Anything for Her(94)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN



NOLAN HAD MADE Sean’s favorite dinner. He wasn’t very hungry himself, but he watched as Sean slurped spaghetti into his mouth, shoveled in garlic bread and generally consumed enough food to have fed three or four normal people.

The kid managed to talk during a good deal of the meal, too, but Nolan refrained from issuing a lecture on not talking when your mouth was full. He was too grateful not to have to say much himself.

“Are you done with your torpedo thing?” Sean asked as he polished his plate with a last scrap of bread.

“No, I’ve been too busy with other work.”

“You don’t seem to be in a very good mood.”

And he’d tried damned hard to hide his mood. Apparently he wasn’t much of an actor.

“I guess not,” he admitted. “Allie and I have hit a bad patch. I kind of think we’re over.”

“What?”

“You heard me.” He pushed back his chair and started clearing the dirty dishes.

“But...did you do something?”

Punched by anguish, all he could do was lock his knees and stand there so he didn’t stagger, hands full of dishes. “Yeah,” he said hoarsely, when he could speak at all. “You could say that.”

“What...?”

“I can’t tell you, Sean. She’s got some stuff going on I didn’t understand. I screwed up. Sometimes saying you’re sorry is good enough, sometimes it isn’t. This is one of the times when it isn’t.”

“Wow.” The teenager rose to his feet. “That’s a bummer.”

A bummer. In a different mood, he might have laughed. A bummer was missing an important shot in a game. Not being able to find a parking spot, so you ended up walking ten blocks in the rain. Hurting the woman he loved, losing her, that fell into an entirely different category.

So did finding out that what she called love was too shallow to qualify in his book.

Not fair, he told himself after escaping to the kitchen, as he scraped a good deal of his dinner into the garbage bin.

There was no doubt that she did love her mother. Maybe it wasn’t reasonable for him to think he could compete given that he and she had only known each other for a couple of months.

And that he’d just broken her trust in him with a solid swing of his mallet. He’d seen fine chunks of stone shatter and fall apart in exactly the same way when he’d been careless.

“There’s nothing you can do?” Sean asked behind him.

“I don’t think so.” He rinsed off a plate and put it on the rack in the dishwasher.

“You’re sure?”

“Damn it, butt out!” he snarled.

It took all of about ten seconds for chagrin to kick in, but when he turned he found himself alone in the kitchen. He slapped his hand down on the countertop hard enough to sting, not nearly punishment enough.

You’re sure?

No, he thought. No, he wasn’t sure.

His head seemed to clear. For all his hurt, he couldn’t see letting Allie go without trying something, anything, to keep her. To convince her that she could trust him.

“Shit,” he said aloud, and reached for his phone to call his sister. Good excuse to put off apologizing to Sean.

* * *

HIGH ON ALL the excitement, Allie’s mother phoned with regular updates.

The U.S. Marshal had spoken to Nolan, who didn’t believe he’d ever told the P.I. where he lived. Most of their transactions had taken place online. The only solid clue would have been the area code for Nolan’s mobile phone, which happened to be 206 for Seattle rather than 360 for the rural northwest part of the state.

Nolan was forwarding the report with specifics that the investigator had prepared for him. The marshal’s office wanted to pin down everything the P.I. had done so as to determine whether there had been any other activity beyond what he had generated.

“They’re pleased Nolan is being so cooperative,” Mom reported.

In another phone call, she told Allie that so far, all indications were that the private investigator was ethical. With nearly the next breath, she added that she had partially packed, in case the move came suddenly. “I hope you’ve done the same,” she said.

Allie went home that evening and looked around her small apartment. What would she take? Leave? She was dismayed to realize how little she actually owned. A few pieces of artwork, but none that were very expensive; furniture she liked, but which could easily be replaced; clothes, of course, but even there she didn’t have a huge wardrobe. She didn’t share the passion many women felt for shoes or jewelry or shopping in general. Some books, but she mostly used the library.