Such a Beautiful Family: A Thriller(48)

“I changed my mind.”

“Because of your boyfriend, Alex?”

Hailey narrowed her eyes. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Then why are you guys always kissing?” Trevor asked.

Hailey blushed and then jumped to her feet and tossed her napkin on the chair. “I’m not leaving. If you sell the house, I’ll move in with Jane.”

Nora’s heart skipped a beat. “You will do no such thing.”

Hailey looked at her dad as if she hoped he would jump to her defense.

“Sit down,” David said, “and let’s discuss this calmly.”

Trevor, Nora noticed, appeared to be entertained by it all, eating his dinner, chin to plate, watching the scene unfold, his gaze falling on whoever was speaking.

Hailey gestured toward Nora but kept her gaze pinned on David. “How can we talk this over calmly when Mom is making demands like that? She hates Auntie Jane because Auntie Jane is everything she is not: kind and generous and always there for us. It’s not fair.”

Nora drew in a breath, then inwardly counted to three as she exhaled. So there it was, just as Nora had suspected, the truth of the matter. Jane had managed, in a matter of months, to swoop in and replace her.

“We’re moving,” Nora said, pushing herself to her feet. “The house will be put on the market by the end of the month.” She hadn’t called a broker yet, but she would do so first thing in the morning.

Hailey’s words had cut to the core of why she had quit her job at IMPACT. She wanted . . . needed . . . to get her family as far away from Jane as possible.

And the sooner the better.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The next few weeks passed in a blur, giving Nora little time to worry about Hailey’s moodiness. Throw in Christmas approaching and it only tripled the madness. Every day at 5:00 a.m., Nora jumped out of bed at the sound of her alarm and then proceeded to run around at a nonstop pace until bedtime. Once her parents had been moved into the cottage, she had hired a roofer and a painter and driven back and forth between Sacramento and Whispering Pines, doing her best to eat meals with her family in order to stay connected.

Surprisingly, Nora and Jane had been able to find common ground when it came to work, which allowed Nora the space needed to use her office to interview candidates to take her place while helping David to ready their own house and get it on the market.

Today was Saturday. Christmas was approaching quickly, and despite having so much to do, Nora was excited about the Harmon family spending the holidays in Whispering Pines. She was in the kitchen, wrapping dishes in packing paper, when David joined her.

“Where are the kids?” David asked.

“Hailey and Trevor are packing up their rooms, labeling boxes and taking them to the garage.”

He looked around. “Do you need help in here?”

“If you could get started on sorting through everything in the garage, that would be great.”

“Aye-aye, Captain.”

She smiled. “Thanks for being a good sport about all of this.”

“If it were my parents going through tough times, I would want to be near them, too. We’re a team, right?”

The look in his eyes expressed that he wanted things to be okay between them. His lies, or what he liked to call his “attempt to not stress her out further,” had put a strain on their relationship. How many more secrets was he hiding? she wondered. How could two people be a team if they didn’t communicate? But now wasn’t the time to question and analyze, so she nodded and said, “Yes. We’re a team.”

Through the kitchen window, she saw a black Porsche Cayenne pull into the driveway. “Someone’s here.”

David peered over her shoulder. “Looks like Richard and Jane.”

Odd, Nora thought as she headed for the front entry. They hadn’t seen Richard since the barbecue.

David followed Nora out the door and down the path toward the driveway, where both Richard and Jane were climbing out of the car. The sky was overcast, and Nora pulled her sweater tighter around her to keep out the chill.

Jane was beaming. Her eyes bright, her smile wide.

Nora had no idea what was going on until Jane lifted her left hand and waggled her ring finger. A two-carat diamond sparkled. “He asked me last night, and when we woke up this morning, I told him we needed to drive straight to the Harmons’.”

Nora’s first thought was, Why? Her second, What the fuck? This strange relationship of theirs kept getting weirder. In the past few weeks, they had hardly said two words to each other, but here she was with Richard, a man Nora had begun to think had simply disappeared off the face of the earth. “Wow!” Nora shook her head, trying to muster up excitement. “I’m happy for you both.”

Nora didn’t want to give Jane the wrong idea, but she also liked to think she was a good person with compassion. She would never go out of her way to dampen Jane’s or Richard’s excitement, so she gave Jane a hug.

Jane squealed. “Can you believe it?”

“It’s . . . very exciting news,” Nora said. “I’m really, really happy for you two.”

David circled the front of the car and shook Richard’s hand. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks. My nerves almost got the best of me,” Richard said. “But once she said yes, I could breathe again.”