Lost Along the Way(86)

“Catch!” Meg said as the phone went flying through the air. She glanced around at the other ladies having lunch, who were leering at them for the second time in an hour, and made a mental note to never return to this restaurant for lunch. Probably not for dinner either, but definitely not for lunch.

“Give me back my phone, you psycho!” Sheila yelled as she ran toward Cara. Unfortunately for Sheila, she’d picked the wrong day to mess with this particular group of women. Cara calmly dropped the cell phone into the ice bucket that had held their wine bottles for the duration of lunch. They watched as it drowned in the icy water.

“You just destroyed my personal property!” Sheila screamed.

“It’s quite annoying when people get in your personal space, isn’t it?” Jane said. “Maybe you should think about that next time you want to take a run at me!”

“Listen,” Meg said calmly, trying to keep the situation from spiraling into a different level of crazy. “I’m a friend of Nick’s, and he told me how you’d already planned to sell photos of Mrs. Logan for your own personal gain, which is not only an invasion of her privacy, but also just plain creepy. Plus, I don’t know how the local celebs would feel about a trigger-happy girl working in the coffeehouse where they go in the morning for bagels and caffeine wearing pajamas and no makeup. So assuming you want to keep your job, I suggest you buy a new cell phone and stop bothering people who have nothing to do with you. Otherwise, I’ll make sure your boss, your parents, and the editors of the local newspapers know what you’re up to in order to make some extra cash, and you can kiss your summer tips good-bye forever.”

“Now get out of here before we break more than your cell phone,” Cara said.

“I think you just found your fire again,” Jane said as Sheila stormed out of the restaurant.

“I’m really sorry for the disruption!” Meg said to the waitress as she quickly signed her name on the credit card receipt.

“Don’t say you’re sorry. You’re not sorry. She started it!” Jane said, still shooting eye darts at Sheila as she hurried down the block.

“I’m a little bit sorry,” Meg said, holding her fingers up an inch apart. “Just a little.”

“I think we should go now,” Cara said, fishing the phone out of the bottom of the bucket and throwing it in her purse. “I’m going to keep this. I don’t want to risk her being able to pull something off it.”

“Smart. Thank you,” Jane said.

“No problem. Now let’s go. I need another drink, and I can’t afford to have one here,” Cara said as she made her way toward the front door.

And that was yet another something they could all agree on.





twenty-eight


It was Tuesday afternoon and Cara hadn’t heard from Reed once since she’d left the house four days ago. He’d never called to find out where she went or sent a text asking what prompted her to leave or begged her to come back in a carefully worded e-mail. He wasn’t planning on sweet-talking her into coming home; he was planning on humiliating her and forcing her to come back whether she wanted to or not by cutting off her credit and debit cards. When they returned to the house, Cara immediately sprinted upstairs to her room and grabbed her cell phone from the top of the bureau, knowing that she’d have a message. She stared at the text on her phone and her head started to throb. She wondered if Jane had any pills left. She was so going to need them.

Friday is Neal Booker’s birthday party. Cody picking us up at 7. Come home. Now.

Typical, Cara thought. He didn’t care that she had run away from home to God knows where with God knows who, but he’d be damned if he was going to have to show up to a social commitment alone. Reed had spent his entire life upholding the legacy of his family’s name, and he’d die before he let Cara disgrace that. She didn’t know what she was going to do, or how she was going to get out of this, but she knew one thing with absolute certainty: there was no f*cking way she was going to that party.

She’d never liked charades and she was done playing along.

She padded downstairs in her socks and found the girls sitting in silence at the kitchen table with mugs of coffee. Cara knew that they didn’t know what to say and were waiting for her to speak first. She collapsed in the chair next to Meg and took a sip from Jane’s drink. Then she gagged and had to control her urge to spit the coffee back into the mug.

“Oh my God, what is in this?” she asked.

“Whiskey,” Jane answered unapologetically. “Today we need the hard stuff.”

“Who puts whiskey in their coffee?” Cara asked.

“Irish people. That’s why it’s called Irish coffee. Though the better question is: Who puts coffee in their whiskey?” Jane asked.

“That’s disgusting,” Cara said, reaching to take another sip. “Hand it over. You’re right, today I need the hard stuff.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Meg asked.

“What’s there to talk about? I need to figure out what I’m going to do about going home,” Cara said quietly. “I knew this was going to happen eventually. My little mini vacation is over. I got four days of happiness and now I have to face the fact that I can’t hide here forever, especially without a line of credit. I’m thirty-seven, not sixteen. I’m too old to just run away from home with absolutely no clue as to what I’m going to do next.”