CHAPTER 5
JAMES
Present Day
June 22
Los Gatos, California
James should have known returning to his childhood home would reward him with a restless night. He floats in and out of sleep. The cold, deathly quiet interior of a house that’s too large for the three of them keeps him awake. So does his overactive mind.
He tosses in the bed, the sheets tangling around his legs. He worries about his sons adjusting to their new country. He’s concerned they’ll never see him as the father they once had. He’s paranoid he’ll hear Phil walking down the hallway. And the person he wants to talk to the most, the one he used to talk to every day, is the one person he can’t call.
James groans, rolling to his feet. He pads barefoot through the house, triple-checking the locks, then flips the thermostat switch. The fan rumbles to life. Vents creak, stirring the air, erasing the oppressive stillness in the house. Maybe the white noise will help him rest. Remarkably, he misses the ocean outside his bedroom windows.
He misses Aimee.
A memory moves gracefully through his mind the way Aimee did while in his arms as they danced. And suddenly, she’s back there, in his arms, as he spins them around the crowded floor at Nick and Kristen’s wedding. Her smile is dazzling and meant just for him. “I love you,” she tells him.
He leans in to kiss her and the clock in the dining room chimes off the hour. James tenses, then sighs, a frustrated sound of longing. He punches the wall. Not hard enough to do any damage, but with enough strength to bring on the sharp sting of reminder that he is alone in this new life. He doesn’t have anyone he can rely upon, or lean on, not in the way it had been with Aimee for most of his life.
God, I miss her.
He rubs his sternum with the base of his palm to relieve the ache and returns to the guest bedroom where he’s been sleeping, or trying to sleep. He powers on his laptop and launches the browser. He should go to LoopNet and search for commercial properties. But what’s the point? He has no desire to paint, and without painting, he doesn’t have any art to show and sell, which means he must find a job. His interest in Donato Enterprises that Thomas sold on his behalf is enough for them to live off for now, but the money won’t last forever.
James brings up the career-search website Ladders and stares at the home page. He graduated from Stanford with a double major in finance and art history, and because of his father’s expectations of him in the family’s import-and-export business, he completed Stanford’s Spanish-language program. Thanks to his experience at Donato, he’s more than qualified to apply for upper managerial positions. He can also return to school and get credentialed to teach high school or college-level art courses.
Both ideas sound utterly unappealing.
James opens a new browser window and finds himself staring at the satellite view of Los Gatos. He has two sons to support, needs to find a job, wants a new house, and definitely needs to exchange his car. He really should get back into painting. But he doesn’t have any motivation to do anything other than look at the house he once owned with Aimee. This isn’t the first time he’s checked out the house, a three-bedroom, two-bath bungalow in the heart of downtown. He doubts it’ll be the last.
He zooms into the photo until the roofline fills his screen. He doesn’t recognize the car in the driveway. The sycamores in the backyard are overgrown and the grass left to brown. His index finger erratically taps the edge of the laptop. He doesn’t like how the yard has deteriorated and he wonders if the same has happened inside their house.
He and Aimee were supposed to raise their children in that house. They had grand plans to expand—add on a second story and push out the back. And they were supposed to fall more deeply in love as they grew old there together. Instead, she married another man and now has a daughter.
What did she name her little girl?
He swears at himself and slams shut the laptop.
Thank God she doesn’t live there anymore. He’s not sure how he’d react with her there with another man. But damn, he feels like a stalker every time he Googles her, or the house. Or her café. He can’t help it. The same craving that drove him to paint now drives him to learn everything he can about Aimee.
He doesn’t deserve her and deep down he knows he must stop obsessing over her, but he can’t help that either. He wants her back, needs her back, as much as his body needs air to breathe.
After an early-morning walk with the boys through the reserve behind the house, James finds himself on the sidewalk outside Aimee’s Café. He didn’t intend to stop here, but the nearest parking spot was three doors down and the boys are hungry. Starving, rather, as Marc pointed out during their excursion. It’s well past breakfast time.
A sign squeaks overhead and James looks up. He recognizes the logo instantly. A coffee mug under a tornado-swirl of steam. He’d scribbled the logo, a crude drawing nowhere near what he could have designed. he had wanted to spark Aimee’s interest to open a restaurant like he planned to open an art gallery. They’d both been working for their parents at the time. He never intended for her to use that rough sketch, but it touches him profoundly. It’s as though she wove pieces of him into her dream.
Dressed in a wrinkled DC Comics Suicide Squad shirt, chino shorts, and Adidas slides, Julian cups a hand alongside his face and peers through the glass. “This looks good. Let’s eat here,” he says in Spanish, blatant defiance to James’s request they speak English. School starts in two months, so they’d better get used to speaking the language regularly.
“No,” James snaps. It’s late morning and he’s starving, too. But under no circumstance will he set foot inside the café.
Julian scowls and clamps his ever-present headphones over his ears.
“I’m hungry,” Marc whines in heavily accented English.
“Me too, bud.” James reaches for Marc’s hand and almost stumbles in amazement when his son’s smaller hand clutches his.
“I can’t see the menu from here.” Julian slips inside the café.
“Julian!”
Marc tugs his hand free and follows his brother.
James swears, glancing down the street toward the diner where he planned to take the boys. Now what? Does he wait here on the sidewalk like an idiot and hope the kids come back out when they realize he didn’t follow? Or does he suck it up and go inside?
Through the glass he sees Julian placing an order.
“Shit.” He sucks it up.
James yanks open the door. The bells overhead swing in a wide arc, hitting the wood-framed glass. Heads turn in his direction, exactly the attention he doesn’t want. He gives the diners a clipped nod and freezes. A montage of photographs, stencils, and paintings cover the far walls. His paintings.
She kept them, after all these years. He stares at them until his eyes dry out—scenes of rustic barns in the foothills and meadows covered with morning dew overlooking the ocean, forests with sunlight breaking through a canopy of trees or moonlight reflecting off the waterfalls of Yosemite. He pushes a long, steady stream of air through his lips and his hand slides into his front pocket, fisting the ever-present engagement ring like a lifeline.
“James?”
The tendons around his ears tighten at the sound of his name. He slowly turns around and faces a woman with a distended belly. She gazes up at him as though he returned from the dead, and in a twisted sort of way, he has. Her lips part on a gasp at the same time she falls back a step, eyes growing large. He’d recognize those cornflower blues anywhere.
“Kristen,” he rasps. She looks the same, yet different. Seven years has matured and enhanced his best friend’s beautiful wife.
“It’s you. It’s really you.” She launches herself into his chest and folds him in her arms, holding him as tightly as her pregnant stomach allows.
It’s the first hug he’s received in longer than he cares to remember. James’s face tightens as he fights a sudden well of emotion, and ends up holding himself back. He doesn’t return the hug, but awkwardly pats Kristen between the shoulder blades.
She leans back to look up at him. “Nick told me you were coming home and I didn’t believe it. Then I could hardly wait until you got here. And now you’re here.” Tears spill over her cheeks. A silly grin stretches her lips wide; then she excitedly jumps up and down. “Oh my God, you’re here!” she squeals.
James cringes. His gaze jumps to the swinging door that leads to the kitchen, then to the hallway in back before returning to Kristen. She’s still jumping and squealing. A smile fights its way onto James’s face. No, Kristen hasn’t changed much at all, except for her stomach. He stares stupidly at her belly. “You’re pregnant.”
She snorts. “Again. I know.”
Nick visited him once in Puerto Escondido. When he couldn’t reach Aimee, James had called Thomas. Nick’s number was the third one he dialed. He had to hear from Nick that everything Thomas told him was the truth. Unlike the lies Thomas had been telling him for years, the one he’d hoped was a lie, that he’d been abandoned in Mexico, was the absolute, horrifying truth. Nick confirmed this with one sobering statement. “Yes, it’s true, all of it.”
Within a few days, Nick was with him in Mexico, filling him in on the six and a half years missing from his life. James learned about Aimee, how she never gave up on him, eventually finding him, only to let him go so he could live his life as Carlos. Nick then sat him down, because he’d been pacing the length of his living room like a crazed man confined in a prison cell, and gave him the cold, hard facts about Aimee. She’s in love with another man. She’s married and has a daughter. Of all the news he heard, that was the most heartbreaking. It nearly destroyed him.
James had thrown his glass of scotch against the wall, where it shattered into slivered fragments, just like his heart.
Now, Nick’s own wife is pregnant with their third child.
Kristen rubs a circle around her stomach. She grimaces. “Four more months to go.”
“You look good,” he tells her honestly.
“So do you,” she says, her exuberance from a moment ago gone. “It’s good to see you. I never thought—”
Pots bang in the kitchen. Voices reach them, drawing his attention. His heartbeat accelerates. “Is she . . . ?” He looks anxiously at Kristen. “Is she here?”
Kristen shakes her head. “She didn’t come in this morning.”
He makes a noise in the back of his throat. She’s not here, which is for the best. When he does finally see her, he doesn’t want an audience.
James feels a tug on his shirt hem. He looks down at Marc. “May I have a doughnut, please?”
“We’re not eating here, Marc.”
“Anything else for you, sir?” the cashier calls over to James. His older son, standing at the head of the ORDER line, tosses James a challenging look.
“Julian,” James barks. So much for not eating here. He glares back at his son.
“What? I’m hungry.” Julian holds out his hands, silently asking what’s the big deal. His expression morphs into feigned innocence as he walks past him and Kristen. Kristen’s brows reach her ponytailed hairline as they both watch Julian meander his way through the maze of disordered tables. He flops into an empty chair.
Kristen smirks. “I see I’m not the only one who has my hands full.”
James grunts, but the corner of his mouth tugs upward at their shared connection. Parenting.
“Why don’t you join us? We just sat down.” She points out a table near Julian where a toddler in a high chair exuberantly eats her oatmeal. Another girl with jelly-tinged lips stands in her chair humming.
“Sit down, Nicole,” Kristen orders.
The girl sinks onto her chair.
“I’m so happy this one is a boy.” She pats her stomach.
“Boys aren’t much easier,” James admits, thinking of the circles Julian and Marc run around him.
Kristen sighs. “Just different, I guess, right?” She tilts her head toward the counter. “Go order and come eat with us.”
Marc scans the dining area. James nudges him in Julian’s direction. “Sit with your brother. I’ll get your doughnut.”
At the counter, James scans the menu and orders a coffee and omelet. Trish, according to the chalkboard-style name tag, repeats back his order. Anger crawls up his throat as Trish rattles off the items. “That’ll be ninety-five fifty,” she concludes.
Julian had ordered enough for all three of them, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. James yanks the wallet from his back pocket and shoves the chip card into the slot. Pick your battles, man. Pick your battles.
“Outside of the omelet, doughnut, and pancakes, pack the rest to go.”
“Sure thing, sir.” Trish smiles and hands him the receipt.
James doesn’t bother calling the boys over to Kristen’s table when he sits down. Let them eat alone. They could use this brief respite after the past couple of days.
Kristen passes her older daughter a napkin. “Say hello to Mr. Donato, Nicole. He’s Daddy’s friend.”
“Hey-whoa.” Mouth full of food, Nicole waves jelly-stained hands.
James returns a wave to the little girl who’s a mirror image of the mother he’s known since their youth. After a round of introductions where he learns Nick’s youngest daughter is named Chloe, and a brief conversation about their kids, their ages, and favorite activities, Trish brings their drinks. Regular coffee for James and two giant mugs of hot chocolate under a mountain-size glob of whipped cream for the boys. She also sets down a large Mexican coffee and espresso shot on Julian’s paper place mat.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” James grumbles.
Kristen leans over, shaking with silent laughter.
He looks at her. “I didn’t ask for this,” he admits without considering the deeper meaning of his words.
Kristen rests her chin in her hand. “I know you didn’t. But sometimes, the best gifts in life are those we didn’t know we needed.”
James glances over at his sons. Both have whipped-cream mustaches. A quick chuckle vibrates his chest and he feels a slight lift in spirit.
“So, what are your plans?” Kristen asks, pulling his attention back to their table.
He drinks from his mug. “My plans?”
“You know, what you’re doing for work, schooling for the kids, where you’re living.” She circles her hand, inviting him to share.
“You want my life story.”
“I do, but the moment we’re done with breakfast, I’m calling Nadia. She’s in SoCal this week on business, but she’ll want to know everything.”
Nadia, the glue that binds the Aimee-Nadia-Kristen trio. James watches the steam rise from his mug as he considers Kristen’s questions. “Do you plan to call Aimee, too?”
She is quiet for a beat. “I’m not sure. She’s having a difficult time, James. She loves Ian and they’re very happy together. But knowing you’re you now, it’s brought the past back.” She crumples Nicole’s dirty napkin and studies the wadded paper as though it holds all the answers. “You’ll both have to figure out how to move forward in your own separate ways.”
Soon, breakfast arrives, and after he finishes eating, they make plans to meet again. Kristen invites them to barbecue and swim at their house that weekend. On the way home, James drives around town. He shows the boys the school they’ll attend and points out a local skate park crowded with kids Julian’s age. His son sits up straighter to get a better look out the passenger-side window and James makes a mental note to purchase a skateboard. Julian surfs so he might like boarding.
It’s past noon by the time they get home. Scents of toast and bacon assault their senses as James shuts the front door. The boys raise their noses and sniff. Julian scrunches his face at the hard-boiled-egg-and-vinegar odor.
James and Julian look at each other for a heart-pounding few seconds. Someone is here.
James sets the bag of take-out food on the floor. “Stay here,” he orders the boys and cautiously moves through the house. Sweat dampens his armpits. Has Phil been released? He swore Thomas said six more days. Five now, since that was yesterday. He clenches his hands. Damn, he wishes he had a baseball bat. Or a gun. The scar on his hip throbs.
He rounds the corner where the hallway opens up into the kitchen and comes to a dead stop. He blinks as his mind attempts to process the sight before him. Standing at the marble-topped center island slicing hard-boiled eggs is his mother, Claire.
“What are you doing here?” He should be overcome with joy at seeing her for the first time in years. Any good son would be. But he wasn’t a good son, and Claire had never been the kindest of mothers.
He really needs to change the locks to be certain other family members don’t show up unannounced.
Claire sets aside the knife and gives James a critical look. He didn’t shave this morning and his shirt is untucked and unpressed. He doesn’t have to ask whether he passes inspection. Her pinched face is all the answer he needs. She taps her chin, a silent message that he should have cleaned up before he left the house.
He’s thirty-six years old, for crying out loud. He won’t be made to feel guilty about how he looks. He’s already swimming in a cesspool of guilt as it is.
“What’s all this?” He lifts a palm at the food.
“I’ve made lunch,” she says, neatly brushing crumbs from her hands. “Welcome home, James.”
He hears the boys come into the kitchen behind him. Marc squeals. Julian gawks before the first smile since they landed in California appears on his face. His expression goes full wattage. “Señora Carla, what’re you doing here?”