He stood there, staring after her as she ran toward the bay doors of Miller’s Garage. She called out again, “Allie! Allie! Marge let me ride the giantest horsey!”
She’d said Allie, not Daddy. Christ, his brain had played one mother of a trick on him. As he stood gaping like a complete idiot, his daughter launched herself up and into Allie’s arms.
And Allie knew. She looked at him over Emily’s shoulder as she hugged his little girl, and she knew he’d thought his daughter had been running toward him for a hug.
But Em didn’t know him from Adam. He was just another weird stranger on the street, just another potential danger. He was someone to run from, not run to.
And, oh, Jesus, that hurt more than he would have believed. It drove home for the very first time just exactly what these past two years had cost him.
He’d brought down Frank Riposa and Thomas Huang, one dead, the other facing criminal charges that would put him away for the rest of his life. But Allie had been right from the start. Although he hadn’t fired the bullet that did the job, he’d watched Riposa die, watched the man’s life gurgle away from him on a New York City sidewalk. But it hadn’t brought Kevin back. It had only made Harry feel sick.
He’d let himself believe it would hurt too much even to look at Shaun and Emily. He was afraid that just by seeing them he would be reminded of all that he’d lost. In his mind, he’d superimposed Kevin’s face over theirs, and he’d thought he’d do the same when he was with them, thought they’d all just pretend that Shaun would step up and fill Kevin’s shoes—an impossibility from everyone’s angle. Shaun wasn’t Kevin, but Kevin had never been anything like Shaun. For the past week, Harry had been haunted not by Kevin, but by the image of Shaun, standing there and looking him in the eye, strong enough and tough enough to tell him to go to hell, to tell him he’d had enough of Harry’s shit.
Kevin never would’ve done that, not in a million years, had their roles been reversed. He wouldn’t have had the guts.
It had been the fault of men like Riposa, Huang, and Trotta that Kev and Sonya’s lives had been lost, but Harry alone was responsible for the loss of his other two children.
All along he’d blamed the mob bosses for the disaster his entire life had become, but in truth, his own inability to cope with tragedy, his refusal to move forward, his obsession with revenge, and his total loss of hope had injured him far more deeply.
He alone had to bear the responsibility for the complete devastation of his life.
A son who hated his guts.
A daughter who didn’t recognize him on the street.
A woman who might’ve loved him, who might’ve been showing him how much she loved him last night, who might’ve been offering him the most precious of gifts—a gift he’d refused to see, let alone accept.
She was looking at him now, but only with pity in her eyes. The love was gone. He’d killed that completely today.
He turned away, afraid that he was going to be sick right there in the street.
Marge was standing behind him, and she, too, had seen everything. He backed away from her, aware that she was speaking, but unable to hear her over the roaring in his ears.
He unlocked his car door and got in, starting the engine. He had to get out of there. Now.
He backed out of the parking spot, and his cup fell forward, hitting the front hood and breaking apart like a water balloon, spraying the windshield with coffee.
Harry didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. He just turned on the wipers and kept going.
The walk home from the Merry Maids office was a particularly long one that evening. Allie was exhausted, both physically and emotionally, and the bag of groceries she was carrying got heavier and heavier with every step she took.
Harry was gone.
She hadn’t seen him once that entire afternoon. Not after that incident in front of Renny Miller’s Garage. Dear Lord, the look on his face had been enough to make her want to weep for a week.
She’d thought maybe he’d approach them, that maybe he’d sit down right there and introduce himself to Emily, start to rebuild all that he’d lost.
But instead he’d run away.
This time she was certain he was gone for good.
She refused to let herself care. She would not care. She …
Harry’s car was parked crookedly at the curb in front of her apartment.
Her heart skipped a beat, and her pulse surged. She stopped for a minute, briefly closing her eyes and forcing herself to remember. Big deal. So what if he was still here. She didn’t care.
But as she got closer, she saw that the car was empty. Harry wasn’t slouched in front of the steering wheel.
She refused to care, but she couldn’t stop her steps from quickening as she walked down the Yurgens’ driveway. She didn’t care, but she was running by the time she turned the corner.
And Harry sat on the wooden steps that led to her apartment door. He was leaning back against the railing, as if he were too exhausted to hold himself up. Still, he straightened when he saw her.
Allie stopped short.
He looked awful. Worse even than he’d looked when she saw him downtown a few hours ago.
His face was gray and his eyes were swollen and red—he’d been crying. He tried to hide it, but his hands were shaking.
“Hey, Allie,” he said, as if his being there was an everyday, run-of-the-mill occurrence, instead of the major miracle that it was.
She set down the groceries. “Harry.”
With anyone else, she would have read the desperation in his eyes as an invitation to go to him and pull him into her arms. But with Harry, she couldn’t assume anything. She couldn’t risk waking up tomorrow and finding out that she’d been wrong. Again.
So she stood there and looked at him.
He wouldn’t hold her gaze. He looked around, only occasionally meeting her eyes, and a few times he opened his mouth as if he were going to speak.
Allie just waited, hoping, God help her, that he wouldn’t get up and walk away. Daring to hope …
He rocked back and forth very slightly, like a runner getting into position to start a breakneck sprint, cleared his throat, and finally spoke. “You once told me …” His voice broke, and he cleared his throat again, the muscles in his jaw working furiously as he clenched his teeth. “You told me to, um, just to …”
His gaze met hers, and for the briefest split second she could see beyond his flip facade, his tough guy, foul-mouthed, don’t-care attitude, to the very naked, very lost man inside.
“Just to let you know if I needed you,” he finished in a barely audible whisper.
He forced his gaze up again, forced himself to look her directly in the eye despite the fact that now more than just his hands were shaking, despite the fact that tears were brimming in his eyes. “I need you, Al,” he whispered. “I really, really need you.”
Allie set the bowl of soup in front of him and Harry picked up the spoon. But it wasn’t because he was hungry. It was only because she seemed to want him to eat something.
She was silent, just sitting across her kitchen table from him, waiting for him to talk to her.
That’s why he was here, wasn’t it? To talk to her, to be with her, to have her hold him.
God, he wanted her to hold him.
But she’d been careful not to touch him, careful not to get too close as she’d unlocked her apartment door and let him into her home.
Her home. And this tiny apartment was a home. She’d only been here a little more than a week, and the furniture was all secondhand, but she’d somehow managed to make this place her own.
There were books everywhere. The posters on the wall exuded color and warmth. The very air smelled like her.
He put down his spoon then picked it up again, needing desperately to hold on to something.
“I’m glad you came here,” Allie said quietly, saving him from the responsibility of having to speak first. “But I have to be hon
est with you, Harry. What you really need is a professional counselor. You and Shaun and Emily. And Marge. She’s part of this, too. You’ve got to figure out what you want—”
“I know what I want.” He looked up at her, gripping the spoon so hard his hand shook. “I want my life back.”
“You can’t have it,” she said, her blue eyes filled with compassion. “But you can start over. It’s not so bad to start over, you know.”
He didn’t know, but she did. She’d done it. She was impossibly strong, impossibly brave, impossibly tough.
Far tougher than he was.
“You’re never going to have the same relationships with Shaun and Emily that you had two years ago,” Allie continued, “but you can have something new. Something that might even be better than what you had to start with.
“You know, I have friends here in Hardy,” she told him, as if that fact still surprised her. “Marge and Natalie and Annarose Gerty. And I’m—I’m writing a book. I’m only up to page ten because I’ve been so busy with work, but …” She smiled self-consciously, unable to hold his gaze. “I figure, why not try, right?”
“That’s so great, Al,” he said, feeling tears pressing against his eyelids. Please God, don’t let him start to cry. “I think that’s really great.”
She looked at him again, and it was as if she’d made a conscious choice to let him see deep inside her. “Griffin would’ve laughed at me,” she told him. “If I’d ever told him anything like that, he would’ve laughed, and maybe patted my hand.”
“If I ever pat your hand,” Harry told her, “you have my permission to shoot me.”
On the surface, what he’d said had been mostly in jest, but the things his words implied were terrifying. If I ever … The implication was that there would, indeed, be an ever.
He knew Allie had caught the implication, too. She sat very, very still for a moment. But then she looked up at him.
“What are you going to do, Harry?” she asked him quietly.
“Do you …” He had to stop and clear his throat, blink back the tears that still threatened to escape. He tried to sound noncommittal, tried to sound as if the answer to this question didn’t have the power to rip out his heart. But even though he tried, his voice shook when he spoke. “Do you think Shaun and Em will ever forgive me?” Would she, Allie, ever forgive him? He couldn’t ask that, too. He just couldn’t risk hearing her tell him no.
Allie reached across the table and took his hand. “I know they will,” she said. “They’re your kids, Harry. It’s going to be hard, and it’s going to take time, but they will. Especially if you don’t give them any choice in the matter.” Her smile was decidedly watery. “I think you should move in with them. It’s your house, they’re your kids—just move in.” She faltered. “I mean, if … you’ve decided to stay.”
“I want Trotta,” he said, needing to be honest even though she couldn’t possibly understand. “I want him, Allie, so bad it hurts.”
He was holding on to her hand so tightly her fingers must’ve hurt, too. But she didn’t try to pull free.
“Do you want him more than you want your kids back?” she asked.
“No. But it’s close,” he admitted. “I know that’s really screwed up, but …” He’d been running so long with anger and revenge as his fuel, he couldn’t just shut it off. He wanted Trotta. He burned to bring the bastard down.
But Allie didn’t condemn him. She just kept letting him hold her hand. “So what are you going to do?” she asked again.
“I’m good at what I do,” he told her. “I hate it, though, working for the Bureau. But I’m good at it, I know it, so it’s really hard to think about quitting. Isn’t that fucked up?”
“No,” she said.
“Yeah, it is.” He was the one who finally pulled his hand free. “I suck at relationships. I always have. So what am I thinking about doing? Quitting the thing I know I’m good at to go do the thing I’ve never really gotten right.”
“You don’t suck at relationships—”
“I do. Look at my track record. Sonya. Christ. My entire marriage was a joke. You know, I didn’t know if Em was even my kid until after she was born and we ran paternity tests. Sonya told me it was my fault she started sleeping around—that she was looking for the kind of connection I didn’t give her.”
Allie was quiet, just letting him talk.
“I don’t know what she wanted,” he told her, his anger keeping his tears at bay. “I mean, I honestly don’t have a fucking clue what it was I didn’t give her, and that scares me to death because it means I’m just going to keep on making the same mistake over and over again with anybody I ever try to have any kind of relationship with, you know? Kevin was the only person I could ever just be with, the only person I didn’t have to work at being around.”
It had been that way with Allie, too, but he didn’t dare say that aloud.
“Maybe it was her fault,” she said softly. “Maybe all this time you’ve been great at relationships, and Sonya was the one with the problems. Or maybe it was something in between. Part your fault, part hers. It sure seems as if it was at least part hers, because in my experience, the way to strengthen a relationship is not to jump in bed with someone else.”
“I feel like I’m unraveling,” Harry said. He’d never talked about any of this with anyone ever before.
“You once told me maybe it was time to get rid of Alessandra Lamont. Well, maybe it’s time to let Harry O’Dell unravel a little bit.”
He shook his head. He wasn’t sure he could do this.
“What do you want to do?” she asked him. “What do you really want, Harry? It’s your life, your choice. Either stay or go. But if you’re going, please, do me a favor and leave now.”
Harry looked at her, sitting there across from him. Her hair drooped in her eyes, and she wasn’t wearing even the least little bit of makeup. Her T-shirt hid her body, and her jeans came from the bargain bin at Target.
She didn’t want him to leave. He could tell from the I-don’t-care angle to chin that she did, in fact, care.
What did he want? He wanted her to care, that much he knew.
“I want to stay,” he said, and the sheer truth of his words unraveled him a whole lot more. “Please.” His voice shook like a four-year-old’s. “Can I stay?”
“I think he’s finally sleeping now,” Allie told Marge. “He took a shower and shaved, and I made him something to eat. He wanted to go right over there tonight and talk to Shaun, but I told him I didn’t think you were leaving for Denver tomorrow until about noon. I don’t think he’s slept in more than a week, and frankly, he looks awful. I told him I was afraid he’d scare Shaun to death. He has a better chance of looking human in the morning.”
Marge was silent for a moment on the other end of the phone.
“We talked for about five hours,” Allie told her. “He knows Shaun needs more than an apology, and he seems open to doing whatever it takes. If you know any counselors, maybe someone over at the college, that Shaun might be comfortable going to with Harry …?”
She and Harry had talked for a long time about all the different ways he could rebuild his relationship with his kids, but they’d both completely skirted the issue of exactly what his remaining in Hardy would mean to the two of them.
“I can’t promise that Shaun is going to greet him with open arms,” Marge finally said. “But I will make sure he’s home in the morning. Bless you, Allie. Can you get Harry over here by ten?”
“I’m not responsible for this,” Allie told her new friend. “Harry will be there because he wants to be there. And … brace yourself, Marge, because he’s planning to move in.”
“Oh, thank God.” Marge’s voice was thick with tears. “And thank you. You may not think you’re responsible, but you’re a good friend to him.”
A good friend. As Allie hung up the phone, she knew she had to take care not to be too good a friend to Harry. He was asleep in her bed, and—for her
own sake—she had to camp tonight on the couch. She would not climb in with him. She couldn’t risk hurting herself that way again.
She took Harry’s clothes from the washing machine in the kitchen and put them in the dryer.
She put on her pajamas in the bathroom, scrubbed her face, and brushed her teeth.
Then she went into the bedroom to get an extra blanket from the closet and to take one of the pillows from the bed. She moved quietly, even though he’d been completely exhausted and she didn’t think anything would disturb him.
She was wrong.
He stirred, rolling over, as if he’d been forcing himself to stay at least half awake, listening for her, waiting for her.
“Allie, can I hold you?”
His words from just last night echoed in her head. Is that smart? Again, the answer was a resounding no. But sometimes the right thing to do wasn’t smart.
She slipped into the bed beside him, needing to feel his arms around her as much as he needed to hold her.
As he held her close, she heard him sigh.
And without another word, Harry slept.
And Allie lay in the dark and loved him, even though she knew it wasn’t the smartest thing to do.
Twenty
CHRIST, HE SHOULDN’T still be here.
Harry’s face was buried in Allie’s hair, his legs intertwined with hers, his arms still tightly wrapped around her as the morning light brightened her bedroom walls.
What the hell was he doing here?
But then he remembered. He’d come to her last night, a complete wreck. She’d brought him inside, fed him and cleaned him up, and let him rant and rave for hours and hours.
She’d listened, asked questions, and helped him sort through his options, helped him make a battle plan for the beginning of the rest of his life.
She’d done all that for him—including climb into bed with him when he’d asked. She done it even though she didn’t owe him anything—except maybe a big kick in the pants.
She stirred, turning toward him as she opened her eyes then froze, as if he were the last person in the world she’d expect to find in her bed ever again.
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