She wrinkles her nose. “No time of day is good for negativity, hon.”
“It’s not negativity. It’s…practicality. It’s realism.”
“It’s bullshit is what it is,” pronounces Suzanne with finality, giving me a small shake. “Don’t let life rob you of hope just because it’s kicked you in the balls a few times.” She pauses. “Metaphorically speaking, of course. I wasn’t insinuating I think you have testicles.”
“Oh, but I do,” I say with a straight face. “Big steel testicles that clang when I walk.”
“I was wondering what that noise was,” Suzanne shoots back. “I thought maybe you had the Liberty Bell stuffed up your vag.”
Then we’re laughing. It feels good after all the tension and confusion of the past few days.
She asks, “All kidding aside, how are you? Really?”
I sigh, glancing back at the house. “I’m fine. A little weirded out about Theo, but that’s nothing new.”
Suzanne arches her brows. “Don’t tell me he glared at you again. Coop let me in and said everything was going great.”
I meet her gaze, relieved to have someone to talk to about the subject of Mr. Mysterious. “Theo showed up before the firemen did last night. He got here when I was still on the line with 9-1-1. He had to be, like, right outside the house.”
She does a slow blink that’s almost comical in its exaggeration. “In the middle of the night?”
“I know, it’s weird, right?
Her expression turns horrified. “You’re not saying you think he’s responsible, are you?”
“Oh, no, not at all,” I reassure her, because she looks like she might pass out at the thought. “The outlet where the fire started has been making strange noises since I moved in, and all the lights in the house flicker. I knew the wiring was shot. And Theo had to break through a wall with a sledgehammer to get to where the flames were. There’s no way he could’ve started anything.”
Suzanne looks confused. “Break through a wall?”
“The fire started between the walls. Something to do with an arc failure. The firemen explained it, but the bottom line is that Theo, somehow, was outside my house when it happened. The question is why?”
Suzanne runs a hand over her head, smoothing away a few dark tendrils that have escaped from her ponytail and are trailing into her face, teased by the ocean breeze. “Did you ask him?”
“Of course I asked him. And he did his usual impression of a slab of granite and refused to answer.”
I don’t mention his strange note. It feels too intimate, as if telling someone else would be breaking a confidence. Spilling a secret meant just for me.
Suzanne draws a breath, shaking her head. “Well, I don’t know what to tell you. He does have a reputation for being nocturnal.”
“Yeah, one of the firemen said that he wanders around at night, keeping his eye on things.”
“So maybe just chalk it up to coincidence. He happened to be wandering in your neighborhood at the right time.” When I give her a dubious look, she adds tartly, “Hey, you’re the one who thinks everything is pure chance.”
There’s chance and then there’s circumstance, and I know Theo’s arrival wasn’t a random event. He was here at that time for a reason, even if I don’t understand what that reason is.
Yet.
My intuition and common sense both tell me it has to do with whatever his obsession is with the Buttercup. He’s already admitted in an email that the house feels like true north to him. But no matter how obsessed I was with something, I wouldn’t be hanging around it in the middle of the night.
Have you forgotten all the midnights you spent on your knees on the banks of the Salt River?
The thought sends a spike of pain straight through my heart, as if it’s been lanced by a spear.
Suzanne glances at me sharply. “You okay, sweetie? You just went white.”
It’s times like these I wish I had a face that didn’t display every emotion I feel like a neon sign. Normally when I get emotional, I try to cover it up with a laugh or a sarcastic comment, but something moves me to tell her the truth.
Looking out at the white-capped waves, I blow out a hard breath. “After my husband died, I used to go to the bend in the river where I’d scattered his ashes and sit there for hours by myself. Sometimes all night. I’d sit and listen to the crickets and watch the stars move across the sky and talk to him. I’d tell him everything I was doing, how life was going, what new movies were out that he’d want to see. It took more than a year before I realized I wasn’t really mourning him.”
My voice drops an octave. “I was waiting for him to come back.”
I meet Suzanne’s startled gaze. “Cass was gone for fourteen months, and I still didn’t believe it. That’s when I started going to therapy, because I knew my heart couldn’t be trusted to tell the difference between reality and a beautiful, long-dead dream.”
Suzanne looks traumatized by my confession. She says faintly, “Oh. Honey. That’s…”
“Depressing as hell, I know,” I say drily. “I’m a laugh a minute, aren’t I? Sorry I blurted that out. My head’s all over the place this morning.”
“Don’t get down on yourself.” With a tender, motherly gesture, she tucks a stray lock of hair behind my ear. “I can’t even imagine what you’ve been through.” She hesitates for a moment. “Are you still seeing a therapist?”
“I was, right up until I moved here. But honestly, Suzanne, no amount of talking in the world can change the past. We’re all stuck with our scars and our sad stories. I think the more I talked about my pain, the worse it got, like picking at a scab so it could never heal over. Now I’m just resigned to the fact that all my happy years are behind me.
“But I’m luckier than most. That’s what I tell myself on the bad days: in a world full of temporary things, I have this love that will last forever. Even though Cass is gone, our love isn’t. And that’s how I live.”
“Oh, crap.” She blinks rapidly and waves a hand at her face, her voice tight. “I think you’re gonna make me cry.”
I smile at her. “Good thing you’re not wearing mascara.”
She pulls me into another hug, whispering into my ear, “I’m so mad at myself about the other night. Drinking before I drove over. It was so stupid and reckless, and I’m just so, so sorry—”
“You’re forgiven,” I say, cutting her off. “But do it again and I’ll take a bat to your knees.”
We pull apart and smile at each other. Then she swipes at her watering eyes and straightens her shoulders. “Threats of violence. I knew you were a badass, despite this whole No Fucks Given Barbie thing you’ve got going on.”
“I don’t know what that means, but it sounds unwholesome.”
She suddenly notices what I’m holding in my hand and brightens. “Hey, is that a bear claw? I love those things!”
“Of course you do.” I hold it out to her. “Mazel tov.”
“What does that mean?”
“Congratulations. In Hebrew.”
“Are you Jewish?”
“No, just weird. Don’t worry, nobody else gets me either.”
The only one who ever did is dead.
* * *
Suzanne and I talk for a few more minutes while she devours her pastry. She eats the same way I do, with gusto, not caring that it looks like it’s the first food she’s had in a week. We go inside, and she gives me the contact information for the interior designers she’d mentioned a while back, then she leaves with a promise to bake me another key lime pie.
Then I’m left alone with a house full of men and an overwhelming ambivalence.
I want to talk to Theo and determine exactly why he was outside my house in the middle of the night, but I also don’t. Especially now that I’m feeling whatever it is I’m feeling toward him. This electrical awareness brought on by the simple touch of his fingers on my skin.
It’s not exactly attraction. It feels darker than that.
More dangerous. Like I’m standing barefoot in a shallow pool of water and he’s the live wire sparking mere inches away.
I don’t have enough experience with men to know if this is normal. Cass was the only man I was ever with. When you’ve loved the same person since you were six years old, you grow blinders to anyone else’s charms.
So I do what any rational adult would do when faced with an uncomfortable situation they don’t know how to handle: avoid it. I grab the contract and my coffee from the kitchen, then go upstairs and hide in my bedroom.
Five minutes later, my phone chimes with an incoming text.
In case you thought you were being stealthy,
I saw you sneaking off.
“Of course you did,” I mutter, reading Theo’s words. The man notices everything.
Just going over the contract.
After I hit Send, Theo immediately begins typing his response. When I see the three little dots on my phone indicating he’s composing his answer, I start to chew my thumbnail in anxiety. Somehow, I know whatever he’s going to say is going to make me feel worse.
That’s the first time you’ve lied to me, Megan.
My stomach in knots, I flop onto my back on the bed and stare up at the ceiling. I hear Theo’s guys walking around the house, their footsteps echoing hollowly, their voices muffled through the floor, and I wish I could hear his voice.
I wonder what it would sound like. Hard like his expression or soft like his eyes?
Aggravated with myself, I slap a hand over my eyes and sigh. I really need to get out more. Maybe I should go on a date with Craig. Have a little dinner, have a nice conversation, listen to him talk. And talk.
I don’t have to ask myself how much of that time would be spent thinking about Theo Valentine, because I already know the answer.
My phone chimes.
I was walking on the beach.
I saw all the lights go on in the house,
saw you running around,
saw the smoke when you opened the window.
My heart thudding, I sit up and read his text again. Then I compose my own.
Walking on the beach at midnight?
I wait breathlessly for his answer, my palms starting to sweat. Outside, a screaming flock of seagulls swoops past the windows, and a cloud passes over the sun. A sudden gust of wind rattles the panes.
I don’t sleep much. Bad dreams.
“Something else we have in common,” I say thoughtfully, studying his words. On impulse, I decide to confess it.
Me too. Maybe I should take up walking.
Usually, I just toss and turn.
When he answers, my cheeks heat with embarrassment. That dark, dangerous attraction flickers to life in my blood.
I could tell by looking at your bed.
“Why were you looking at my bed like that?” I murmur, fighting my fingers for control. They itch to coax more from him, to write something provocative that would make him confess why he stared at my twisted sheets and blankets with such intensity, but my brain tells me in no uncertain terms that this particular slippery slope has a pool filled with man-eating sharks at the bottom.
Ultimately, my brain wins.
I’ll bring the contract down in a few minutes.
I have to run some errands, so I’ll be out for
the rest of the day. Text me if you need anything.
If I thought that would put the cap on the conversation, I was wrong. Theo dashes off a response that leaves me right back where I started, unsettled and questioning everything, burning to know more.
What I need can’t be put into a text.
I close my eyes, filled with dread at the distinct possibility that the question of what exactly Theo Valentine needs will grow like a cancer in my mind until it consumes me.
14
Everything looks straightforward in Theo’s contract, so I sign it and leave it on the small table in the foyer on my way out the door. It’s a beautiful day, sunny but with big, puffy clouds floating in the sky like so many giant cotton balls. On a whim, I decide to head into Portland to hunt for furniture.
An hour and a half later, I’m standing on a street corner in the industrial part of the city, contemplating the pile of rubble that used to be Capstone Construction’s headquarters.
Craig was right: it looks like a bomb went off. Or maybe a hurricane blew through and then a bomb went off. The destruction is total. Charred husks of a few brick walls are the only things that remain standing of the large structure. The blackened skeleton of the roof drapes over large piles of metal that I assume were some kind of machinery, but everything has been melted or burned to such a degree, it’s impossible to identify what anything originally was.
One block over, the tall metal telecommunications spire atop a high-rise glints cheerfully in the morning sun.
What I know about lightning, I learned from the annual desert monsoons that came to Phoenix in July like clockwork, many of which featured violent lightning storms. I used to hate the deafening booms of thunder and the brilliant, jagged white bolts of light that split the black sky, but Cass loved it all, the wild majesty of it, the dangerous beauty.
Some artists are moved to depict the ugly and forgotten things in life, but Cass loved beauty in all its forms, the more unpredictable the better. He was an oil painter by trade, successful enough to support us while I finished my graduate degree, but he was also obsessed with photography. He loved to get out with a bunch of his storm-chaser buddies to hunt the perfect shot of a lightning strike, and many of those images decorated the walls of our home. Even the supercell thunderstorms of the Great Plains are no match for the drama found in the southwest desert storms.
So I’m no stranger to lightning. I know its unpredictability. I know its danger.
I also know its purpose.
Lightning wants to ground itself. It wants to terminate its powerful electrical discharge in a physical object, namely the earth. The reason lightning strikes tall objects like cell towers or a skyscraper more often than, say, a person lying down in a field, is because of what storm chasers call the degree of influence. Basically, the taller the object, the more it will attract lightning that’s going to discharge in that area anyway.
For example, a metal spire atop a high-rise building has a far greater degree of influence than the flat roof of a one-story building a block away.
Yet here I am in front of that one-story building, which is utterly destroyed while the nearby high-rise stands untouched.
Kinda makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
“No,” I say aloud to that nagging voice in my head. “It doesn’t.”
Sure. That’s why you’re here. Because you’re not wondering.
I mutter, “Shut up,” and get back into my car.
Portland is a beautiful city, but the traffic sucks. I circle a trendy shopping area for twenty minutes, looking for a parking spot, until one opens up. Then I wander aimlessly through crowded streets lined with shops, hoping something of interest will jump out at me.
The only thing that jumps out at me is the growing list of odd happenings and strange coincidences that have occurred since I moved to Seaside.
I’m a list maker by long habit. My brain enjoys order, planning, and the sense of satisfaction that comes from checking things off a to-do list. But the series of events my mind stacks up one after another as evidence of a strange power at work leading me straight to Theo Valentine is anything but satisfying.
It’s ridiculous. A total waste of time and energy.
And yet.
And yet you want to believe there’s something more than the nothingness that swallowed you whole five years ago.
“Don’t be a fool,” I whisper, standing stock-still in front of a small art gallery.
In the window hangs a large, beautiful oil painting. It’s a landscape, done in bold colors. Slashes of purple and indigo depict a mountain range in the background, its tips as serrated as the edge of a hunting knife. In the for
eground, a dry riverbed is a stripe of dusty yellow meandering through an arroyo of shadowed green. Red flowers crown giant saguaros on a brown desert mesa that stretches far into the distance, leading the viewer’s eye to the brilliant bursts of white cutting across the canvas from the thunderclouds over the mountains to the ground in a spiderweb of jagged, forked lines.
The piece is titled Lucky Strike, by an artist with the initials T.V.
I tell myself the title means nothing, the initials mean nothing, the painting itself means nothing, but the flesh of my arms has pimpled with goose bumps and my heart is up in my throat.
My phone chimes with an incoming text.
There’s a shipment here for you. Should I sign for it?
It’s Theo. I laugh, breathless, because of course it’s him.
Yes, please. FedEx?
No, something called Craters and Freighters. It’s big.
My laugh dies in my throat. I have to lean against the window of the gallery because my knees have suddenly gone weak.
Craters and Freighters is the company I hired to ship Cass’s paintings from Phoenix. Part of the collection was in an art storage facility, but a few pieces were on display in the lobby of a local resort hotel. I’d made an agreement with the hotel that they could keep them through the end of the year, and then Craters and Freighters would pack up the whole collection and ship them to me in Seaside in January. By that time, the renovations on the Buttercup would be close to completion.
But now the paintings have arrived.
Three months early.
On the morning I’ve visited Capstone’s headquarters, destroyed by an unusual lightning strike. At the exact moment I’m standing outside an art gallery, looking at a desert storm landscape exactly like the ones my late husband used to photograph, created by an artist with the initials T. fucking V.
Midnight Valentine Page 13
