The Last of the Moon Girls(2)

But six months after her coveted promotion, she was still trying to wrap her arms around the new position and the recent flurry of changes in her life. There hadn’t been time to tell Althea—at least that’s what she’d been telling herself. The truth was their communication had grown increasingly spotty over the years. Not out of laziness, but out of guilt. It felt wrong to crow about her success when her grandmother had been forced to watch her own life’s work—her beloved farm—wither and die. Instead, she’d convinced herself the checks she sent from time to time would atone for an eight-year absence, for letters that went unanswered and phone calls that came only rarely. They didn’t, of course. Nothing could. And now it was too late to tell Althea anything.

She tried to digest it—a world without Althea Moon—but couldn’t manage it somehow. How could such a woman, so rich in wisdom, life, and love, who seemed to have sprung from the very soil she loved and tended, ever be gone?

She’d never mentioned being sick. Not once in all her long, newsy letters. Yet Evangeline Broussard’s letter had mentioned a prolonged illness. Why would Althea have kept such a thing from her?

“Ah, you’re here—finally.”

Lizzy blinked back a fresh sting of tears, dismayed to find Luc Chenier hovering in her office doorway. He’d just had a haircut, and looked even more devastating than usual in his ubertailored black Brioni. He knew it too, which used to annoy her when they were seeing each other, but didn’t anymore.

She sniffed away the remnants of her tears. The last thing she needed was to be caught crying at her desk by the man who’d just green-lighted her promotion—or to be peppered with uncomfortable questions, which she would be if he thought for a minute that she was holding something back. She glanced up at him, hoping to appear unruffled as she swept the journal into her lap and out of sight.

“Did you need something?”

He turned on the smile, recently whitened by the look of it. “I came looking for you at lunchtime, but they said you had a meeting.”

“I was with marketing, trying to nail down the concepts for the new print campaign. We’re not quite there yet, but we should have—”

Luc cut her off with the wave of a hand. “Come out with me after work. I was going to take you to lunch, but dinner’s better, don’t you think?”

No, she didn’t think, though it didn’t surprise her that he did. He was used to getting his way. And why wouldn’t he be? The man positively oozed charm. It didn’t hurt that he looked like Johnny Depp without the eyeliner, or that he’d retained a hint of his mother’s French accent. But those things had quickly lost their appeal.

They’d done their best to keep things quiet. No office flirtations or public displays of affection. No lunches that didn’t include a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint handout. But the night her promotion was announced they’d gone to Daniel to celebrate, and run smack into Reynold Ackerman, an attorney from legal, who happened to be there with his wife, celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary. That was when she knew she had a choice to make—end things or become the office cliché.

She’d ended it the next day. Luc had taken it well enough, perhaps because they’d established ground rules early on. When the time came, either party could walk away. No tears. No recriminations. But lately, he’d been signaling that maybe they should pick up where they’d left off. A nonstarter, as far as she was concerned.

“So tonight, then?” he prompted from the doorway. “We can do Italian.”

“I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll book us a table at Scarpetta. The cannoli alone—”

“My grandmother died,” she blurted. “I just got the letter.”

Luc had the good grace to drop the smile. He stepped into the office and closed the door behind him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know she was sick.”

“Neither did I.” The words stung more than Lizzy expected, and she found herself having to look away. Crying on each other’s shoulders hadn’t been part of their arrangement, and she wasn’t about to start now. “Apparently, she’d been keeping it from me.”

“I don’t remember you talking about her much. Or any of your family, for that matter. Were you close?”

“We were,” she said evenly. “She basically raised me.”

“Tough break.”

Lizzy stared up at him from her desk chair. Tough break? That’s what you say to someone when a person they love dies? And yet she shouldn’t be surprised. She’d seen him deal with death before.

They’d been seeing each other on the quiet for several months when Luc’s mother, and Lizzy’s mentor in the world of fragrance, finally lost her battle with cervical cancer. Lizzy had watched him at the funeral, shaking hands and accepting condolences, playing the dutiful son. But as the afternoon wore on, she couldn’t help thinking that that was precisely what he was doing—playing a role. Initially, she had attributed the lack of grief to the lingering nature of his mother’s illness. He’d had time to prepare, to make his peace and say goodbye. Now she wondered if she’d given him too much credit.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said finally, reaching across the desk to lay a hand over hers. “You’ll want to go home, of course, for the funeral.”