangs of death shake him.’”
“Ah there, see!” Terence clapped and then gestured at me to continue. “Go on.”
I made a face. “Learn your own lines.”
“You’re all amateurs,” Quentin growled.
Jane made a face. “Well … yeah.”
“It’s kind of in the company name, darling.” Terence continued to grin unapologetically.
Our director muttered something but he was too far away for me to hear.
“Is it just me,” I lurched forward at the sound of Jack’s voice right behind me, “or are they all particularly annoying tonight?”
“I would include you in that,” I huffed, gesturing to his seat and then the stage. “When did you get there from up there?”
“While ye were staring at yer laptop pretending to work but secretly daydreaming about me.”
I sighed and turned back around. “I’m not going out with you, Jack.”
“I wasn’t going to ask again. At least not tonight.”
“You don’t want to date me. You’re… confused. No woman has ever said no before.”
“True, but it’s not just that. Ye’er a mystery, Nora O’Brien. I haven’t met a lot of those lately.”
“Too bad for you I don’t want to be solved.”
Quentin frowned over at us.
Jack leaned in closer so his mouth was near my ear. “What is it, then? Tragic past? Heartbroken one too many times?”
I pretended to look around. “What is that incessant buzzing noise?”
He chuckled. “Or maybe heartbroken the one time but it was enough to make ye gun shy.”
“I certainly won’t be handling your gun anytime soon.”
“Or maybe it’s daddy issues. I’ve dated women with those before. Is it? Is it daddy issues?”
I tensed, glaring sullenly at my screen. “My dad is dead.”
“I got all your letters,” Mom said the next morning. We sat at the breakfast counter in her beautiful New England-style kitchen. “I just didn’t feel like I deserved to read them, to be a part of your life, after the way I’d treated you. Back then I thought you deserved to be free of me.”
That wasn’t something I’d ever expected my mother to say.
But nothing about this trip home was going as expected.
After the news of my father’s death, we didn’t do much talking. At first, I cried and then I grew cold and words failed me as I processed the fact that my dad had been gone from this world for nearly a year and I’d had no idea.
Rather than continue the conversation about my letters, I let my anger lead me. “Is that why you didn’t contact me to tell me he’d died?”
“No, I wrote you about your dad. Sent it to the last address you wrote from but the letter came back unopened.”
Shit. “I moved.”
She nodded. “I thought so. I tried social media but I couldn’t find you.”
Because I’d deleted my Facebook account after Jim died.
Shit.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, my anger dissipating.
“I figured I’d hear from you eventually.” She studied my naked ring finger. “Divorced?”
I flinched. “He died. Early last year.”
Horror filled my mother’s expression. “Nora … I am so sorry.”
Exhaling shakily, I said, “It’s been a crappy few years.” Then I caught sight of the photo of us I’d liked best—the one of my mom cuddling into Dad’s side and Dad holding me tight. I was about eight or nine in the picture. Mom had hung it near the kitchen door. “Did he hate me?”
“No,” she said instantly. “He blustered about it but I knew your father better than he thought I did and he was mad at himself. He blamed himself for driving you away. Didn’t make him any less mean. In fact, he only got worse.” She sighed. “I’m afraid to say that hardship did not bring out the best in your father.”
“I’m sorry for the way I left,” I said, looking her directly in the eye. “That’s what I came here to say. And to see if I’m forgiven for running away when you needed me.”
Mom’s brows pinched together. “There’s nothing to forgive. We were the ones who needed to be forgiven, Nora. I understand why you left. You were a smart, great kid and I made you think that you didn’t deserve to reach for something outside of this town. I was bitter. And I’d been bitter a long time and it wasn’t until you left us that I woke the hell up. Too little, too late.”
“You’re so different,” I mused, studying her, gratified to see her eyes were no longer dull and tired. “And this house …?”
Smirking at my unfinished question, she replied, “This was all your dad’s. The son of a bitch was sitting on money, Nora. Inheritance from his uncle who’d passed it to him ’cause he had no kids of his own. It was the money your dad used to set up his construction company. Money the sneaky bastard kept from his wife and invested well. Not to mention the fact that I found out from Kyle Trent at your dad’s goddamn funeral that he paid decent money for your dad’s company and the house but your dad asked him to keep it quiet from me.”
Shocked, I couldn’t quite comprehend what she was saying. “But why would he lie about it?”
And then realization hit me.
I could have gone to college.
“School,” I whispered.
Guilt filled my mother’s eyes. “I really thought we couldn’t afford it. If I’d known that we could send you to school and then some, I swear …” She shook her head. “I had a lot of anger toward your dad after he died and I came into all this money. He and I never had the greatest relationship and I knew the only way it would survive is if I worked all the damn time. I liked working. I liked being social. But I was bitter over losing our nice house and that my kid, who listened to her daddy fill her head with big dreams of an Ivy League education, was going to end up working jobs she hated. To realize he kept you from school, kept us all from comfort and security … I wanted to resurrect him just so I could kill him.”
I felt my own anger burning in my gut, along with incredible amounts of hurt. “I thought he loved me. Why would he lie?”
“He did love you. I think he was scared you’d go off to college and leave him alone with me. Irony was you ran off anyway.”
We sat in silence for a minute and then I looked around at the pretty kitchen. “So, you spent the money?”
“Building this was therapy. It helped me get over what he’d done.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“Thank you.” She sat back on her high-backed stool and said, “And you are welcome to stay here as long as you want. But you should know that I put money in an account for you, in case you came back.”
“Mom, you don’t have to give me money. I didn’t come here for that.”
“Of course you didn’t. But the money is yours.” She cocked her head to the side. “Did you ever make it to college?”
I shook my head.
She grinned. “Well, if you still want to, there’s enough money in that account to get you where you want to go and keep you there for four years.”
The utter disbelief I felt must’ve shown on my face because she laughed and leaned over to pat my hand. “I knew it would feel good telling you that, but I never could’ve imagined it would feel this good.”