Love Handles (Oakland Hills #1)(12)

Hilda’s mouth dropped open, and for a split-second something soft and uneasy flickered in her eyes. Then it hardened into naked contempt. “You don’t want to be a teacher.” She sat up bolt upright. “You want to be a mommy. Young women like you say you want to devote your lives to other people’s children. It’s a lie. You’re lying to me, you’re lying to the children, and you’re lying to yourself. Now that you’ve hit thirty you’ll realize you want your own baby and walk away. It’s written all over you.”

“You never had children.”

Hilda shook her head in disgust. “You’re not me. You want children you can manage. Line up and show off. Just like Jacob’s mother last year, getting him head shots, taking him to auditions. At three years of age!”

“So I’m like a stage mom? Because I helped the kids make valentines?”

“Two words,” she said. “Annabelle Tucker.”

Bev sucked in her breath. So that’s what this was about. Not her job performance, not the affection the children held for her, not the meddling in art projects—Hilda nursed a grudge about a child Bev had first met in the university child care center over a decade ago. Bev had been a student teacher, getting her degree. Later, she had babysat Annabelle for years to help pay the bills. Last year, Annabelle, then fifteen, had asked Bev for an introduction to her father, a Hollywood exec. Now the girl had her own show on the Disney Channel.

“It wasn’t my idea, but it seemed the nice thing to do,” Bev said. “I didn’t feel it was my place to make any career decisions for her.”

Hilda shrugged. “Like I said, you’d be better someplace else.”

Molars clenched together, Bev took a step backwards, then another, out through the door until Hilda’s face and its smug disapproval went out of focus. She kept moving until all she could see was the frame around the door and the rows of cubbies on the wall, then she turned away from the office and wandered through the playroom. She paused to tidy up a pile of foam blocks, willing her hands to stop shaking.

When she reached the backyard, chest heaving with the effort to breathe, the kids presented her with a farewell bucketful of roly-polies, and for once, their Ms. Bef was too angry to cry when she said goodbye.



The apartment building was surprisingly shabby. Liam frowned at the chipped concrete structure in the middle of the modest southern Californian street, double-checking the address on his phone. He could even hear the roar of I-5 from inside his car, her street not seeming to have the clout to extend the concrete sound barrier from its wealthier neighbors. Maybe he’d made a mistake while inputting the number he got from the lawyer. The ranch houses on the rest of the street, though, were too small to be broken into apartments, and hers was definitely 2B, as in “to be.” He remembered that part in particular.

She must live in the big shithole then, the one with the rusty dial-up box outside the propped-open security gate and gravel lawn and the dead shrubs lined up in geometrical precision along the sidewalk.

He wondered if she gave them bottled water.

He’d be in a better bargaining position from inside the building, not begging for an audience through an intercom with a gate between them. Even an open one. Smoothing down his dress shirt, straightening his tie, he decided to appeal to the mercenary spirit Ed had bemoaned all these years as the only unifying family trait.

Liam frowned at the useless security gate as he walked into the building. The elevator had a Post-It note over the call button declaring “Broke”so he found the stairs. At least it didn’t smell like piss. The idea of her living where random thugs off the street could hide out in the stairwell bothered him.

Why did Ed’s granddaughter live in such a dump? He pulled open the fire door—surprisingly functional—and strode down the hallway, looking at door numbers. Beverly Lewis’s was in the middle on the left, not even the end unit. She had neighbors on all three sides and a kidney-shaped brown stain on the carpet in front of her apartment.

He wrinkled his nose and knocked on her front door, his knuckles making a hollow, tapping sound in the cheap wood. Music turned off, and footsteps approached the door.

“Hello?” Eyes red and pale skin splotchy, Bev peered out at him through a foot-wide crack.

“Hi. It’s Liam Johnson. From Fite. I’m sorry to barge in on you like this, but I couldn’t risk the wait.”

“Liam Johnson?” Her sad face lit up with rage. “You! What are you doing here? You’re in my building.”

“Unfortunately.” He glanced over his shoulder. “At least I don’t have to live here.”

“What?”

“Sorry. May I come in?”

“You came all this way to insult me?”

“Not at all. I’m here to point out that you don’t have to live here either.” He glanced over her shoulder and gestured inside. “May I?”

She didn’t move. “You have no idea how badly you screwed up my life. And now you just barge into my home and insult me. What’s the matter with people? Couldn’t you have been decent and respectful and used the phone? Didn’t I deserve at least that courtesy?”

Taking in her tears and the illogical rant she’d flown off into, Liam concluded Bev was upset about something other than his sudden arrival. “I apologize. Would you have answered?”