Take the Long Way Home (3 page)

Wistful, maybe. Apprehensive, yet
curious.

And damn, really, really pretty.

“So…you still live here?” he asked.

It didn’t seem like a difficult question,
but she took a minute to mull over her answer. Finally, she said,
“I recently moved back.”

“Yeah. Me, too—well, not exactly. I’m in
Boston.” He tilted his head slightly in the city’s direction, as if
Boston were one town over and not thirty miles south of Brogan’s
Point. “I don’t know if you remember Ashley Wright from our class—”
he tilted his head again, this time toward the booth where Ashley
waited for him, visibly seething because he’d abandoned her to talk
to Maeve “—but she’s living right here in town. Working for her
dad.”

“He owns that car place on Route One,” Maeve
said.

More than one car place. Ashley’s father
owned multiple dealerships along the North Shore: Wright Honda,
Wright Buick-Cadillac, Wright BMW. “Get the Wright Car at the
Wright Price!” his ads used to scream from radio speakers, TV
screens, and billboards. “Looking for a new car? You can’t go wrong
with Wright!” Ashley had been one of the rich kids in town, living
in a sprawling mansion with an ocean view on the north end of town.
Now she lived in a condominium she was dying to show Quinn, but
he’d thought it best to avoid that, at least until he figured out
what he did or did not want to happen if he crossed the
threshold.

“So…are you working in the area or just
visiting?” he asked.

Her gaze flickered left and right before
centering on him again. She appeared dubious, as if not quite sure
how to answer, or why he’d even asked. He wasn’t sure why he’d
asked, either, except that he felt…something. A need to become
acquainted with her. A need to connect with her in some way. Just
because he’d never gotten to know Maeve Nolan, the cop’s crazy
daughter, in high school didn’t mean he couldn’t get to know her
now.

“I’m not sure,” she finally answered. “I’m
planning to open a cookie store, but we’ll see how it goes.”

A cookie store. That struck him as a little
strange. People might open a bakery, or a doughnut shop, or an
ice-cream parlor. But a cookie store?

All right. She’d been weird in high school,
and she was weird now. Despite her weirdness, he was enjoying this
conversation. He felt that this moment, this meeting, was why he’d
taken the long way home. That made no sense, but not everything in
the world had to make sense.

She peered past him once more, then gave him
a smile that tugged his heart in an odd way. “You should go back to
Ashley. She’s waiting for you. And I have to get back to work. Nice
talking to you.” She turned and reached for the door.

He touched her wrist again, and her gaze
fell to where his fingers rested against her skin. “Nice talking to
you, too,” he said, then winced at the banality of their words.
She’d said them because she wanted to leave, to get away from him.
He’d said them because he meant them. He wanted to talk to her some
more. He wanted to prove to her that he was no longer a
self-centered dick who believed his value as a human being lay in
his ability to throw a football. He wanted her to understand that
he was open-minded now, and hard-working, and humble.

Why impressing Maeve Nolan mattered so much
to him, he couldn’t say. But it did. He wanted her to see that he’d
come home a better man than the person he’d been when he left
town.

She slipped her arm from
his light grip, gave him another smile that twisted something
inside him, and swung open the door. Watching as she vanished into
the rain, he thought,
Cookies. Why
not?

When the Torellis had owned the bakery,
they’d attached a bell above the front door so it would ring
whenever anyone entered the premises. Now that the place was hers,
Maeve had decided to leave the bell there. If she was back in the
kitchen and Joyce, the counter clerk she’d hired, was busy with
another customer, the bell would alert her if more customers
entered the place. Nothing she might be doing in the kitchen could
be as important as prompt service. Never leave a customer
waiting—one of the many lessons she’d learned during her years in
Seattle.

Besides, she like the way the bell sounded
when the door opened. A cheerful tinkle. It made the place feel
homey and welcoming.

Her shop—which she’d named Cookie’s after
her cat, who in turn had been named after the cookies Maeve loved
to bake—wasn’t yet open for business. But she must have forgotten
to lock the door after the delivery man had shown up with her
coffee and cappuccino machines, because while she was arranging the
machines on the back counter, the bell let out a cheerful tinkle,
announcing that someone had opened the door.

She spun around in time to see her father
enter the shop.

He looked much better than he had when she’d
left town ten years ago. Chatting with him on Skype during her
years away, she’d been able to view his evolution from
grief-shattered wreck to human being, a process for which she
supposed Gus Naukonen deserved a fair amount of credit. His eyes
were clear and gray, missing the webs of bloodshot that used to
plague them chronically. The laugh lines crimping their outer
corners were deeper than she remembered, although during those
ghastly years after her mother’s death, he hadn’t laughed enough to
have laugh lines. Was there such a thing as cry lines? Mourn
lines?

That morning, he looked like a man who
smiled. He was still handsome in a bluff, rough-hewn way, his jaw
square, his forehead high. His hair had more silver in it than
she’d remembered, but his waist didn’t appear any thicker than it
had been when Maeve had left.

The first few years she’d lived in Seattle,
she’d refused to tell him where she was. She’d kept in touch enough
for him to know she was alive and well, and that had been all he’d
deserved—and all she’d allowed. He’d respected her need for
distance then, but eventually, they’d both healed enough that Skype
chats were possible. A few times, he’d asked if he could visit her,
but she’d always said no. Seattle was her new life. Her father was
the old life she’d fled three thousand miles to escape.

Now she was back in that old life, and her
father stood in her shop, clad in a business shirt and tie, khaki
trousers, and a windbreaker with “Brogan’s Point Police Department”
embroidered above his heart. “Maeve,” he said, opening his
arms.

She wasn’t
ready
. But she couldn’t
not hug him. She emerged from behind the counter and let him wrap
his arms around her. His embrace didn’t feel bad. It felt warm and
safe. Hesitantly, she returned his hug.

They held each other for a long moment.
Then, as if they’d perceived the same signal, they stepped apart.
“How did you find me?” she asked.

“I’m a detective, honey. I know how to find
people.”

“I thought I would see you yesterday,” she
said. “I went to Gus’s bar, figuring you would be there, but you
weren’t.”

“I’m here now. How long have you been in
town? Why didn’t you call? What are you doing in Torelli’s?”

Last question first. “I own it now,” she
said. “I’m opening a cookie store.”

“What?” Ed Nolan looked flabbergasted.

“A cookie store.”

“You own the building? How did you manage
that?”

“It’s kind of complicated.” She gestured
toward one of the café chairs she’d set up around two small tables
that morning. Her father ignored the chair and gave her a skeptical
look—the kind of look he used to give her when she was five and had
crumbs stuck to her chin, or a muddy smear on her good dress for
church. The kind of look she imagined him giving the criminals he
arrested and brought into the station house.

She tried to defuse that look by asking,
“You want some coffee? I was about to try out my new machine.”

He nodded, but his expression didn’t
change.

She busied herself with the coffee machine,
inserting one of the jumbo filters, scooping in some grounds,
adding water from a pitcher. “I had a friend in Seattle,” she
explained as she worked. “He thought I should move back here and
sell my cookies.”

“Some friend,” her father scoffed. “He
wanted you to move away?”

“He didn’t live in Seattle. He just came to
the city a few times a year on business. He’d always stop by the
Stoneworks Café when he was in town. He was in love with my
cookies.”

“In love with
you,
probably.” She heard
the overprotective-father vibe in his voice, as if he would shoot
any man who messed with his precious daughter.

“No, Dad. We were just friends.”

“Right.”

“He was old. In his seventies, or even his
eighties. I don’t know—he was kind of ageless. But really smart. I
didn’t know it, but he was also seriously rich.”

Her father’s face softened. “Maybe you
should have made him fall in love with you, then.”

“Dad.” She laughed, her gaze fixed on the
machine. It gurgled and hissed pleasantly as the coffee brewed. “He
was the nicest man I ever met,” she said, a layer of sorrow muting
her voice. “He said I belonged home with you. He said I was too
smart and too talented to be working as a waitress. I was more than
a waitress at Stoneworks, but he thought I should have my own
place. And…” Her smile faded and her eyes filmed. “He died. I
didn’t know it, but he’d already bought this place and was
intending to sign the deed over to me. Just to get me to move home.
He thought I should be with my family.” She didn’t look at her
father then. She didn’t want to see if he was tearing up, too.

“He bought this place for you? Just like
that?”

“We’d known each other for years. And he was
very rich.”

“How does a very rich old man get to know a
coffee shop waitress?” An ominous rumble of suspicion still
darkened her father’s tone.

“Like I said, he would come into the café
whenever he was in Seattle. I think he had an office in one of the
buildings nearby. He used to just come in for coffee, but then he
tried one of my peanut-butter crunch cookies and swooned.” No need
for false modesty. “They’re wicked good.”

Her father nodded, although
he still looked dubious. “So an old man eats your cookie, swoons,
and buys you a bakery.”
What did he get in
return?
Maeve saw the unspoken question in
her father’s frown.

“Not right away,” she said. The coffee
machine had stopped making noise, and she filled two cups with
coffee. “At first we just would talk. He’d ask me about the
cookies, about where I was from. He was so easy to talk to—because
I knew he didn’t want anything from me,” she added, returning her
father’s glare with one of her own. “He never told me he’d bought
the bakery. He did encourage me to take some on-line courses on
business management, and I learned a lot from Lenny.”

“Lenny?”

“The manager of Stoneworks. I wasn’t
thinking of opening my own place, just learning how things worked.
Harry had more ambition for me than I had for myself.”

“Good for Harry,” her father muttered, then
took a sip of coffee and nodded. Maeve tasted the brew in her cup
and smiled. It was delicious.

“He did tell me all the time that I should
move back home. He said family was important. For that alone, you
should love him.”

“I adore him,” her father grunted. “I’m
eternally indebted.” Despite the sarcasm underlining his words,
Maeve sensed that he was softening slightly.

And he damned well ought to soften. It was
because of Harry that she was in Brogan’s Point. If her father
wanted her here, he should be grateful. If he didn’t, then he could
let the bell ring him out the door and out of her life.

She was here for Harry, she decided. Not for
her father.

But then her father smiled, making those
little lines in the corners of his eyes pleat like a geisha’s fans,
and it was her turn to soften.

“The sign on the door says your grand
opening is Saturday.”

“That’s the plan.”

“Saturday is a big day over at the high
school,” he told her. “Homecoming game. I’ll spread the word that
you’ll be open for business. Maybe you’ll get some spillover. Not
everyone likes the rubbery boiled hotdogs they sell at the games.”
He slugged down some more coffee. “This is delicious,” he said.

She wondered if, once Cookie’s opened, he
would be dropping by her shop for his afternoon coffee, instead of
the Faulk Street Tavern. Somehow, she doubted it. Maybe he could
send some of his colleagues on the force her way, though. Why
should they drive all the way to Dunkin Donuts on Route One when
they could support a local business like Cookie’s?

“So, when are you coming over for dinner?”
he asked.

Going to his house for dinner meant going to
her childhood home. She shrugged.

Her father didn’t pressure her. “Maybe you
and Gus and I could have dinner at the Lobster Shack,” he
suggested. “I can convince her to take an evening off every now and
then.”

“Okay.” She wouldn’t commit to anything, but
to say no outright would be an insult not just to her father but to
Harry, who’d gone to such great lengths to bring the Nolans back
together. “We’ll see.”

Her father drained his cup with one final
swig. “I’d better get back to work,” he said, eyeing her
plaintively. “I’m glad you’re back.”

“I’m not the girl I was when I left,” she
warned him.

His smile was respectful. “I noticed.” He
seemed to consider giving her another hug, but he didn’t beckon her
out from behind the counter. Instead, he gave her a hopeful smile.
“We’ll work it out,” he promised.

She appreciated his not
bothering to specify the
it
they’d work out. She wasn’t sure what
it
was. Everything, she
supposed. The abandonment. The rejection. The long years apart. The
long way home.