The day was shaping up to be a perfect specimen of summer. With Colin babbling in his high chair in the kitchen, Emma chattering to Roxie in the living room and bright sunlight streaming through the window, it seemed impossible that I’d ever been uneasy.
Then the sharp knock at the side door made me jump. I relaxed when I saw that the shadow outside the door was in the shape of my mother. Usually I tried to consume at least twelve ounces of caffeine before dealing with my mother’s inevitable censure but coffee would have to wait.
“I wasn’t expecting you, Mom,” I said with as much cheer as I could muster.
She stared at me through her dark oversized sunglasses. They added a bug-like quality to her face. “I told you last night that I needed to talk to you, Kat.”
I sighed. “All right.”
She was about to step into the house when she suddenly frowned. “What’s that?”
“It’s the kitchen door. And I’m holding it open. So please come in before the flies do.”
“No.” She touched the door right beneath the rectangular glass pane to show me something I hadn’t seen before.
When I did see it my blood froze.
“I meant that.”
It was a small miracle my fingers didn’t shake when I plucked an item off the door that had been affixed with a blue square of masking tape. It was nothing, just a piece of paper. And yet it rattled me to depths of my soul. The photo had been printed out on regular computer paper and I was confronted by my smiling eighteen-year-old self, flanked between two impossibly good looking guys. I remembered exactly when it was taken, at a party right after a winning homecoming game. My life had felt like a fairy tale at the time; small town ugly duckling goes to big city university and attracts the interest of one of the football gods. He was a king in that world, he and his brother, both players on a champion college football team. He could have had any girl he wanted and I was in awe. In the beginning anyway.
Due to my early academic successes I was only sixteen when I started college. After two years of constant study I finally lifted my head out of my books and wondered what I was missing. At the start of a brand new semester I allowed myself to be dragged to my first college party where I kept to the sidelines and sipped warm beer until something unexpected happened.
“Come out of the corner, little mouse. You’re with me now.”
He was hot and fun and exciting. I’d never even had a real boyfriend and there I was, eighteen and claimed by the twenty-one year old golden gold of college sports. He and his brother were only a year apart, equally gorgeous and talented. They were royalty. Everywhere we went other girls examined me with thinly disguised jealousy, wondering what the hell I had that they didn’t. And I enjoyed it. Worse, I thought I loved him. I thought so even when he suggested that I change the way I dress, the way I speak. I thought so even when he insisted that I spend less time on my studies and laughed when I grew distraught over my falling grades. I thought so right up until I learned he wasn’t faithful. In the year we were together he had never been faithful and when I assumed otherwise I’d just been kidding myself. What I did next might have been partly revenge. It didn’t occur to me at the time. I thought I was trying to help a friend. But later I wondered if a much uglier motivation was there beneath the surface.
“Kathleen?” My mother was standing in the kitchen now and she was wearing a rare expression of worry on her face. “Isn’t that a picture of-“
“Grandma!” Emma had been lured away from her cartoons by the sound of her grandmother’s voice and ran into the kitchen, colliding with my mother’s legs.
“Hello my sweet girl.” My mother smoothed her hair and held out a small paper bag. “Look what your grandma brought you for breakfast.”
“A chocolate cupcake!” Emma squealed as she peered into the bag.
Normally I would have been irritated but my head was still spinning. I balled up the piece of paper in my fist.
“Ems,” I said, surprised that my voice sounded so calm, “here’s a plate. You can take that in the living room and watch cartoons with Roxie.”
Emma didn’t question what strange turn of events prompted me to encourage her to eat in front of the television. She scuttled out of the room.
My mother was staring down at Colin as he kicked his legs in his high chair and played with a teething toy. “He looks more like his mother every day,” she said sadly.
“I know,” I said, sinking into the nearest chair. The picture was still crumpled up in my hand but the image was seared into my mind. It depicted a moment when everything had seemed perfect, before I learned of betrayal and inflicted it myself, before one of the two brothers at my side would fall into a downward spiral that couldn’t be stopped, before I made a careless mistake that would alter my life irrevocably and yet gave me the best thing that would ever happen to me.
Emma laughed in the next room.
And I was aware that my mother was talking, saying something that she wanted me to pay attention to, but I was having trouble concentrating on her words.
“Kathleen Margaret,” she said with some sharpness. “Do you even care about what I’m telling you?”
“Mom.” I stood up. “I’m not feeling very well. I’ll call you later, okay?”
“Are you kicking me out?” she huffed.
“No. But I’m distracted so I’m afraid I’m not a very satisfactory conversational companion right now.”
She exhaled unhappily. “When are you going to start talking like everyone else?”
It was an old complaint, one she’d been using since I was six and informed her that she needed to ‘stop projecting your own insecurities on others’. So I repeated the same answer I’d been giving her for years.
“I didn’t know it was a crime to be smart.”
“Kat, sit back down. I’m talking to you about something serious.”
The ball of paper weighed heavily in my hand. As I sat I discreetly dropped it on the floor underneath the table so my mother wouldn’t be reminded of its existence. I definitely couldn’t handle an interrogation right now. As far as my mother knew, Emma’s father was a cheating, emotionally abusive creep and Emma was better off without him in her life. That gave me a reason for opting not to seek child support. It also gave me an excuse to hide from the truth. My own father had taken off when I was two and other than occasionally sending a random check, I hadn’t heard from him much while I was growing up.
“Can I make another cup of coffee if we’re going to get into serious topics?” I asked.
“Kat, I don’t care. Drink all the coffee in town if it’ll make you pay attention for five minutes.”
I sighed and moved to the counter beside the sink to refill my Hawk Valley Happiness mug.
My mother pounced as soon as I sat down. “So don’t you want to know the details?”
Emma trotted in with a face full of chocolate cupcake icing, snatched her favorite plastic cup and accepted a kiss on the cheek from her grandmother before she returned to the living room.
I waited until she was out of earshot to inquire, “What details?”
“About his record.”
I rubbed my eyes. “Whose?”
“Nash.”
Colin was abruptly sick of sitting in his high chair. Or else he didn’t like hearing gossip about his big brother. He let out a wail.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, not really caring to know. Colin rewarded me with a big drooling grin as I pulled the tray away, unsnapped the safety belt and lifted him.
“An assault charge in college and another one last year. The first time the charge was dropped but the second time he got whatever it’s called where you get a warning and don’t have to go to prison.”
I frowned. “Probation?”
She shrugged. “I guess.”
Nash had gotten into a lot of scrapes in high school. I remembered that clearly. There were always rumors that he was on the brink of expulsion yet somehow he managed to skate through with no lasting consequences. I’d just assumed he’d gotten past his tendency to lash out. I’d certainly never witnessed that kind of aggression from him.
“I hit someone.”
No, whatever happened in that scuffle didn’t really count. Travis Hanson was in perpetual need of a good thrashing and I was sure he’d deserved whatever Nash’s reaction had been.
But there was also the deal with his knuckles, the way they looked bruised and cut the night he came to town and he fed me some nonsense about scraping them during a tire change.
Still, Nash had never mentioned any legal trouble back in Oregon. On the other hand, there were plenty of things I hadn’t mentioned to him to so it was entirely possible. He wouldn’t have had any reason to mention minor problems with the law. I’d never asked.
“How did you come by this information?” I wanted to know.
She was smug. “Retta from church has a son who is a private detective down in Phoenix. His name is Freddie and he can find out anything about anyone.”
The idea was alarming. My brand new goal in life was to never become one of Freddie’s projects.
“Why were you looking into Nash anyway?” I asked, bouncing Colin in my lap as he chewed on a teething ring.
She threw me a knowing look. “I’m your mother, Kathleen. Do you really think I can’t tell what’s going on here?”
“How about you enlighten me then?”
Her mouth pursed. “You’re involved with him. You’ve been suckered into taking care of everything. His business, his house and even that baby.”
I didn’t want to yell. Emma would hear. I kept my voice low but insistent.
“Colin is Heather’s child. He’s our flesh and blood, your grandnephew. He’s not just ‘that baby’ so don’t refer to him that way.”
She relented, looked away. “No, of course not. You know I care about what happens to Colin. That’s why I was so concerned about handing him over to a man like Nash Ryan.”
“That was a decision for Heather and Chris to make,” I said flatly. “They made it.”
“But-“
“You know,” I said, “you might have come around more often to help instead of digging up dirt behind the scenes. If you had then you would have seen that Nash takes very good care of Colin. What’s even more essential is that he loves Colin with all of his heart.”
One eyebrow arched. “I noticed you’re not denying having relations with him.”
My voice was cold. “What do you want to hear, Mom? You want to hear me admit that we have earth-shattering sex? Fine, I admit it.”
She reddened with embarrassment. “Don’t be vulgar, Kathleen.”
“Then don’t pry into subjects you don’t want to talk about.”
She tilted her head and looked a little hurt. “I’m only prying because I care. I care about you and about Emma and Colin too.”
Emma returned with Roxie at her side. The dog appealed to my mother with a wagging tail but my mother ignored her so she turned to me for a pat on the head.
“Are you fighting?” Emma asked.
“No, honey,” I said. “Why do you think that?”
“You look mad.”
“I’m not mad.”
“Nobody’s mad,” my mother insisted and held out her hand. “Now come give Grandma one last kiss before I leave.”
Emma still had some chocolate on her face and she managed to smudge some onto my mother’s cheek.
My mother blew a kiss to Colin before she left. For me she had only a few stern words of warning.
“Remember what I told you, Kat.”
I turned my head and pretended to be looking at something fascinating out the window until she was gone.
“Me and Roxie are bored,” Emma announced.
I picked up a napkin and cleaned the chocolate off her face. She resisted, wrinkling her nose and shaking her head.
“Can we go in the backyard?” she asked.
I shook my head. “No honey, let’s just play inside today.”
“Why?”
“It’s hot out.”
That wasn’t a lie. But it wasn’t the complete truth either. Someone had been watching me, possibly following me, even finding me here at Nash’s house. I knew who it was, the same person who’d called and emailed at least a dozen times this smmer. I’d deleted every message and email, sometimes before listening or reading. He had no place in my life, no place in Emma’s life. But things had escalated and I needed someone to confide in. Steve Brown maybe. Someone who could objectively tell me what my legal options were in case it was time for me to be confronted by my own lies.
“What are we supposed to do in the house all day?” Emma pouted.
I stood and heaved Colin onto my hip. “When I was a little girl I used to build forts. We could do that.”
“What’s a fort?”
“It’s like a little clubhouse and we can build one right in the living room with some chairs and blankets.”
Emma was intrigued. “Can you show me?”
I smiled. “Sure.”
Twenty minutes later we were all relaxing in the makeshift living room fort. Emma and I were lying on our backs and staring up at the yellow blanket that served as a roof while Colin enjoyed some tummy time between us. Roxie sat guarding the entrance, our ever faithful sentinel.
“I like it in here,” Emma whispered.
“I do too,” I whispered back.
My phone rang. I’d been keeping it close, just in case I needed to dial 911 in a hurry, though I was pretty sure Roxie would go ballistic if anyone actually tried to get into the house.
I felt a flood of relief when I saw the caller was Nash.
“How’s the drive?” I asked him.
“Long. Dull. How’s my boy?”
I glanced at Colin. “He’s fine. He’s trying to lift himself up.”
“Tell him I miss him.”
“I will.”
There was a long pause.
“I miss you too, Kat.”
My eyes closed and a fleeting second of happiness surged through me. It was exactly what I’ve been wishing to hear from him. Some hint that there was more to us than a practical arrangement. My heart wanted me to respond, to tell him how much I missed him too. I wanted so badly to feel his arms around me, to hear the comforting thud of his heartbeat as I rested my cheek against his chest after we finished enjoying each other’s bodies.
My eyes opened. I couldn’t say it. Not now. Saying it would expose me to a potential level of hurt that I wouldn’t be able to bear. Because Nash knew nothing of the most important story I had to tell and how I’d been hiding from it for so long, lying for so long, I wasn’t sure how to do anything differently. He wouldn’t understand. Nash had little patience or forgiveness in his heart for duplicity of any kind. Nash assumed I was upstanding and honorable because I’d never given him any reason to believe otherwise.
No, of course he wouldn’t understand. I was on my own.
“I guess I’ll see you later tonight,” I said.
I thought I heard a sigh of irritation on the other end. “I guess so.”
“Drive safe.”
“Bye, Kat.”
Emma sat up in the little structure we’d created and stared at me. “Mommy, are you crying?”
I swiped at my eyes. “No, Ems. There’s no reason for Mommy to cry.”