by Megan Hart
“It might be too cloudy.” Nikolai stretched out his legs and leaned his head back to look up into the winter sky.
There was supposed to be something special up there. An alignment of the planets, nine of them. Something rare. A once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing.
“Just watch,” Jennilynn said, her voice uncharacteristically quiet. “It’s going to be amazing.”
This felt right. The four of them, together, the way they’d been for as long as Alicia could remember. Friends. More than friends. Without thinking about it, she let her head rest on Niko’s shoulder, then smiled when he tilted his to rest on hers. Beneath the blanket covering them both, his hand found hers. Fingers squeezed.
“Wouldn’t it be great,” he said, “if we could travel into space the way we can fly in an airplane?”
Ilya inched closer to Alicia to grab some of the blanket, and as if on cue, she and Nikolai released each other’s hands. “Why would you want to?”
“I’d like to,” Jennilynn put in. She did not move closer to Nikolai’s other side, although the blanket was big enough for all of them. “Just . . . fly away.”
Ilya leaned to look at her. “Where would you go?”
“Anywhere.”
“I’m with you,” Nikolai said. “Get out of this town. See something. Do something important.”
The thought of leaving Quarrytown had always seemed like a no-brainer for Alicia. College. A job. Someday a family. Visits home at Christmas and Thanksgiving, the way her parents did with their parents. She hadn’t thought much about what, exactly, she wanted to do or where she wanted to go, but the world was a big place. Plenty of choices and plenty of time to make them.
For now, she was content to sit with her butt going numb on a splintery old picnic table in the Sterns’ backyard, looking up at the sky, waiting to see something that only came along once in a lifetime.
Theresa handed Alicia the pen—a heavy, fancy Parker fountain pen that seemed perfectly made for signing papers of such importance. Alicia carefully wrote her name and the date in all the places she was supposed to. She put the pen on the table gently, so it wouldn’t roll into a splash of coffee or a dusting of crumbs.
“Congratulations,” Theresa said with a smile. She pushed a thin envelope across the table. The check.
“It’s a lot of money,” Alicia said with a peek at the contents. “It’s going to let me do a lot of things.”
Theresa nodded. “Money is freedom, that’s for sure.”
Alicia grinned. She did feel free. “Coffee’s on me, okay?”
“Oh, you bet it is.” Theresa also smiled and leaned back in her chair. “I’ll get the final paperwork over to you as soon as possible.”
“I’ll cash this check as soon as possible—you better believe it.” Alicia tucked the envelope into her bag, a little giddy at all the zeroes on the check.
Theresa laughed. “I’m sure. So . . . if you don’t mind my asking, what are you planning to do with it?”
“I haven’t decided just yet. Travel. I know that. See things.” Alicia stretched. “Do things. Get out of here. That’s all I know.”
“Sounds fantastic. Good luck.” Theresa looked sad for a moment.
Alicia noticed. “You okay?”
“Oh. Yeah. Just wish I could’ve sealed the entire deal.” Theresa bit her lower lip for a second or so. “Sixty percent is better than nothing, though.”
“Ilya is a pain in the ass,” Alicia said flatly. “I’m sorry. It’s not going to make it easy for you, having to deal with him. My extra twenty percent might end up being more of a hassle than Diamond Development planned for.”
“They can build around the dive shop and still develop the property—no worries there.” Theresa shook her head and lifted her coffee mug. “Hey, it’s not champagne, but I still think we should toast. To freedom!”
“To freedom,” Alicia agreed, clinking her mug against Theresa’s. “Let it begin now.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
This was a bullshit business. Selling the quarry to that real estate development company so they could build that hotel and water park and take over everything he and Alicia had built over the past ten years and turn it into something bland and neutral.
“And profitable,” Alicia said when Ilya let this last bit of his rant out. She offered him coffee, but he waved it away so he could pace in her kitchen.
He flung out a hand. “We’ve done all right. Look at what we started with.”
“A cheap piece of property tainted by a high-profile tragedy that made it almost impossible to sell, and we still paid too much for it,” Alicia said quietly. “Ilya, sit down or stand in one place, but stop pacing. You’re driving me nuts.”
He pivoted on his heel. “Fine. You want me to sit here at your kitchen table and talk to you about this like we’re, what . . . having tea and biscuits?”
“Like we’re partners,” she snapped, then softened. “Like we’re friends, okay?”
He gripped the back of one of her chairs until his knuckles turned white and the wood creaked in protest. “Right. Partners. That would mean agreeing on things, wouldn’t it? Giving me a say on how things should happen?”
“We were married for a long time, and I always thought that meant that I’d get a say in how things would happen, but it didn’t. I tried to talk to you about it. I told you what I wanted. You refused. You wouldn’t listen.” Alicia clinked her spoon deliberately against the side of her mug.
Ilya’s lip curled at that old accusation, and he fixed her with a look. “Seems to me that at the end, you were the only one who got any say in how it all went down.”
“Here we go again,” she muttered, and got up to pour herself another mug of coffee. “Do you want me to call for the wa-a-a-a-ambulance? Are you going to complain again how I never really gave you a chance to . . . what, be the man I wanted you to be? That I walked out on you without any warning? That if only I’d told you what it was that I wanted, you’d have changed? Is that the conversation we’re going to have, again? It’s old news.”
“Old news for you, because you’re the only one who ever got to say a word about it.” His fingers curled again on the back of the chair.
Angry, not so much at Alicia as he was at Niko and Galina—hell, at Theresa and the company she worked for that was trying to come in and take away everything he’d worked so hard to build, no matter if Alicia wanted to give him any credit for taking any part of it.
Alicia rolled her eyes. “Oh, we talked about it. Lots of times. You never listened.”
“I listened to you!”
“Then you didn’t do a very good job of hearing me,” she told him.
Ilya shrugged, then shook his head. “You’re just so hard to understand, Allie. You don’t make yourself clear.”
He waited for her to make that face, the one that told him she was getting ready to explode. They’d battle it out, go round and round, but he knew in the end he’d give in to her just to keep the fight from turning endless. Allie always had to be right, the way his mother always had to have her way. He’d set his life around giving in to women who nevertheless always found him to be a disappointment.
Now, although her lips firmed into a grim line and her eyes narrowed, Allie kept her voice smooth and calm as the quarry’s water on a chilly spring day. She stirred cream and sugar into her mug and sipped while she eyed him over the rim. When he gave her a gesture, wordlessly telling her he expected an answer, she shrugged.
“Not going to argue with you about this,” she said simply. Solidly.
Ilya frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m not arguing with you about our marriage or anything else. That’s it. If you want to talk about your mother, I can listen and offer some advice, but I’m not going to fight with you about her, either. And if you want to talk like adults about this offer Theresa brought us, well, I’m ready for that.”
“Theresa.” Ilya shook his head, thinking of the fou
rteen-year-old girl in braces and ponytail who’d become the sort of woman he knew he would never be able to impress. “I knew she didn’t just come back to offer her condolences. She’s as sneaky as her creep of a dad.”
Allie looked up at that, tilting her head to stare at him. “Huh? What do you mean?”
“Barry. Her dad. He was a creep back then when he started coming around my mom. I always thought so, but she didn’t want to hear it, and Niko was always looking off to his own adventures. Didn’t give a damn about anything beyond himself.” Ilya went to the coffeemaker to help himself. “Don’t supposed you have any Baileys to splash in this?”
“It’s not even lunchtime.” Allie twisted in her chair to face him. “You never said much about Barry before.”
Ilya focused on filling the mug as close to the brim as possible without spilling it. A flash of memory slithered through his brain, a snake in wild grasses looking for something warm and scampering to bite. “He was boning my mother. Don’t you think that made him creepy enough in my book?”
“What does that have to do with Theresa now?” Allie got out of her chair to cross to him, getting in his space so that he had little choice but to back up against the counter with his mug in his hand to keep her far enough away. “What’s your problem?”
“I’m just saying that anyone could’ve worked for this development company, right? It could’ve been anyone. But who shows up after all this time but the one person pretty much guaranteed to get in with us, both of us, but especially me, acting like . . . family.” His lip curled as he spat the words, thinking of every single conversation he and Theresa’d had before she finally left.
“You think she took that job just so she could convince them to come around trying to acquire our property? Ilya, that’s beyond crazy.” She reached around him to pull the jar of sugar toward him. “Here.”
“Spoon?”
He was well familiar with her sigh.
“In the drawer,” Allie said.
“Which drawer?”
“The same drawer that the spoons have been in since about 1983.” She yanked open the drawer next to the sink so hard everything inside it rattled. “There. Right there.”
“Why do you always do that?” he asked her without taking a spoon.
Allie closed her eyes as she took a few steps back, pressing her fingers to the bridge of her nose before she looked at him. The carefully blank slant of her expression spoke more about her anger with him than if she’d been screaming. It had always infuriated him when she did that. Her sister hadn’t been that way. Jennilynn would’ve let him have it, laid into him. Maybe even smacked him a little, never enough to hurt even though he’d been sure she meant it to.
“Do what?” Allie asked finally.
“Treat me like I’m an idiot.”
She looked at him. “Stop it.”
“Is that what you think of me? That I’m an idiot?” Ilya poked her, to get some goddamned kind of rise out of her. To make her see him, to at least give him that.
“Yes,” Allie snapped and slammed the drawer closed. “Yes. Yes, I do, sometimes, think you are an idiot. Worse than that, I believe you make yourself deliberately obtuse as a way of somehow getting out of doing the things that an adult person should just be able to do. Like find a freaking spoon in a drawer, in the place where the spoons have been for as long as you and I have known each other. Why do you do that?”
Ah, this. Here it came. The fury, the fire. She would look at him instead of through him or around him.
“I don’t understand what the big deal is. I forgot, okay? Why couldn’t you just give it to me, without all the hassle?”
Alicia shook her head and turned, walking away. “Get your own spoon. Or go home. Your choice.”
He stared after her for a second. “Hey. Don’t walk away from me.”
“Did you come over here to start an argument with me or to talk about this offer?” she shot over her shoulder as she headed toward the living room. “Or is talking about the offer just a reason to pick a fight with me? Because I’ll be honest with you right up front. I have too much of my own shit going on right now to have any desire to go battling with you. Okay?”
He followed her. “Hey. Allie.”
She took a seat, her usual, in the rocker facing the television. She put her mug on the side table and covered herself with the faded, ugly, orange-and-green afghan that was always draped over the chair. She picked up the remote and lifted it with an arch of her brow.
“What’s going on with you?” he asked.
She looked faintly surprised before everything in her expression closed up tight. He’d always hated that look. The one that told him he’d gone too far, pushed too hard, and now she was going to shut him out.
“We don’t have to take the money. I know it looks like a lot of money, right there on paper like that, but babe—”
“Don’t call me that,” she warned.
“Allie,” Ilya said, “I know you think this deal is the best thing, but it really isn’t. The money’s not even enough to cover what we sunk into the business.”
She tapped the remote gently into her fist and then let it rest there. She sighed. “It’s not just the money. It’s the business, as a whole.”
He sank into the couch across from her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that I’m tired of working at Go Deep.”
He shook his head. “So . . . so we hire someone else to come in, run the numbers, and handle the books. We can find someone to do that, no problem. You can start taking over some of the trips. You always complained about how I was the one who got to do all the exciting things—”
Her harsh bark of razor-blade laughter shut him up quick.
“Yes. That’s exactly it,” Allie said in a voice thick with tears. “I want to go and do exciting things. I want to go and do anything but stay here in this house, in this town, with—”
“Me.”
Her second wave of laughter was harder to hear than the first, sharp-edged and jagged. Poised to shred. Allie dropped the remote and leaned forward to hang her head, to drop it into her hands.
“No, Ilya. My God, no. You have nothing to do with what I want or where I want to go or who I want to do it with.”
He knew he should get up off the couch, but a sudden pressure at the base of his neck kept him from moving. He let it push him forward, echoing Allie’s position, his elbows on his knees. Fingers clasped, palms together.
“No,” he said. “I know that.”
Her quiet sniffle made him want to run. He could never handle a crying woman, especially if he was in any way responsible for the tears. And he had to face the facts: he almost always had a hand in it, somehow. Yet he couldn’t make himself move—not to get up, not to leave, not to go across the room and put a comforting arm around her—hell, if she even wanted that from him, and he was sure she wouldn’t.
“It’s time to give it up, Ilya.”
He shook his head, not able to look at her. Not able to see anything at the moment, not through the cloudy gray haze covering his vision. He wanted to blame it on a bottle of vodka, a couple of six-packs, but he hadn’t had so much as a shot of liquor. It would be better if he could pace, but in the kitchen she’d told him to sit or go, so now he was sitting, and he couldn’t make himself get to his feet.
“No. They’re just offering us money, Allie. It’s only money—”
Her voice rose. “It’s not money! It’s not about that!”
He found the strength to stand, then, by pushing too hard and too fast, the way he always did about everything else, and he took a few stumbling steps forward to catch his toe on the edge of the coffee table. It flipped over, spilling the candy in the dish, a spread of magazines. He kicked those, too.
“I’ve put everything I have into building that business!” he cried, whirling on her. “And you . . . you of all people, should understand that! It’s not about the money!”
“No,” she said. “No,
it’s about her! It’s always been about her! Everything I’ve done since the day she died has been about her!”
He ran. Or tried to run. But the coffee table was in the way. So was Allie. She’d stepped in front of him, trying to pick up the candy dish. He didn’t mean to kick her arm, and he didn’t mean to shove her out of the way when she stood with a yelp. She lost her balance and fell back, knocking into the chair and then the table next to her chair. Her coffee spilled. The mug shattered.
He didn’t know how it happened or what was going on, but all at once he was on the floor with the broken pieces of her mug in his hands and lukewarm coffee staining the knees of his jeans. Allie was beside him, an arm over his shoulder. He turned and pressed his face into the familiar warmth of her, closing his eyes to let the fall of her hair cover him up, for her perfume to fill his lungs.
“We’ve both held on for way too long,” Allie said into his ear. “We have to let go, Ilya. We have to let her go.”
She held him while he shook and shuddered; she kept holding him even when he fought her. He stopped after a few seconds. He sank into himself.
The weight of the afghan covered them both. Light through the holes. The floor was hard and chilly, but Ilya didn’t move. Beneath the blanket’s embrace, he twisted to look at her.
“I can’t,” he whispered. “I want to, Allie. But I just can’t.”
She rubbed his back. “Honey. She’s gone. We did this together, and I know why we did, believe me, but back then we never talked about why we decided that buying the quarry was what we needed to do. We told ourselves—and each other, I guess—that it was a great business opportunity.”
He coughed, but couldn’t clear himself of whatever was choking him. “It was.”
“Sure. Of course. But it wasn’t the reason why we bought the quarry, and it’s not why we kept it through everything else. It’s not why we put ourselves in debt, Ilya. It’s not . . .” Allie sat up, making a tent out of the afghan with herself as the center pole. “That’s not why you and I ended up together.”
“We ended up together because we loved each other,” he said.
