Jaded (34 page)

“A ride to rehab,” she said. She swiped at her damp cheeks. “Please. Will you take me?”

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll take you. Let me make some calls.”

He helped her inside and got her a glass of water after she washed her face and hands in his bathroom. While she sipped the water, he made a couple of calls and found her a bed at an inpatient facility in Brookings.

“Why?” he asked as they headed out of town. Duke sat in the backseat with his chin resting on Tanya’s seat back. “I’m not complaining, but why now?”

She stared out the window. “I failed Duke. What kind of person can’t take care of an animal? Even animals take care of other animals. I couldn’t even do that.” Tears trickled down her cheeks, but she didn’t seem to notice them, just lifted her hand to pat Duke’s head. “I can’t be a cop anymore. I’ve screwed that up forever. But I can be something. Somebody. I can be somebody.”

They pulled up in front of the treatment center. Tanya got out and smoothed her hands down the fronts of her jeans. “I’ll bring your stuff out tomorrow,” Lucas said.

She gave him a wry smile. “Best to get me here in case I change my mind.”

She wouldn’t change her mind this time. It would be tough, every day, for the rest of her life, but something inside her was different. Inspired, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the lost ring, the one Alana found, the one he’d been carrying around since she left, and held it out to Tanya.

“Grammie’s ring,” she said. Her hands flexed as if she’d reach for it, but then she folded her arms. “I thought it was gone.”

“Alana found it worked into one of the cracks in the foundation.”

“I can’t take it, Luc,” she said. “I can’t. I don’t . . . Grammie wouldn’t want me to have it.”

“Yes, she would,” he said. He tapped it on her forearm. “Grammie never gave up on anyone. She didn’t give up on you. I’m not giving up on you, either. Take it.”

Tears were rolling down Tanya’s cheeks. She unhooked the gold chain she wore around her neck, slipped the ring on, and refastened the chain. She gave Lucas one last hug, and walked down the hall.

 • • • 

IF TANYA COULD
admit herself to rehab knowing she’d fight the addiction every day of her life and never get the job she always wanted . . . if Cody could agree to paint the mural knowing it might be the biggest project he ever took on . . . if Mrs. Battle and Mitch and Delaney Walker-Herndon could do the right thing for the town and the library, then Lucas could join the fight.

He knew what he had to do. He had to go get her. He had to bring her home.

15

A
LANA PULLED INTO
the driveway of the Senator’s house in Kenwood well after five. The Secret Service security detachment hadn’t changed in her absence. After a friendly wave, she parked behind the house, snagged her overnight bag, then walked up the landscaped patio to the back door.

Freddie stood in the kitchen, wearing a robe, her six-carat yellow-diamond engagement ring, and the fuzzy troll slippers Alana had gotten her as a gag gift three Christmases earlier. She had her iPhone in hand and her hair coiled into a knot at her nape. She squealed when she saw Alana and practically leaped across the kitchen to envelop her in a huge hug.

“You’re here! You’re finally here!”

“I’m here? You’re finally here. You’re the one who flew in from New Delhi for this party.”

Freddie pulled back and looked at her. “Are you okay?”

No. She hurt worse with every day she put between herself and Lucas, and Cody, and Mrs. Battle. “I’m fine. Just tired.”

The house felt too big. Everything about it felt wrong, the size, the gleaming modern kitchen, the view through the windows to the professionally landscaped backyard. Her apartment, dusty from disuse, felt equally wrong. No roses, no detached garage, no shared driveway that a battered Blazer would pull into for the sweetest reunion.

Freddie was staring at her. “Oh, God. You got entangled.”

“I did not get entangled.”

“Oh, honey,” Freddie said quietly. Her sister’s blue eyes, the mirror image of her own, showed a genuine concern. “Oh, honey.”

“Who’s entangled?”

Her mother appeared in the doorway leading to the parlor. She wore Chanel and had obviously just come from the salon. Alana tugged out of Freddie’s hug and crossed the slate floor to give her mother a kiss on the cheek. “You look lovely,” she said.

“Thank you,” her mother said, and eyed her jeans. “You’ve just enough time for a shower. Frederica and I chose a dress for you—”

“Jason Wu, very chic, perfect for your coloring,” Freddie added as she thumbed away at her phone.

“It’s upstairs in your room. Try to be ready in an hour, dear.”

Freddie gathered the folds of her silk robe in her hand and followed her up the stairs. “Spill.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Alana said as she opened the door to her childhood bedroom. A midnight blue dress hung from the back of the door to the bathroom. She set her bag down and looked at the dress so she didn’t have to look at her sister. It had a fitted bodice and a gorgeous raw silk skirt. “It’s lovely, Freddie,” she said. “Where’s Toby?”

“Halfway between Sao Paolo and London.”

“So you’ll meet up with him again in Mumbai?”

“Lannie,” Freddie said quietly. “Talk to me.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Alana said. “We should be talking about your wedding. You can get Westminster Abbey if you want it. The bishop’s secretary was very accommodating—”

“Alana.”

Her sister never called her by her first name. Never. Alana looked at her, and swallowed hard. She wouldn’t cry over this. She wouldn’t. “Okay. I got entangled.”

“What’s his name?”

“Let’s see. There’s Cody Burton. He’s seventeen, and he’s got three younger brothers he’s helping his mom raise, and an older brother who’s going back to jail for breaking and entering and stealing Gunther Jensen’s dead wife’s engagement ring.”

“He’s
seventeen
?” Freddie said, for once shocked into looking up from her phone.

“Or do you mean Mrs. Battle? She’s seventy-seven, and she’s got macular degeneration, and her kids all left Walkers Ford, so she doesn’t have anyone to drive her to doctors’ appointments. She taught English and physics at the high school for forty years. She’s amazing.”

Freddie’s lips shaped into a soft
Oh
.

“Then there’s Tanya. She’s addicted to prescription painkillers, and she’s probably also an alcoholic. She needs rehab, but we both know you can’t make someone go to rehab.”

Freddie backed up to Alana’s brass bed and sat down on the edge. “Go on.”

“There’s Carlene, and the moms with their kids who come into the library for the backpacks, and the home-schoolers who need extra resources, and . . .”

“And?”

“And Lucas Ridgeway. He’s the chief of police.”

“Your landlord?”

Her landlord, her lover. Her everything. “He’s renovating the kitchen in the house I rented, and he’s got this dog, and he’s just . . . he’s just . . .”

Hot and distant and wounded and willing to keep her secrets and possessive and not at all interested in telling her who or what she should be. He let her just be.

“That blush says it all,” Freddie said.

“He liked the way I blushed,” Alana said. She sat down on the floor with her back to the closet door. “He liked me.”

Freddie held her tongue. More important, she dropped her phone on the bed behind her. “Of course, he did. You’re very likable.”

“David didn’t actually like me. David saw me as a fixer-upper.”

“David is a brown-nosing ass,” Freddie said. “Anyway, you didn’t see yourself that way.”

“No,” she agreed. “I didn’t really see myself any particular way. But after the marriage proposal debacle, I realized that if I didn’t, someone else would always define me. Mother or David or someone like him.”

Freddie studied her. “You’re not a pushover, Lannie. You stand your ground when it matters most. Especially when it matters most. You didn’t say yes to David.”

“It’s not enough to know what I don’t want,” she said. “I need to know what I do want. You know what you want.”

“Sure,” Freddie said as she leaned back, lifted her feet, and studied her pedicure. “But that’s easy because what I want fits in with what the family needs and can use.”

“Me, too,” Alana said automatically.

“I call bullshit,” Freddie sang out. “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit . . .”

“Oh, God,” Alana said. “Stop that. Mother will have a fit if she hears you.”

Freddie lowered her voice but continued to sing. A knock came on her bedroom door. “Alana? I don’t hear the water running.”

“I’m starting it now,” Alana said. She clambered to her feet and turned on the shower in the bathroom.

“What do you think of the dress?” her mother called.

She looked at it while Freddie continued to sing
bullshit
to the Barney song sotto voce.

“Stop it,” she hissed at Freddie. “It’s gorgeous. The embroidery is exquisite.” Now that she looked, she could see delicate vines of roses in a thread only slightly lighter than the blue of the dress. They clustered deeply around the hem, then curled around the skirt to coil and burst into bloom at the edge of the bodice.

Roses. She shook her head. Never again would she be able to look at a rose without thinking of Lucas, of gleaming walnut and old-fashioned roller shades, of everything she’d left behind to come home.

Had Lucas found the ring? If so, he hadn’t bothered to text or e-mail or call her. So many ways to get in touch, but without emotion they were meaningless.

“We leave in fifty minutes, Alana. Frederica, stop singing foul language at your sister and get dressed, please.”

“Told you so,” Alana whispered.

Freddie stuck out her tongue, grabbed her phone, and slid off the bed. “Don’t go anywhere.”

She wasn’t going anywhere. That was the point. She was home, and needed here. This was her life, her family.

She stripped and got into the enormous shower, shivering from the cold air that collected in the corners of the stall. She applied lotion, dried her hair and spritzed it with shine spray, then shimmied into her underwear. When she opened the door to put on her ball gown, Freddie was waiting in her own dress in a brilliant shade of ruby red. She turned her back to Alana.

“Zip me up.”

“So you’re wearing red and Mother’s wearing white, and I’m wearing blue,” Alana said as she ran up the zipper. “We’re the Senator’s living flag.”

Freddie squirmed and wriggled the tight bodice into place, then smoothed the skirt with her hands. “What do you think? Alexander McQueen.”

“It’s beautiful. It’s the perfect color for you, too.”

“I’m thinking about getting married in red,” Freddie said nonchalantly. “This shade. It’s Toby’s favorite color. Red for love. Red for power. Red for passion. Red for blood of my blood and bone of my bone. God knows I’m hardly able to wear white.”

“Have you told Mother?” Alana asked as she slid the dress from the padded hanger.

“Hmmm . . . no,” Freddie mused.

Alana hummed the Barney song under her breath as she took the gorgeous blue dress from the hanger and stepped into it. Freddie zipped her up. “It fits perfectly,” she said. “I’ll do your makeup.”

“Smoky eyes,” Alana said. She dug through her makeup bag until she found the right compact.

“Really? You usually never like that. You want modest and understated and demure.”

“Tonight I want smoky eyes,” she said.

Freddie applied eyeliner and shadow in shades of blue and gray, smudging both together, then touched up the tips of her lashes with mascara. “This isn’t about David, is it? Go with a pale lip gloss. Shine, not color.”

“I know that. This is about me,” she said as she uncapped the lip gloss.

She let her heels dangle from her fingers as she followed Freddie down the curving staircase to the entry hall. Freddie braced herself on Alana’s shoulder first to step into her stilettos, then stood still for Alana to do the same. Their mother hurried around the corner, issuing last-minute instructions to Nancy, her assistant

“You both look lovely,” her mother said. “It’s good to have you home, Alana.”

The correct answer to that was she was glad to be home, but somehow she couldn’t make herself say the words. “I missed you,” she said instead, because that was true.

But a truth was growing inside her, one she couldn’t ignore. This wasn’t home anymore. Walkers Ford was.

“Where’s the Senator?” Freddie asked.

“He’s meeting with David. They’ll join us at the hotel.”

They followed their mother out the front door and into a limousine. Inside, Freddie kicked her heels off. Alana watched the city slide by as they made their way to the Palmer House Hilton. She’d lived here off and on for her whole life, always considered it home, a place of possibility and opportunity, of change and industry and significance. But today the buildings hemmed her in. She missed the endless arc of sky. She missed the prairie, undulating to the horizon. She missed the wind buffeting the grasses into endlessly changing patterns and cross-hatching.

She missed the people. She missed Lucas so badly, she ached inside.

Her mother was preoccupied with her phone.

“You okay?” Freddie asked quietly.

“It’s been a very long day,” Alana said.

“You always feel something when you leave,” Freddie said finally. “It’s perfectly normal to like people, enjoy their company, feel sad when you move on to the next project.”

“You get entangled?”

Freddie shrugged. “Not really. That’s just what people say.”

“Don’t you ever want to just stay and make a difference in one place, to one group of people?”

“I never really thought about it,” Freddie admitted. “I like what I do. I like the pace, the dialogues, the global scale. I like knowing I’ve made a difference to thousands of people.”

“I know,” Alana said.
But that’s not what I like. I liked seeing Cody come alive at the library. I liked sitting with Mrs. Battle at her doctor’s appointment. I liked making dinner for Lucas. I liked peeling back his layers, watching him struggle with who he was and what his life meant
.