This Time for Keeps, page 5
Charlotte. Poor sweet Charlotte. Ainsley had loved her so very, very much.
Meg closed her eyes against the memory, but images awaited in the darkness, as well. Ainsley on the hospital bed, weak, fading. Reaching for her baby one last time.
Inside, something started to shake. Fighting it, Meg reached for all those slip-sliding pieces and locked them away, stood and eased the baby into her crib. In the hall, she crossed to her office, but found herself heading for the kitchen instead. She just needed…
At the oven, she went up on her toes and opened the cabinet, saw the lone bottle. She’d put the five-year-old cabernet there the night after Charlotte was born. Maybe tonight was the night to allow herself just one glass….
Meg…where were ye? I was scared my wee one would get here before you did….
She closed the cabinet. Walked out of the kitchen. Back to her office. Shut the door.
That’s where she was when her cell phone rang. She picked it up, answered on the second ring.
“Open up,” Julia said by way of greeting.
Meg blinked. “Pardon?”
“We’re on the porch,” Julia said in that brisk, all-business way of hers. “Didn’t want to knock and risk waking the baby.”
Puzzled, Meg saved the business plan she’d been editing and went to the front of the house, where she opened the door to Julia and Lori, and a nondescript brown bag.
Julia brushed right by her, looking both ways as she crossed the small foyer. “Is he here? Is that his truck out front?”
Meg glanced out to see the white, late-model truck across the street. “Is who here?”
Lori stepped inside and closed the door. “We know,” she said quietly. “We saw him.”
Meg stilled as realization formed. Her friends had seen Russell. And here they were…checking on her.
Because they knew—everything.
“He’s not here.” The truck across the street had been there a few days, most likely belonging to one of Mrs. Morgan’s grown sons. “And you don’t need to be here, either. I’m fine.”
“Right,” Julia said. “Your husband waltzes back into town after two years—”
“Soon-to-be-ex,” Meg corrected. She’d filed the papers the month before Ainsley had died. All they needed were his signature.
“My point exactly.”
Lori’s eyes widened as Julia whisked into the kitchen. “You should have seen her. She pretty much let him have it.”
Meg sighed. “Julia!” Then, “What happened to ‘You have to call him’?”
Julia returned with three spoons. “Your terms,” she said. “Not his.”
It was hard to argue with that.
“And so you came over here to…?” she asked, glancing from the bag in Lori’s hands to the utensils in Julia’s.
Julia grinned. “Eat ice cream.” Tucking her arm under Meg’s, she all but dragged her to the back door.
Meg thought about protesting, telling them she was fine. Insisting that they go home. She hated that they felt the need to descend on her as if she was some fragile creature in danger of shattering.
But gratitude overrode everything else.
Over the years they’d shared a lot, from Barbie clothes to real clothes, and then real dreams. And real heartache. Julia and Lori had been there before she went off to college—and when Meg came home. They’d listened to her go on and on about the dreamy guest professor—and they’d gawked when he came after her. They knew about the night she lost her virginity. They’d helped her plan her wedding. They’d encouraged her when she and Russell had been forced to turn to medical science to conceive a child. They’d held her hand, helped with shots, held her up.
In the end, they’d been the ones to help glue all the pieces back together.
Outside, on the wide porch overlooking the yard that sloped down to the creek, she let them steer her to the top step, where they all three plopped down. Lori pulled the carton out of the bag. Julia ripped off the lid, revealing the mint chip ice cream beneath.
Lori handed over the spoons.
They all dug in.
THE PINEY WOODS GAZETTE had once been a thriving daily newspaper. Meg’s great-grandfather had prided himself on being a newsman, founding the local paper to quiet the gossip that often gripped the town. He had been a man of facts. A man of principle. Focus. He thought everyone had a right to know…everything.
It was a legacy Maxwell Landry dedicated his life to building—and passing down to his only son.
Standing outside the offices of the Gazette, Russell figured it was probably best neither man had lived to see the newspaper business slowly wither away. More and more consumers were getting their news from alternative sources, particularly online. Print was static, cumbersome. Passé. It was only a matter of time before physical newspapers became a thing of the past. He and Meg had spent countless hours working on strategies—
He frowned. No strategy in the world could stop the continuum of change. You adapted, or you became obsolete.
He and Meg had never been very good at adapting.
Neither had Ainsley. From the time she’d been just a toddler, his sister had never been able to just go with the flow. She’d seen the world through a lens all her own, and now she was gone.
It still hurt like hell.
Hating what had to be done, he pushed open the door and strode into the outer office, as he’d done hundreds of times before. And just like all those times before, the scent of vanilla and orange greeted him. His office had been down the hall to the left, across from Meg’s. Sometimes he’d worked there, but more often than not, he’d roamed the vacant space upstairs. He could think better there, without walls everywhere he turned.
Lori sat at the front desk, flanked by two ficus trees. Her role had expanded beyond being a receptionist, but with limited budgets, staffing had become an issue—and someone needed to sit out front.
Lori, with her warm smile and inherent gentleness, was the obvious choice.
She looked up from her computer screen, and again, all Russell could think was how tired she looked. Dark smudges ringed her eyes, the glare of the overhead lights making her look even more pale. She and Meg were roughly the same age, which put her at thirtyish. But she looked far older.
“Hi,” she greeted, and he couldn’t help but smile. He’d always had a soft spot for Lori.
“Hi, yourself,” he said. “You okay?”
She smiled, and the shadows seemed to recede. “Just tired,” she said, downplaying his question. “Busy day ahead. Trey has an—” She broke off, shook her head. “You’re here for Meg.”
They were simple words…true. But not true at all. “I need to get the keys—”
She picked up a small retro Magic 8 Ball from beside a picture frame on the edge of her desk. From it dangled two hot-pink keys. “Got ’em.”
Lori had the keys. Meg had given them to her. Obviously she had no intention of seeing him.
The quick burn in his gut surprised him.
“I expected her back by now,” Lori said, “but the festival meetings almost always run long.”
With two long strides he was across the cozy reception area. He reached out, almost grabbed the keys. But this was Lori, not Meg, and she’d never been anything but kind to him. Jaw tight, he forced a smile and took the keys, made the requisite small talk before returning to his rental car.
How like Meg to avoid what she didn’t want to face.
The drive across town took less than ten minutes. He pulled off the quiet crepe myrtle–lined boulevard and wound his way through a few side streets before arriving at the small frame house.
Flowers bloomed. Everywhere he looked, a rainbow of colors screamed back at him. Pink and white from the azaleas, red from geraniums, yellow from daisies and daffodils. Even the trees rained colors, a veritable parade of dogwood and redbuds, all shimmering in the late-morning sun like something straight out of a picture book.
Once he would have grabbed his camera and gone down on his knee, searching for the perfect blend of light and shadow and color. That’s what Ainsley had always loved, the contrasts in life. The unexpected.
The house had been drab when she’d first showed it to him, gray in the dead of winter. He’d thought she was making a mistake, but she’d seen the promise, and she’d insisted.
Now she was gone, but the color remained.
Russell pushed the car door open and stepped into the seductive warmth of Texas in April. He was a man who thrived on the periphery, the complete opposite of his baby sister. No matter how much he did not want to go inside, he owed her. This, and a whole lot more.
Striding up the walk, he made his way between the armies of petunias lining the walkway, up the two steps to the screened porch, and yanked open the outer door.
Meg rose from the porch swing, the baby on her hip. “Hey,” was all she said.
He stopped, stared at her standing there in a fall of sunlight, her jeans faded, her scoop-neck olive shirt wrinkled. Her hair was soft, loose.
“Meggie.” Goddamn his voice for breaking.
She shifted little Charlotte on her hip. “Lori called, told me I’d just missed you.”
His hand tightened around the key.
“My meeting ran over,” she said as Charlotte fisted her hand in Meg’s hair and yanked. “I must have been crazy signing up to chair. You wouldn’t believe how many last-minute details there are.”
The edges of the key dug into his palm. “You always were one for staying busy.”
Her smile was lopsided, and with it about a thousand years fell away. “That’s one way of putting it, I suppose.”
The tension spun out between them, the stillness and the silence pushing in like invisible walls. Once he’d known this woman as well as he’d known himself, her body—her heart. Or at least, he’d thought he had. She’d been his wife and his friend, his coworker and confidante, his lover. They’d bought a falling-down house and turned it into a home. They’d shared meals and dreams, their bodies…
Now they stood in the cramped confines of the small front porch, without a freaking clue what to say to each other.
CHAPTER FOUR
Two and a half years before
THE HOUSE WAS QUIET. Not that long ago, the silence would have surprised him. Meg loved music. She always had it going, blasting so that she could hear it in every room. He would come home and find her doing the dishes to U2, dusting to The Boss, paying bills to Dave Matthews.
He’d never understood how she could concentrate with so much else going on.
She’d never understood how he could concentrate with what she called the scream of silence.
Now that silence filled the house. Once he would have called out to her, but now he moved quietly through the foyer. He didn’t want her to know he was home. Not yet. There’d been a Web site launch meeting that afternoon at the Gazette—but she’d never showed. Lori said she’d gone out for coffee a little after two.
She’d never come back.
She did that a lot these days.
He found her in the kitchen, the big walk-in pantry to be exact. The navy suit she’d put on that morning was gone, replaced by a boxy T-shirt and baggy jeans. They literally hung on her. Her feet were bare, her hair loose.
The urge to—Russell didn’t know. He didn’t know what he wanted to do—what he was supposed to do. Six weeks had passed since they’d lost their baby…a little girl. Dr. Brennan said Meg had recovered physically, but emotionally…
Julia said to give her time.
Meg’s mother, Lilah, said to give her love.
Russell had tried both.
Now he watched her alphabetize their canned goods, and wanted to put his fist through the goddamn wall.
“Hey,” he finally said.
She stiffened. His wife. She stiffened at the sound of his voice.
“Missed you this afternoon.” He’d quit asking if she was okay.
Slowly she turned, looked at him with those awful, blank eyes of hers. “The pantry’s driving me crazy.”
He felt his jaw tighten, didn’t have a clue what to say in response—she’d arranged the cans by size and color the week before. “Meggie—” He reached for her, stilled when he saw her wince.
His wife. Wincing because he wanted to touch her.
“I can finish up for you,” he said. “Why don’t you go ahead and shower.”
She blinked at him. “Shower?”
“The play tonight,” he reminded her. Evangeline—one of her favorites. “Lori and Trey will be by in about an hour. They want to stop by Uncle Ralph’s first—”
Her eyes darkened. “No.” It was barely more than a whisper.
“Sweetheart—”
But she was shaking her head, backing away. “Not tonight.”
The very real dread in her eyes gutted him. “It’s been six weeks,” he said as gently as he could. Six weeks during which she’d hardly slept, eaten. She was lost behind a wall of grief, he knew, but he couldn’t find so much as a crack to slip through. “They’re your friends….”
Her mouth went tight, and in the harsh glare of the fluorescent light, he saw how pale she’d become. How gaunt. The beautiful, soft swell from pregnancy…gone. Even the lines of her face were stark.
“Not tonight,” she said, then turned back to the canned goods, picked up a damp rag and started to clean the already spotless shelf.
Present Day
OUTSIDE, WHERE NATURE provided the water, color rioted. Here on the screened porch, the profusion of clay pots in multiple sizes sat empty, save for a scraggle of pale green weeds.
Somehow Russell resisted the childish urge to kick one into about a thousand pieces. The question burning his throat was another story. “What are you doing here?”
As far as finesse went, he flat-out flunked. But it was better than the poison of silence.
There’d been so much of that.
Sunlight slanted through the branches of the century-old live oak in the front yard, casting Meg’s face half in shadow, half in light. She pulled her lower lip in and bit down, reminding him of the girl he’d first seen almost a decade before, sitting in the front row of the lecture hall.
He’d already been a seasoned photojournalist. He’d covered war and famine and the kind of natural disasters that made you question…everything. He’d experienced luxury and poverty, sin and virtue, and everything in between. All the while he’d made himself walk through it all, objective, documenting rather than experiencing.
But this girl in the front row… She had wheat-colored hair, a glow in her exotically tilted eyes, an eagerness in her slightly parted lips. She’d watched him with a provocative combination of wholesomeness and determination.
Christ, after almost ten years, he could still feel the heat sear through him.
It was much the way she watched him now.
“I don’t really know what I’m doing here,” she said, answering his question with a candor that reminded him of that long-ago girl, the one who’d spoken honestly and passionately…who never ran and hid. She glanced at the big picture window to her right, then at the child in her arms.
His sister’s child.
“I loved Ainsley, too.” Her words were quiet, hoarse, and he had no doubt that they were absolutely true. “I owe her this,” she said. “I promised…” She looked toward the scattering of empty pots for a long moment before lifting her eyes back to him. “I promised her I would take care of…everything. I can’t turn my back now just because it’s not easy.”
Russell shifted, easing the weight from his right leg. If he stood too long without moving, the residual ache turned to more of a stab. His doc said it was phantom pain…but his hand found his thigh anyway, and rubbed.
And for the first time since he’d found out about Ainsley, he let himself think about what it must have been like for Meg. He’d been so insulated from her, had trained himself not to think of her, that he’d thought of nothing but the mechanics. Ainsley had been in an accident. She’d died. Her baby was with Meg.
He wanted to know more about Ainsley’s death. And by the steely resolve in every hard line of his wife’s body, she was the one to fill in. She’d been there. She’d been with Ainsley when she passed away.
“Can you get the door?” she said now, her voice softer than before. Gentler. She eased toward him, jarring his attention from her to the suddenly sleeping baby in her arms. “She’s out.”
His throat burned. Woodenly he stabbed the key into the lock and turned, let Meg breeze by him and into the warm, musty shadows of his sister’s home.
And God help him, as she passed it was all he could do not to drown in the scent from so long ago, the one that had once been as familiar to him as the sound of spring rain.
Roses…and baby powder.
EVERYTHING WAS THE SAME. The little living room looked exactly as it had the last time Meg had seen it, two days before Ainsley died.
The wave of grief hit so hard, Meg stopped and bowed her head, took a long deep breath. Let it out slowly.
“You okay?”
She looked up to find Russell lingering in the doorway. Sunlight streaked in from beyond the screened porch. He looked so tall and solid standing there, the lines of his shoulders wide, his jaw square. And for the briefest of moments, it was easy to remember.
“I miss her,” she whispered with an honesty that surprised her. But there was no reason to lie. “I was just remembering the last time I was here.”
Russell closed the door and with two long strides reached her side. Without being asked, he retrieved an old crocheted afghan and made a pallet on the floor. “Tell me.”
Gently, Meg eased Charlotte from her arms to the blanket, holding her steady as she stirred. Did she know? Did she remember, too?
“Ainsley and I were right here,” she said, easing back from the sleeping baby. Charlotte’s nanny had woken up with a headache, and so Meg had taken over, forcing her to ad-lib her way through the day.
