Chapter Twenty-Six

Emile went to early skate Saturday morning only because he had no choice. It was game day, and this was his job. Four days Amy had been gone, and Emile still had not told anyone connected with the team. But what would he have told them? “My personal assistant left?” That hardly sounded like a disaster, but it was—a huge one.

He wearily sat down in his stall, though he didn’t reach for his stick. There was plenty of time to prepare it. Despite not wanting to be here, he’d arrived even earlier than usual. Why not? He hadn’t been able to sleep.

Too bad he wasn’t an accountant or a shoe salesman. He’d call in sick. If he called in sick to Coach, they’d just send Bombay, the team doctor, to get him going again.

“Eat this.”

Emile jumped. Packi. How did he appear out of thin air without making noise? “Do you sneak up on everybody, or is it just me?”

“I couldn’t sneak up on you if you didn’t allow it. You should be more aware of your surroundings.”

He’d been plenty aware in the last four days, and he had been surrounded by a lot of nothing.

“Here’s your food.” Packi held out two protein bars, a can of pears, and a carton of yogurt. “Water’s in your stall.”

Emile took the food. “How did you know I needed breakfast?” Packi hadn’t brought him food since that day when Emile had refused it because Amy had made his breakfast.

Packi sat in Swifty’s stall, placed an ankle on one knee, and locked his hands around the other one. “Power of deduction. You’ve come in here the last two days, refusing to look me in the eye or string more than two words together. Today, you’re here even earlier than usual, looking like a minor league player who just got pushed off the last chance bus. Last weekend, I saw you talking to Snow. I figured that’s something Amy didn’t want you to do, but since you did it anyway, she wouldn’t be so open to spoiling you rotten with omelettes and organic fruit all cut up and ready to go.” How did he know Amy had cut up his fruit? And if he had to take this up, why did he have to wait until game day? “If she’s even still here.” Packi’s questioning eyes bored into him.

Might as well go ahead and admit it now. He would in the end anyway. He tore open one of the bars and took a bite. “She’s gone.”

Packi nodded. “Uh huh. Gone where?”

Emile shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve looked everywhere. That’s all I’ve done for four days when I wasn’t here.”

“Apparently not everywhere. If you’d looked everywhere, you would have found her.”

What an ass. Emile decided not to point that out. “Amy had become friendly with my sister, but Gabriella has not seen her.” She’d had plenty to say, too. There had been a lot of talk about “letting her get away from us.” What was this us? He was the one who’d lost her. “I called all the hospitals and went to every homeless shelter in Nashville.”

Packi registered a rare, true expression of surprise. “Why would you think she would go to a homeless shelter?”

Emile downed the rest of the bar and shrugged. “Something she said once . . . or maybe it was me. No matter. She wasn’t there. I went to the shop that sells the little books and pens that she likes. I talked to Merry Sweet, who works there and also works at Bridgestone. You know her?”

Packi shook his head, indicating neither a yes nor a no, but get on with it.

“Anyway, she had not been there. They hadn’t seen her at the dry cleaners either, or that fancy market where she gets eggs that come from happy chickens and meat from animals that have never been medicated. The last people from Star View to see her were the couriers who delivered the boxes of her belongings.”

“Boxes of belongings?”

“Her things that Snow took. I asked him to send them back to her.”

“It was that simple, was it? You asked him to send them back, and he happily complied? When are the two of you going fishing or out for a beer?”

He ignored that last part.

“Oui. It was simple. There was more to it than that, but I enjoyed outsmarting Snow, so it was simple.”

“You enjoyed it. Uh huh. Are you enjoying the aftermath?”

“I had expected to.”

Packi laughed and shook his head. “I’m sure you did. Son, I’ve been there.”

“Been where? I do not understand. You mean you have come home to find Mrs. Packi lost?”

“Not that exactly, but we’ve all been where you are—in love and totally screwed.”

In love? Was that what he was? He thought they were only “considering.”

“Not the same. Mrs. Packi is not gone.”

“She might have been, maybe on more than one occasion when I was young and stupid if I hadn’t stepped up and fixed things. But I had a better excuse than you. I was only nineteen when I got married.”

“So, it is not hopeless?”

“Truthfully, I don’t know. But it is for sure if you don’t try.”

“What would you do?”

“I’d go to her with a made-up mind about exactly what I wanted, and I’d make a grand gesture.”

“I thought I had already made a grand gesture when I got her things back from Snow.”

“No. That was a grand display of idiocy.”

All that sounded good. He was pretty sure he knew what he wanted. No, not pretty sure, definitely sure. And nobody did grand better than he did. Just look at his car. But there was only one problem.

“I still don’t know where she is.”

Packi rose. “Have you looked in south Georgia?”

“She wouldn’t go there.”

“You sure about that?”

Of course he was sure! Hadn’t she said so often enough? But he’d been sure that she would shower him with praise and love for recovering her belongings, too.

“I suppose it’s possible.”

“My wife says that according to Mr. Robert Frost, home is where when you go there, they have to take you in. Or something like that.”

“Hmph. I’d like to talk to this Mr. Frost. He knows nothing of home. Home is where they want to take you in.” Just as Johanna and Paul had wanted him and Gabriella, just as they would want them even today if it were needed.

Which meant Amy’s home was with him.

“You might be right about that. But you’d better get to work. The Senators are coming for you. You’re getting low on stick tape. I’ll get you some.”

When Emile looked up from his canned pears, Packi was gone. How did he do that?

• • •

For the first time in the four days since she’d been back, Amy was alone in the big, rambling farmhouse. It had been a busy Saturday. Fresh peaches were a distant memory, but there was still plenty to be done with all the fruit Mimi, Mama, and the summer help had canned and frozen. Today, Amy had made twenty-eight pies with homemade crust and twenty loaves of peach bread.

Amy’s family had gone to the chili supper and Fall Festival at the church, but she’d begged off. She’d showered and was now making a grilled cheese sandwich that she intended to eat while she binge-watched Outlander. Maybe she’d have two sandwiches. That would still be less than she would have eaten if she’d gone to that chili supper the way her mother had wanted her to, but there was no way that was happening. Not tonight.

Word was already beginning to get out that she was back, but she wasn’t anywhere close to ready for a social debut. The day was coming soon enough that she’d have to work the front counter, dipping ice cream and ringing up pies, cider, and preserves. But so far, her family had taken pity on her and let her confine her labor behind the closed doors of The Peach Stand’s commercial kitchen. Her emotions were all over the place, though, oddly, her emotional state had little to do with Cameron. A worse thing made a bad thing seem small, and Emile’s betrayal was a much worse thing. But the hard work helped, ensuring that that she fell asleep easily at night and left little time for thinking.

She’d canned gallons of peach salsa and jam, fried at least two hundred peach hand pies, and made dozens of oven-ready cobblers that would be packed in dry ice and shipped overnight.

A little involuntary smile crossed her face. Would Emile have ordered oven-ready cobblers if he’d known about them? Probably not. He was pretty good about staying away from sweets during the season. Besides, waiting for something to bake in the oven wouldn’t suit him. He was more about instant gratification.

Except in bed. He’d always been willing to take his time there.

Damn. These were exactly the kinds of thoughts she had been combating with rolling pie dough and sterilizing canning jars. Maybe she needed to go down the hill and make some muffins. They always sold well on Sundays. But she couldn’t bake her thoughts away forever. She took her sandwiches to the den and turned on the 70-inch flat-screen television where they always watched football. If she was going to spend the evening with Jamie Fraser, might as well go big.

She settled in and clicked on ESPN—the station that had been on when it was last turned off. Naturally, here the last week in October, a college football game came on the screen. Ordinarily, she would have probably watched it no matter who was playing, but she was in no mood to think about sports of any kind or athletes of any age.

She reached for the remote to bring up the TV streaming app, when the crawling banner at the bottom of the screen slapped her in the face: NHL: CAPITALS VS. BRUINS 8 PM ET. SENATORS VS. SOUND 7:20 PM ET. BLUES VS. BLACKHAWKS . . . Amy didn’t catch the time on that last one, but who cared? Who cared about any of it?

7:20 p.m., huh? She was in Eastern Time. It was 7:08 p.m.

She shouldn’t watch, shouldn’t even consider it. If she saw him, she might go running back to Nashville and throw herself into his arms and say, “Make all my decisions, take over my life, you don’t have to listen to me at all. Just let me be with you. Boss me around all you want.”

On the other hand, she couldn’t go running back to Nashville—literally. That is unless she ran—literally. She had no car and no money except her $84.38. So what would it hurt to just look at him? And how pitiful was that? The wanting to look at him on TV? But that’s how she seemed to deal with her anger—by being pitiful and deflated. Sometimes she had cut through all that to even remember she was still mad—mad at his arrogant, domineering ways. And now she was mad at herself for wanting to watch him on TV and mad at him for being on TV and tempting her.

And how rational was that? Not at all, but the more the anger coursed through her, the less she cared about rationality and the less deflated she felt. How dare he make her want him, make her think they could have a future, that they were having some whirlwind fairy tale that was going to end in soul-mate-happily-ever-after. She wasn’t deflated anymore! No. She was mad like a warrior, fire engine red mad. Making her think they had a chance was just part of his bossy, interfering, French-speaking self. Oh, oui, it was.

But she knew all that, so what would it hurt to turn on the little dictator’s hockey game? Fire engine red mad felt good! The last time she was this mad was . . . was the night she’d been so mad at Cameron that she’d had sex with Emile so Cameron wouldn’t be the last man who had touched her.

The big, red fire engine shrunk to a toy—a toy not even made of metal. It was plastic.

Some warrior she’d turned out to be.

She was deflated again because she knew that, no matter what, there wasn’t a man alive she would have sex with now. She didn’t want to wipe Emile’s touch away.

And therein was the difference, and it was that difference that crushed her heart.

Pitiful—there was no other word for it. She couldn’t be with Emile. Everything that mad Amy thought about that was true.

But she could look at him on TV if she wanted. No one would even know. Her family was eating chili, bobbing for apples, and playing cake walk.

So, to hell with Jamie Fraser.

She pressed the guide button on the remote. They probably didn’t have the NHL Network or Center Ice, but her father had at least as many TV channels as he had peach trees. Emile was bound to be on one of them.

She scrolled quickly. Now that she had decided, might as well get on with it. Ah. There it was. If she had been fast enough, she’d be able to see him without his helmet during the national anthem.

And she was in time. The team was coming through the big silver musical note, as lights flashed and music played. Glaz, Thor, Swifty—of course, the announcers called them by their real names, but this is how Amy thought of them, because that’s what Emile called them.

“And in goal,” the announcer said, “number thirty—Emile Giroux!” And no one after that mattered. He skated out with his stick over his head. And then—dammit—the camera panned to someone else. But she knew he was skating round the goal, roughing up the ice, tapping the posts, kissing the crossbar.

Lucky crossbar. She’d thought that before, but it had been funny then. It wasn’t funny now.

At last, national anthem time. Maybe it wouldn’t be someone famous. If it wasn’t someone famous, they might show the players more. But no. Luke Bryan. She’d be lucky if she got a tiny glimpse. And that was all she got. His hair was a mess, and he rocked back and forth on his skates. And that was all. Back to Luke Bryan. Then a pan to the starting skaters. And it was over.

“And that was Luke Bryan, ladies and gentlemen.” The camera showed him exiting the ice. Emile from the rear would have been a better shot. “He’s not the only star in the house here at Bridgestone Arena tonight as the Nashville Sound get ready to take on the Ottawa Senators.” The camera panned the audience. “We have Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman. Jackson Beauford, here with his brother, Tennessee Titan Gabe Beauford.”

“And speaking of the Titans,” the other announcer said, “here in town with the San Francisco 49ers, who take on the Titans tomorrow, is Reynolds Fallon.”

What? Amy sat forward as the camera panned.

“Looks like he’s here with his family in bench side seats.”

Amy’s jaw dropped until her mouth was as wide as the tunnel from the locker room. There big as day were Cameron and three other people—presumably the wife and billionaire parents.

Well, hell. That couldn’t be good.