“I’ll talk to her and try to clear the air,” he said.
“Come for dinner,” his mother suggested. “I planned to make that lemon shrimp pasta you like.”
He sighed. “I’ll have to see. I’m behind on a couple of projects and might be late but I’ll try. Don’t wait for me.”
“Of course.”
They said their goodbyes. As he disconnected the call, he saw their guest backing her pickup truck out of the spot and driving down the street.
She left her trailer behind, so he could only assume she would return at some point.
He needed to apologize.
The realization wasn’t a pleasant one. He had been rude and unwelcoming, treating her as if she were trespassing. Had he really threatened to call the police on her? He could be such an overprotective ass sometimes.
He needed to apologize as soon as possible. Eleanor had pointed out that Jess Clayton would be staying at Whitaker House for two weeks, living only a few hundred yards away from him. For his mother’s sake, he had to make things right.
That didn’t mean he had to like it.
3
Rachel
“For the love of Christopher Robin, can you please give me five more minutes? That’s all I need. Five minutes.”
“But I’m starving!” Her five-year-old daughter, Ava, whined, just as if she hadn’t finished a mozzarella stick and several apple slices a half hour earlier. “If I don’t eat something, I’m going to die. Can I have one of your cookies?”
“Eat.” Her brother, Silas, echoed the sentiment if not the words.
Rachel Clayton McBride closed her eyes and released a heavy breath to keep from snapping back. She dredged up a calm smile. “Give me five more minutes and I will be done taking pictures, I promise. Then I can make you some macaroni and cheese.”
“I don’t want macaroni and cheese. I want a cookie.”
Of course she did. If Rachel had said she would give her a cookie, Ava would have said she was in the mood for macaroni and cheese. She was in training for the debate Olympics, apparently.
“I don’t need a cookie, Mama,” her other daughter, Grace, said from the kitchen table in a prim voice that seemed out of place in a seven-year-old girl.
She knew her oldest well enough to be quite certain Grace would quickly change her tune if Rachel actually did start doling out cookies to Grace’s younger siblings. That wasn’t going to happen with these particular cookies. She had worked too hard on them to see them gobbled up by little mouths that wouldn’t appreciate the nuances of flavor.
“Grace, could you please grab a granola bar for Ava and Silas?”
“I don’t want a granola bar,” Ava whined. “I want one of those. It’s purple and pretty.”
Ava pointed to the tray of perfectly decorated almond sugar cookies Rachel had been working on all afternoon.
“I told you when we were making them. These are for my book group tonight. I made some for only us and you can have one after dinner.”
“But they’re so pretty. Why can’t I have one now?” Ava whined.
“Because you can’t.” It was the worst sort of maternal response but she was just about out of patience for the day.
Undeterred, Silas reached on tiptoe for one but still couldn’t reach. If she hadn’t been focused on the photographs for her blog and social media properties, she might have seen the telltale signs of a tantrum. The jutted-out lip, the rising color, the obstinate jawline.
He grunted and tried to reach.
“See? Silas wants one, too,” Ava informed her. “Daddy would give us one.”
“I’m sure he would. But Daddy’s not here right now, is he?”
All right. She was heading straight into full-on bitch mode. It wasn’t Ava’s fault that her father seemed to be spending more and more time working these days.
She wanted to think it was simply an uptick in the construction business that had him leaving before sunrise and coming home after dark most days. As the owner of a successful roofing company, her husband had plenty of obligations outside the home—which meant most of the work inside the home fell on Rachel’s shoulders.
She hoped work was the reason Cody was gone so much, anyway, and that he wasn’t trying to avoid the hard realities of home life, especially their son’s early diagnosis of autism two months earlier.
When Cody was home, he seemed distracted, as if he couldn’t wait to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.
She shoved down the low, constant thrum of anxiety to focus on her children. “A granola bar or nothing,” she told Ava. “Those are your choices until dinner. Silas, you can’t do that. No. Play with your car on the floor.”
As she might have expected, her son ignored her. She might as well have been talking to one of those flower-shaped cookies. He continued driving his car along the edge of the island.
At least he hadn’t had a meltdown over not getting a cookie. Rachel decided to focus on the positive as she took a few more shots of two cookies on a piece of antique china she had picked up at a thrift store.
This would make a beautiful post about spring baking when she shared the recipe on her blog, she thought.
Her phone rang with Cody’s distinctive ringtone, a jazz song they had danced to on an amazing trip to Sonoma for their anniversary some years back.
She was quite certain she had conceived Silas on that trip.
Even though doctors had told her it wasn’t the case, Rachel still wondered whether Silas’s autism was a result of all the wine she had consumed, in between magical afternoons spent making love.
“Hi,” she said breathlessly. Oh, how she missed sex. It had been weeks, for one reason or another.
“Hey, babe. I’m going to be late again. I’m sorry. I’m down two guys and the job is taking longer than we thought. It’s supposed to rain overnight and we can’t leave the Tanners with a hole in their roof.”
“Again? You promised you would be home on time tonight! I have my book group, remember?”
Rachel had been holding on desperately to the idea of a little adult conversation. Okay, most of the time her group rarely actually managed to make time to discuss the book. It was more about drinking wine and having a discussion that didn’t involve her wiping someone’s nose or telling someone else to stop jumping on the furniture.
“Oh, damn. I completely forgot about book group. Maybe my mom could sit with the kids until I get home.”
He could remember the batting average of every single hitter on the Giants lineup but didn’t bother to remember the one night a month when she could pretend to have a life outside her kids.