The doorbell rang, and I jumped as if I’d been caught at something and quickly swallowed what was left in my glass. It was probably my mother, or Georgi coming by to check up on me. I couldn’t let them see the alcohol.
I sprang up and ran to the kitchen, put the bottle under the sink, turned on the faucet, and took a drink from the streaming liquid to wash the smell out of my mouth. I should have chosen vodka.
When the bell rang again, I hurried to the door and threw it open.
Nate Beckett stood there, as if I had conjured him. For a moment, I just gaped at him. “Nate?”
He looked like a wiser, more weathered version of the boy he’d been when we were teens, and that grin that involved his whole face made me smile too. “Brenna, hi. I was just coming to Drew’s, and I saw your last name on the mailbox. I hope you don’t mind my walking over.”
I touched my hair, wishing I’d known he was coming. How did I look? Had I cried my makeup off? Was it dripping down my face like mud? “How long have you been in town?” I asked as if that made a difference in anything.
“About half an hour,” he said. “I should have called first, but I didn’t know your number.”
He was taller than he’d been at sixteen, with the same sable-colored hair and a day’s growth of beard on his jaw, broad lumberjack shoulders and arms that looked as if he worked out for hours a day.
“You look great,” I said.
“So do you.”
I wiped my face, checked my fingerprints for mascara. “No, I don’t. I was just . . . My kids are with their dad, and I was just . . . watching TV. Come in.”
He stepped in and glanced at the television. “Watching the fires?”
“Um . . .” I looked toward the TV. “Yeah. I thought of you. Wondered if you were there.”
“I was until a couple of days ago.”
“Did you come home because of your dad?”
“Sort of.” He looked down for a second, then met my eyes again. “I’d still be at the fire, but . . . well, it’s complicated.”
Nate’s smile was shaky, tentative, but it started in the tired eyes that reminded me of another time, when love was still innocent and threatened no peril. “I lost track of you.”
The words shot that innocence to death and reminded me of the peril that had followed anyway. The demons closed in on me, reminding me of my punishment, my guilt, my part in the tragic drama that had ended my father’s life. “Yeah, my mom and sister and I went to live with my grandmother after . . . after Dad died. Then we came back a couple of years later. You were gone by then.”
“Yeah. Call of the wild.”
As I led him into the living room, I noticed his bandaged arm.
“What happened?” I asked, touching his wrist.
“Nothing,” he said. “I was fighting that fire. Had a little burn.”
I touched his arm and felt more bandage through his shirtsleeve. “That doesn’t seem little.”
“It’s just second degree. It’ll keep me off the field for a couple of weeks.”
I lowered to the couch, and he sat down next to me. I saw how careful he was with his right leg. Under his jeans, I saw that his ankle was bandaged too. “Nate! Where were you burned?”
“It’s no big deal. Just on my right side.”
“Down your whole right side? Your ribs? Hip? Thigh?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“Nate, you drove here?”
“It’s only an hour and a half.”
“But you need to have that leg up.” I put a pillow on the coffee table. “Come on. Put it up. It’s just me.”
He grinned and did what I said.
“You want something to drink?”
“No, I’m fine. I really just wanted to see how you are.”
“I’m okay. I just get a little bummed when my kids are gone. Divorce. It’s not for sissies.”
“Guess not.” He inclined his head a little until I met his eyes. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”
“Yeah, thanks. Never pictured myself divorced, fighting for custody. But life doesn’t ever really work out like you think it will.”
“No, it sure doesn’t.”
I folded my arms and locked in on him. “I didn’t think you’d ever come back here.” I could see that my words delivered a hard blow, but he didn’t recoil from them. He’d survived words before.
“Well, I had to recuperate, and it seemed like a good time to spend some time with the family. How are you feeling about the pardon?”
“Honestly? I can’t believe they let him out.”
“He served fourteen years.”
“You gotta love the governor’s pardoning powers. That’s the way our beloved justice system works, isn’t it?”
“He still says he didn’t do it.”
I rolled my eyes. “Of course he did it. You know that, don’t you?”
Nate sighed. “It sure looked like it. But they never investigated his story.”
“Because it was ludicrous. They were fighting in the bar. They went outside to finish. We’re supposed to believe that someone else came from out of nowhere, followed my father, and shot him for no reason?”
“I know. It was a lot to swallow.” Nate was rarely at a loss for words, but I could see he didn’t know what I wanted him to say. “I didn’t come here to relitigate all that. The outcome is the same, no matter what.”
That was the truth.
“Do you drink now?” Nate asked out of the blue.
I flinched as if he’d raised his hand to strike me. “What? No. Why would you ask that?”
“I thought I smelled it,” he said. “I’m not judging. I just wondered . . .”
“I told you. Life has me a little shaky right now.”
He looked at me as if considering that. “Custody battle sounds brutal.”
I sighed. “I don’t want to talk about that. Let’s talk about something else.”
“Like what?” He grinned, and I felt the heat radiating off his body. “Old times?”
I wished for another drink. “The old times are all recorded in the newspaper archives, if you want to reminisce.”
“Yeah, I guess they are. I meant before that.”
I deliberately looked away and locked onto the TV screen.
“Are these your children?”
I glanced back at him and saw that he was looking at a picture on my end table. My face softened. “Yeah. Sophia and Noah.”
He smiled, the crow’s feet next to his eyes deeper than they’d been before. I liked the way they looked on him.
“They look just like you. Two little brunettes. The little girl—Sophia, you say?—she has your eyes. And look at Noah’s face. Are those freckles?”
I felt the despair seeping out of me and a tentative joy seeping in. “Yeah. All over his nose.”
He laughed, as though he was as smitten as me. “You’re lucky,” he said. “Real lucky.”
I stared down at the framed photo, part of me wishing I could open the floodgate and tell him just how unlucky I was.
“Oh, but I forgot. You don’t believe in luck, do you?” he asked.