by Anne Calhoun
Then Cady threw down a rapper flip of the hands. “Gangsta-style,” she said. “Remember when we used to watch videos and copy the moves?”
Conn thought she looked adorable, prancing and posing, but Emily shook her head. “Be serious. This is important.”
“What about up here?” Cady asked, patting the top rail of the fence.
“You go ahead,” Emily said, looking like she regretted wearing her skirt. Her tights couldn’t be that warm.
With a sweep of her mittened hand, Cady cleared the rail of snow, then climbed up and plunked herself down. Emily leaned back beside her, hands in her pockets, expressionless again. Conn took a few more pictures, then Cady stealthily gathered a fistful of snow and sifted it over Emily’s head. Her face was the picture of mischievous teasing. Conn got several great shots before enough snow melted into Emily’s hair for her to realize what was going on.
“Cady!” she shrieked, then grabbed two handfuls of snow and flung them at her sister.
Laughing, Cady threw up her hands, overbalanced, and had to grab the rail to prevent herself from tipping backward into the snow bank. Emily took full advantage, gathering as much powdery snow as she could and hurling it at Cady, who launched herself from the rail to the ground and swatted a glinting snowy curtain at Emily.
The snow was too dry to pack, and both girls were laughing too hard to do any serious damage to each other. By the time they ran out of breath, Cady’s cheeks were glowing pink, and snow dusted Conn’s hat, her braid, and the moss green coat. Emily had fared no better, her heavy bangs dotted with droplets of melted snow. She wrapped both of her arms around Cady, and turned to her mother.
“Take our picture, Mom,” she commanded.
She bent her head to Cady’s. Smiling, her mother held up her camera and tapped the screen. Conn took a couple himself, first of Cady and Emily, arms around each other, smiling genuine smiles, not the fake ones for the covers of magazines, then of the three women, the family held together by tradition and a mother’s will.
He’d never aspired to Shane’s family life, a big extended family full of loving people who had their moments but held strong. He could be with them and not feel a hint of regret, because it was so far outside his experience. But being with Cady’s family, he got a firsthand look into the kind of family he could have had. Broken. Real.
“Can we please get a tree now?” Cady asked, swatting her hands together to clear the clumps of snow from her mittens.
“Sure,” Emily said absently. She’d reclaimed her phone from Conn and was going through the photos. She gave him a surprised glance. “These are pretty good.”
“Thanks,” Conn said. “I take pictures for work.”
“You do?”
“Sure. Crime scenes, stakeouts, evidence.”
“Crime scenes. Ewww,” she said.
“Say thank you, Conn,” Patty said.
“Thank you, Conn,” Emily repeated.
Emily pulled Cady behind a convenient large tree, presumably to help her balance while she pulled on her jeans. When they emerged, Emily looked both warmer and happier than Conn had ever seen her. They slogged through the snow to the other side of the lot where the balsam firs grew in clusters Conn knew were carefully plotted to seem random and attractive.
“This one,” Emily said, pointing at a bristling monstrosity that had to be twenty-five feet tall.
“Unless it’s going in front of city hall, it’s too tall,” Conn said.
“No, it’s not,” Emily said.
“This happens every year,” Cady said. “They look so small out here, under the sky, but then you get them home and they take over your living room.”
“You have a huge living room now,” Emily pointed out.
“Not big enough for that one,” Cady said. “We could hide an entire family of deer in that tree.”
“What about this one?” Patty asked, standing beside a more modestly sized tree.
“He’s a little thin,” Cady said. “He needs another year to fill out. That one.”
“Conn?” Patty said.
His heart thrilled a little to be automatically included. “It’ll fit under the ceilings.”
“Just barely or is it going to look stumpy? Give me the Goldilocks fit.”
“You might have to shift the furniture a little, but it’s a good size.”
“All in favor?” Cady said, lifting her hand in the air.
“Fine,” Emily said, but she raised her hand. “Think small, all of you.”
Patty raised hers, then all three women looked at Conn.
“What?”
“You get a vote.”
“Me? Why me?”
“You’re here,” Cady said. Her voice was raspy, warm, like a shot of whiskey. She still wore Conn’s hat, and her golden green eyes danced under the black brim.
His hands were jammed in his pockets. Unless he was working, they always were. But Cady’s family was looking at him, waiting for him to join in. Slowly, he lifted his right hand.
“Excellent. Consensus,” Cady said. “Hand over the saw.”
“I’ll do it,” her mother said.
“I’ve got it, Mom,” she said.
“I’m not doing it,” Emily said. She was thumbing away at her phone. “Last year it took me a week to get the sap out of my hair and we found a dead fox carcass under the tree. It was gross.”
“I’ll do it,” Conn said, tightening his grip on the saw’s handle.
“Really, Mom and I can do this,” Cady said.
“Is it tradition?”
“I’m happy to include someone else in this particular part of the tradition,” Patty said.
“Hold back the branches for me,” he said.
“Not in that coat!” Emily yelped, surfacing from the world of pixels and likes.
“I left my other coat in the car,” Cady pointed out. “I have to wear something. It’s freezing.”
Conn unbuttoned his jacket. “Wear mine,” he said grimly. Never in his life had he sat through so many costume changes. The only person still wearing her original outfit was Patty.
Cady gave the branches a good shake, sending snow sliding to the ground like shingles off a roof. Conn went to his knees in the dead needles carpeting the dry, hard soil under the tree, and started sawing away at the base. Cady’s mom kept her tools in good order so it didn’t take long, but by the time he finished and the tree tipped over into the snow, his hands, hair, and shirt were covered in evergreen sap. Cady didn’t look much better. While her mittens took the worst of it, his coat and hat were also smeared with sticky residue.
“Yuck,” Emily said.
“How do we get this off?” Cady said to her mother.
“Goo Gone,” Patty said.
“Let’s get the tree on the sled before we start thinking about getting sap off our clothes,” Conn said.
The tree was awkward, but not heavy, so they had it secured to the sled in a couple of minutes, but Conn, who had the heavier trunk end ended up with more sap on his hands. Emily and Patty set off for the barn, leaving Cady and Conn to haul the tree along.
“This is so outside your job description it’s not even funny. What’s the bodyguard version of combat pay?”
“No idea,” Conn said. His nose was running, his socks, shoes, and jeans were soaked, and the sweat was beginning to dry on his shirt. “It’s fine. Kind of fun, even.”
She gave him a wry smile. “Did you buy Christmas trees every year, or did you have fake ones?”
“Depended,” he said curtly. His grandmother had a fake tree she hauled out and put together, a cigarette dangling from her lips as she straightened the branches and handed them to Conn to slot into the metal stand covered in brown paper to mimic a tree trunk. Most years his uncle didn’t have one at all. Shane’s family picked one up at one of the lots that sprang up around town, and strapped it to the top of whichever minivan his mother was driving at the time. He laughed.
“What?” Cady said.
“I remember going with Shane to get a tree once. His little sister had a stomach bug, so his mom couldn’t go, and his dad was working. So his mom gives him forty bucks and sends Shane to get it. But Shane had gotten grounded for sneaking out of the house, and his dad revoked his driving privileges. His mom didn’t know about the grounding, because he was already on thin ice for something, I forget what, but it was probably something he’d done with me. So he calls me up, we drive to the lot, get a tree and tie it to the roof of the car. But Shane’s scoping out this girl working at the lot, so he’s not paying really close attention to his knots. We’re halfway home when I take the corner off Forty-third and Lake too fast, the twine snaps, and the tree flies into the intersection and takes out a row of metal trash cans.”
“Oh my God,” Cady said, laughing.
“It was an unholy noise. We were lucky we didn’t cause an accident. The cans and the tree are rolling around in the street, we’re stopping traffic in all four directions, and the lady who owned the cans comes out of her house in a flowered housecoat with her three Chihuahuas. She’s giving us hell about the cans, the other drivers are honking, and the dogs yapping at us the whole time. So we back up to the tree, hustle the cans back to the lady’s driveway, open the back doors, we jam the whole thing into my car, and drove the eight blocks home, me driving and reaching back to hold one door and him crammed in the backseat with the tree holding the other.”
“What did his mom say?”
“Nothing. She was holding someone’s throw-up bucket. His dad was just getting home from work when we pulled into the driveway. He looked at us and said ‘I don’t want to know.’”
Cady smiled, and got a firmer grip on her part of the sled’s strap. “How do we get it home?” Conn asked.
“They deliver.”
“Not a good idea right now,” Conn said.
Emily and Patty both perked up. “Strap it to my car?” Cady said in a hurry.
“It’s going to scratch the paint.”
“And look like Chevy Chase getting the tree home in Christmas Vacation,” Emily added.
“I’ll call Shane. He’s got a truck and can bring it over.”
“I don’t want to trouble him,” Cady said.
“It’s no trouble,” Conn said. “And it’s safer.”
They paid for the tree. Patty bought a round of hot chocolates, and they trooped back to Cady’s Audi. “Do I have any Goo-Gone?” Cady asked when they were inside, the heat blasting.
“I don’t think so,” Patty said. “You can borrow mine. Em and I are wet but clean.”
“It’s so weird not knowing what’s in my own house,” Cady said. She had her hot chocolate in one hand and her phone in the other. “Speaking of which, who has keys to my house?”
“I’ve got the one in the kitchen,” her mother said. “I loaned that one to the realtor to get the house set up for you. Oh, and Chris borrowed them last week.”
“Why?” Cady said.
“He took some of your stuff over to the house before the concert. I wasn’t able to go with him, because I had to work.”
“Okay, thanks. Hey, Em, when do you want me to tweet those pictures?”
“Let me mess with them first, then send you the ones I want out there. Thank you, Cady!” Bag swinging wildly, she dashed up the front steps, opened the door, and disappeared into the house. Patty followed her, then returned with a bottle of Goo Gone.
“Thanks, Mom. I’ll get the tree set up. We can decorate next weekend.”
“Sounds good, honey. Thanks again, Conn.”
“No problem.”
The roads were dry, the snow lying in sculpted drifts along the shoulder on the way back to Cady’s house.
“He could have had a copy made,” Conn said, jumping back a few hours to the reality, not the fairy tale of winter wonderlands and Christmas trees.
“He’s not here, remember?” Cady said. She’d tucked her phone into her pocket and closed her eyes.
“He could have given the copy to someone else.”
“So he’s got an accomplice in his new gaslighting business? This is so crazy I won’t even consider it. A random psycho from the internet spending his Christmas breaking into my house in Lancaster is more likely than Chris trying to scare me into dropping a record I’m having second thoughts about.”
“How much money are we talking about? Hundreds of thousands?”
“Yeah. Maybe more, if the record drop goes like the label hopes it does.” She opened her eyes and looked at him. He read so many emotions in there, the satisfaction of a day with family, physical tiredness from slogging through the snow with Emily, and a deeper worry about her future underneath it all. “I know, I know. People shot over a sandwich.”
“Or take in kids because they get money from the state. Or steal their neighbor’s eight-hundred-dollar TV, or an iPhone. What seems to us to be a lot of work isn’t to someone who stands to reap the rewards. What makes more sense to you? A person close to you who knows which buttons to push to throw you off your game and stands to benefit from your success, or a random stranger tracking you down and breaking into your house?”
She thought about that for a beat, then shifted her weight in the seat and refused to look at him.
“I’m here to protect you against a stalker. In my opinion, you don’t have one. You have a manager who sees his meal ticket getting cold feet just as his investment’s about to pay off.”
“Chris comes across like a jerk, but he isn’t one.”
“So ask him. Flat out ask him if he’s been breaking into your house.”
“No way,” Cady said, hard and fast. “I trust him, and I’m going to keep working with him. If I tell him I think he’s behind this, I damage a professional relationship that’s worked very well for me.”
“Until now.”
“Creative differences,” she said. “It happens. You work it out.”
“Like you work things out with Emily?”
“I was too hard on her. Half of the teenage girls in America fantasize about dating Harry Linton, and she actually knows someone who has. It’s just … she’s a typical teenage girl sometimes and then this super-savvy, super-driven designer in the making the rest of the time.”
Conn consciously relaxed his hands. The road conditions didn’t warrant fists clenched around the steering wheel. “I want to track down Harry Linton and beat him to a pulp.”
Cady smiled. “Because he cheated on me?”
“Because he expected you to pay him back for favors with sex.”
Her smile disappeared, and her expression clouded over. “Oh. That.”
It took him a moment to decipher her tone. “You’re ashamed. Why are you ashamed?”
“Because I did pay him back with sex. But it didn’t seem like it at the time, you know? It wasn’t until later that it felt cheap. And ugly. I really didn’t like myself afterward, or how long it took me to figure out that’s what was going on.”
“Does Chris know about this?”
“He’s perfectly aware of how power affects relationships, yes. But it’s not his job to protect me that way. My business relationships, contracts, that kind of thing, absolutely. My personal relationships? I want him as far away from those as possible. Always have.”
“But he didn’t discourage you from dating Linton like you’re discouraging your sister from running after older, more powerful men.”
“No. I wasn’t sixteen, or an industry virgin. I know what lots and lots of guys in bands are like. Music is cool, sure, and a super way to get girls. All the girls you want. Or guys. I walked into that with my eyes wide open.”
“You’d dated enough to know?”
“Not really,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Normally I never date musicians. We’re flaky, and bad bets when it comes to relationships.”
She stopped short, as if she’d remembered she was talking to the guy she was … dating? Sleeping with. Conn stepped in. “People say the same thing
about cops. It takes the right kind of woman to put up with the hours, the stress, what it can do to your head.”
“Yeah. Exactly.” She cleared her throat. “I never wanted to date the guy in the band. I wanted to be the guy in the band.”
Silence cloaked the car, matching the deepening shadows thrown by the forest around Cady’s gated community. Out of the corner of his eye Conn looked at her, getting little glimpses of her expression, the way she nibbled at her chapped lower lip when she was deep in thought, the way his hat covered her forehead and made her eyes huge, moss green. She wasn’t for him. No matter what happened, whether she dropped the album or spent months writing new material of her own, Cady Ward was a woman leaving Lancaster. She might call the city he protected and served “home,” but he knew how meaningless that word was when home was really a tour bus, or an airplane, or a thousand bland hotel rooms all over the world. Home was her music, her fans, the audience that filled auditoriums and bleachers and maybe stadiums.
“You get used to it after a while,” she said, seemingly out of nowhere.
“Get used to what?”
“Blurring the lines between favors, until everything feels like a transaction, like you’re using and being used. It makes it hard to trust people. Evan, my previous bodyguard had a career plan,” she said matter-of-factly. “I was just a stepping stone to the big money and visibility—Hollywood. He wanted to get into acting. That’s why I quizzed you at the police station. For all I knew you wanted the job because you’d gotten a taste of being a big shot bodyguard at the concert. You knowing nothing about the business sealed the deal.”
“I’ve got a job,” Conn said. “It’s the only job I’ve ever wanted. I’m LPD, and I’m sure as hell not going anywhere.”
The words came out more roughly than he intended. What should have been a lighthearted, reassuring response that matched their casual connection now sounded defensive, like he was hurt, or worse, slapping her down for assuming he was like all the other men in her life. But it burned to think of another man protecting her, let alone taking his place in her bed. In her life. In a few weeks Cady would pack up and leave again, and he’d be here, with …
