Too Good to Be True(95)

A soft knock came on my front door, and I glanced at the clock. Eight minutes past nine. Angus had fallen too deeply asleep to go into his usual rage, luckily, so I tiptoed to the door, turning on a light as I went, figuring it was Callahan.

It wasn’t.

Andrew stood on my porch. “Hey, Grace,” he said in his quiet voice. “Do you have a minute?”

“Sure,” I answered slowly. “Come on in.”

The last time Andrew had seen the home we were going to live in together, it had been only half-Sheetrocked, wires and insulation exposed, the kitchen just a gaping hole. The floors had been rough and broken in places, the stairs stained and dark with age.

“Wow,” he said, turning in a slow circle. Angus popped up from the couch. Before he could maul Andrew, however, I picked him up.

“Want a tour?” I asked, clearing my throat.

“Sure,” he answered, ignoring Angus’s purring snarls. “Grace, it’s beautiful.”

“Thanks,” I said, bemused. “Well, here’s the dining room, obviously, and the kitchen. That’s my office, remember, it was a closet before?”

“Oh, my God, that’s right,” he said. “And wow, you knocked down the bedroom wall, didn’t you?”

“Mmm-hmm,” I murmured. “Yup. I figured…well, I just wanted a bigger kitchen.”

The original plan was that there’d be a downstairs bedroom, you see. We were planning to have at least two kids, possibly three, so we planned on both upstairs bedrooms being theirs. Then, later, when our clever children went off to college and Andrew and I got older, we wouldn’t have to worry about schlepping up and down the stairs. Now what was once going to be a bedroom—our bedroom—was my office.

My Fritz the Cat clock ticked loudly on the wall, tail swishing in brittle motion. Tick…tick…tick… “Can I see upstairs, too?” Andrew asked.

“Of course,” I said, holding Angus a little tighter. I followed Andrew up the narrow stairs, noticing how he was still so scrawny and slight. Had I once found that endearing? “So this is my bedroom,” I said tersely, pointing, “and there’s the guest room, where Margaret’s staying, that’s the door to the attic—I haven’t done anything up there yet. And at the end of the hall is the bathroom.”

Andrew walked down the hall, peeking in the various doorways, then stuck his head in the loo. “Our tub,” he said fondly.

“My tub,” I corrected instantly. My voice was hard.

He gave a mock grimace. “Oops. Sorry. You’re right. Well, it looks beautiful.”

We’d found the old porcelain claw-foot tub in Vermont one weekend when we’d gone antiquing and bed-andbreakfasting and lovemaking. It had been in someone’s yard, an old Yankee farmer who once had his pigs use it as a water trough. He sold it to us for fifty bucks, and the three of us had practically killed ourselves getting it into the back of Andrew’s Subaru. I found a place that reglazed tubs, and when it came back to us, it was shiny and white and pure. Andrew had suggested that, while it wasn’t yet hooked up to the plumbing, maybe we could get na**d and climb in just the same. Which we had done. A week later, he dumped me. I couldn’t believe I’d kept the thing.

“It’s amazing. What a great job you’ve done,” he said, smiling proudly at me.

“Thanks,” I said, heading downstairs. Andrew followed. “Would you like a glass of water? Coffee? Wine? Beer?”

I rolled my eyes at myself. Why not just bake the man a cake, Grace? Maybe grill up a few shrimp and a filet mignon?

“I’ll take a glass of wine,” he said. “Thanks, Grace.”

He followed me into the kitchen, murmuring appreciatively as he noticed little details—the crown molding, the cuckoo clock in the hall, the cluster of heavy architectural stars I’d bolted to the wall behind the kitchen table.

“So why the visit, Andrew?” I asked, carrying two glasses of wine into the living room. He sat on the Victorian sofa that had cost so much to reupholster. I took the wing chair, handed Angus a misshapen hunk of rawhide to discourage him from eating Andrew’s shoes and looked at my sister’s fiancé.

He took a deep breath and smiled. “Well, this is a little awkward, Grace, but I felt I should…well, ask you something.”

My heart dropped into my stomach, sitting there like a peach pit. “Okay.”

He looked at the floor. “Well, I…this is uncomfortable for me.” He broke off, looked up and made one of his goofy faces.

I smiled uncertainly.

“I guess I’ll just blurt this out,” he said. “Gracie, what are you doing with that guy?”

The peach pit seemed to turn, scraping my insides unpleasantly, and my smile dropped from my face as if it was made from granite. Andrew waited, a kindly, concerned expression on his face. “What do you mean?” I asked, my voice quiet and shaky.

Andrew scratched his cheek. “Grace,” he said very softly, leaning forward, “forgive me for asking this, but does this have something to do with Natalie and me?”

“Excuse me?” I asked, my voice squeaking. I reached for my dog and lifted him to sit protectively on my lap.

Angus dropped the rawhide and growled obediently at Andrew. Good dog.

Andrew took a quick breath. “Look, I’ll just come right out with this, Grace. That guy doesn’t seem, well, right for you. An ex-con, Gracie? Is that really what you want? I…well, I never met the other guy, Wyatt, was it? The doctor? But from what Natalie said, he sounded great.”