Lakewood is a small town that looks like a carbon copy of every small town I’ve ever been driven through. It has everything—the mishmash of old buildings downtown, dotted with the few that people have bothered to raze and refurbish; the thin layer of slush covering everything in early March; and space. There are few bright spots—one of them is the coffee shop where Bellamy learned to make drinks. She points it out on the way through, but then the town fades into residential buildings.

There’s so much space between the buildings, and very little of it is in use. I don’t mind a wide-open lawn, but the snowdrifts make me want to hire a plow service for the entire town.

I feel out of place here.

I feel most out of place in Wendy Leighton’s front room. I feel outsized, like I’m too large for the furniture, which makes sense. All of it seems to have been chosen specifically for her. I don’t know how else you’d live under house arrest. Less meticulously than this, would be my guess. It’s all perfectly maintained.

Too perfectly.

Wendy is an older version of her daughter, her blonde hair streaked with gray, but she has blue eyes that must have been vivid at one point. When she looks at me, they’re hard and cold.

“I appreciate that you came, honey. I’m just not sure why. I’ve seen the newspapers.”

Bellamy sits ramrod straight on a loveseat across from her mother’s chair. “Mom, I know that must have been...painful, and I’m sorry I didn’t call.”

The awkwardness in the room is palpable. “It’s all right.” Wendy’s apology is flat, insincere.

“It’s not all right, and I take responsibility.” Bellamy folds her hands in her lap. “I wanted to tell you in person and I-I put it off. I shouldn’t have done that.”

“What’s done is done.” Wendy glances at an antique clock on the mantel. “There’s no point in rehashing this over and over. It’s difficult when one party in a relationship can’t leave the house.”

“Okay.” Bellamy glances down at her lap. “The wedding is planned for October, but we might move it up.”

“Oh?” Wendy shifts her gaze to me. “Are you all right with that, Mr. Blackpool?” There are layers to her question, dancing in the air, shifting around one another, but I don’t know which to answer. So, I choose the most obvious one.

“Of course.”

She purses her lips and swings those blue eyes back over to her daughter. It’s an assessing look. I wish I knew what was happening in her mind—and Bellamy’s. I don’t know this apologetic version of her, this version with a tilt to her shoulders, that reminds me of shame. “Would you mind giving us a moment, Mr. Blackpool?”

“I’m happy to step out.” I have the sense that we’re not going to be speaking again after this, so I approach her chair and extend my hand. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Leighton.”

She shakes my hand, her mouth in a set line. “I wish the two of you a very happy marriage.”

Fucking chilling.

I go out the front door of the house and pace down the block. Bellamy grew up on a street with wide yards and small houses. Her mother’s is a tidy two-story bungalow with painted siding that’s chipping at the corners. The slow deterioration scratches at the back of my mind.

It’s surprisingly warm outside, a hint of spring in the breeze. Or perhaps it’s only in comparison to the inside of the house.

I try to picture Bellamy on this street—a younger version, wild and carefree—but it’s a tough sell, even in my imagination. Something about the way her mother speaks to her...

Andrew must have an opinion on this. He must have reviewed Bellamy’s Secret Service file, which would have all the information about her mother, naturally. But he hasn’t said a thing. I mull it over while I walk to the end of the block and back. He must know, and he must not care. Once, Bellamy wanted to know what he was hiding, and I brushed it off. Andrew, with secrets? The one he didn’t tell me in the Oval has to be political, not personal.

It has to be.

The front door of Bellamy’s former home slams, and she comes down the steps of the porch with a practiced movement. I see it—I see her here, the way she must have been. But I also see that she doesn’t fit here either. Her movements are too smooth, too refined. She’s too focused to thrive in a place like this.

She raises her eyes to mine and, with a shock, I register the rest—pain.

Bellamy hustles toward the car and Harold, the driver, scrambles to come around the side and open the door for her. “It was a mistake to come here,” she says, as Hal shuts the door behind me. I want her close, I want her safe. She trembles in my arms as we pull away from the curb. “I shouldn’t have come.”

“It was obviously important to you.” There’s only so much you can say about another person’s mother. Bellamy stares out the window. “So maybe it wasn’t a mistake.”

“It was.” She takes my hand in hers. Bellamy’s hands are freezing, despite being in the warm house.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. I should have known.” She laughs, a bitter edge to the sound. “You know, I always thought my dad was the worst. He walked out on both of us. He made it hard to—” She shrugs. “He made it hard to trust people after that. But he destroyed my mother. Destroyed her.”

“She didn’t seem like that to me.” She was as cold as ice.

“She wasn’t like that before,” Bellamy says, a little wistful. “She was...warmer. She still had that pathological insistence on being truthful, but she didn’t work so hard to say that nothing mattered.”

“That’s not what she meant, I’m sure of it.” I want to tease her—so that’s where she gets her obsession with accuracy from—but Bellamy’s heart is raw and beating in front of me. I’d be a complete prick to throw a punch.

“She did. She even said, 'the wedding doesn’t matter all that much to me.’” Her eyes fill with tears. “Jesus. I don’t know why I’m upset. She can’t care about the wedding. She can’t even come, so it’s best if she’s not hurt.”

I have no solution, so I hold her closer. “What else did she say?” I want it all on the table now.

“She said...” Bellamy looks at the ceiling of the car. “'Why would you risk it all on a man? Don’t you see what that gets you?’” Then she turns her face to the window.

She doesn’t say, Maybe she was right.