by Ruthie Knox
Nev blew out a long breath and softened.
“Shit, customer.” Bea danced back behind the counter, smiling at a stranger, and Winston reminded himself it took years to rebuild trust in a family, and that he wasn’t personally responsible for emotionally managing everyone in the room. His brother had the right to be cautious, and Allie’s sister had the right to squint at him with suspicion, and Chasity had the right to tap at her tablet and behave as though she might leave at any moment.
He took a sip of the chamomile tea his daughter had brought him, unasked for, and ate the shortbread she’d set on the saucer. It was crumbly, rich and buttery, and it made him wish, suddenly, that he could make her a girl again, take her home and put her to sleep in the room where she’d been born, alone with her mother one fierce and cold winter afternoon while he was at the office.
“Breathe,” Allie whispered.
“I’m trying.”
She squeezed his hand.
Chasity tapped the screen of her tablet three times, hard, and then turned her laser gaze on Allie. “How’d you know your ma was in New York to begin with?”
“She hacked into her computer,” May said.
“I didn’t ‘hack.’ She’s used the same three passwords since we were in elementary.”
“She logged into our mom’s credit cards and bank accounts when Mom left town and figured out where she went to.”
“I was a teenager,” Allie clarified. “I wouldn’t do that now.”
“You would so.”
“I would not.”
“But you just did, to figure out she’d gone to New York and not Kohler, you told me.”
“Yeah, okay, but I was desperate, and anyway—”
Chasity made a zipping motion with her hand. May and Allie fell silent. “What are you seeing in her charges since she came to the city?”
“She never buys anything in the city. Just her plane ticket.”
“She must stay with Justice,” May said. “He must pay for everything.”
“If you want to find your ma, you should set up alerts on whatever cards she uses, her debit and credit, even her Starbucks app if she’s got one, and when a charge comes in, map it. Meantime, Bea will have to keep hanging around whatever students and art people she knows, keep track of the rumors flying around, let us know if anything seems solid. Winston, tell her when she gets back that’s what she’s doing. I’ve got a line on a guy works for the city who might be able to get me into the hushed-up permit records, which if we’re lucky are going to give us a name and address for Justice or someone very close to him.”
She waved her hand at Nev and Cath. “You two, I don’t know what use you are, or if you understand what it means to lose your mama and not know if you’re going to ever see her again, but if you figure out anything useful, chip in. And you—” She pointed at Winston. “You’re going to have to set up a meeting with Justice.”
“On what pretext?”
“Any pretext you want. The point is, tell him you need to see him day after tomorrow, tell him it’s important, and see if he bites. You run his money. I don’t care how busy the man is, he’s going to make time for the money. And then you girls”—here, Chasity looked from May to Allie—“just have to show up with your dad and see if you can make things turn out right.”
Bea came back and perched on the arm of the sofa beside him. She had her phone in her hand and was breathing too fast.
“What happened?” He glanced at the counter to locate whoever had done this to her so he could rip them limb from limb.
“Nothing. I’m fine. What’d I miss?”
“Chasity has given everyone their marching orders. You’re to keep an ear to the ground among the students and artists, and to let us know what you’re able to learn.”
“Yas.”
“Is that…affirmative?”
She patted his shoulder. “Yas, Daddy.”
Cath looked up from her knitting. “I hate to be the one to say this, but I think I have to. I mean, I’m all for families being families, and staying together, and I don’t really know any of you, so don’t take this the wrong way. But it seems to me like your mom isn’t so much lost as she’s run away.” She glanced at Neville. “And I don’t know a ton about family, but I know running away. People who run away, you know, when you find them again? They aren’t always real happy about it.”
She looked at Allie, who wouldn’t meet her eyes. When she connected with May, though, May nodded. “I think we’re going to have to talk to Dad,” May said quietly. “After Ben gets him here, we have to ask him what he thinks we should even do.”
“Yeah.” Allie’s voice was flat. “I get that.”
For a long and rather horrible moment no one spoke at all. The coffeehouse was still, its lively bustle put on pause as they all considered what Cath had said. Winston knew some part of her story and what she’d run away from. How far her desire to leave her past, her pain, behind had taken her—all the way to London before she ended up entangled with his brother and found the strength to face the past again, and the courage to fall in love.
Chasity slapped closed the cover of her tablet and stowed it in her bag. “I have all of your contact information. I’ll run point on this. You’ll be hearing from me.” She backed up her wheelchair, whipped around, and then turned to say over her shoulder, “If you hear from your ma, I want to know right away. I don’t want to be biting my fingernails for forty-eight hours before someone remembers to give me a call. That would really piss me off.”
She wheeled out the door with one impressive thrust of her biceps. Bea’s phone buzzed. She swiped at it and read the screen, then clicked the button and swiped more, settling gradually against his side until she shared his cushion on the couch.
“You have a customer,” Nev said.
Bea kept staring at her screen. Her breath was rapid and shallow, as though he’d found her in the grip of a nightmare.
“Bea?” He kept his voice low.
“What?” she barked.
“You have a customer.”
She blinked. Her eyes were wet. “Oh. Fuck.” She stood abruptly and stumbled to the front of the coffeehouse.
Cath and Nev were whispering to each other, and May had pulled her chair closer to speak with Allie about some of the details of Ben’s journey north and who would pick their father up at the airport should the time come tomorrow that they needed to.
Winston watched his daughter, who wasn’t smiling at this most recent customer. She made his drink, handed it over, and he said something, frowning. She took it back. Dumped it in the sink. Made it a second time.
Bea’s phone buzzed beside his thigh. He picked it up and set it on the arm of the sofa. On the screen, the text notification said simply, Mum.
When the customer left the counter and his daughter headed into the back of the store, Winston followed her.
He found her in the back room, huddled between a stack of giant sacks of coffee and an industrial sink. “Bea?”
“Leave me alone.”
Head bowed, arms crossed over her knees, she looked like the child she still was, far from her mother, far from home, and he felt the same urge from earlier—to take her back, somehow, and put her where she belonged and had been safe.
He squatted down beside her. “What’s going on?”
She shook her head.
“I see that your mum’s been texting you and you’re upset. You’re going to have to tell me the rest, bun.”
She sniffled. He looked for a handkerchief in his pocket, but she’d made him stop carrying them. He found a roll of stiff brown toweling and tore her off a piece.
“You look tired,” he said. “Perhaps you only need to rest. Sometimes when we don’t sleep enough, we find ourselves overwhelmed with anger, or tears, and—”
“I can’t sleep.”
“What’s preventing you?”
“I fall asleep okay, but then I wake up, and I can’t stop thinking about Everest,
you know those pictures, that dead guy with the green boots? He has a family still alive, and everyone calls him Green Boots. People use him as a landmark.” Winston considered whether he should put his arm around her. Whether she’d let him. But when he tried to, finally, move closer, she crossed her arms over her knees and shifted away, her eyes hard. “Or I saw this Instagram account, this guy who was at the third camp, the last one before you attempt the summit, and he was trying to acclimate to the altitude but he looks so terrible, Dad, his lips are cracked and he’s sunburned, and he stopped making sense, you know, because there’s not enough oxygen and his brain was dying, and I keep thinking that’s going to be Mum.” She lunged to her feet and began pacing back and forth. “She’s a terrible mum.”
“That’s not true.” He stood, rather awkwardly finding purchase against the sink. “You know it isn’t.”
“She ran out on both of us, left me with you, and now she’s going to die on a mountain, and—and I didn’t even tell her thank you for my birthday present. I can’t phone her because I didn’t say thank you and I never return her calls. I can’t—”
“Beatrice.”
He made his voice just stern enough to stop her talking, because it never helped her to say all her anxieties aloud, it only made her more worked up and upset. She’d always had to be told to stop. Just stop.
“You need rest.”
“I’ve tried. I can’t sleep.”
“Your body needs rest even if you lie in bed awake with your eyes closed.”
“You always say that.”
“It’s true.”
She wiped her face on her shirt and looked at him, challenging and afraid. “She’s a completely rubbish mother, selfish and awful. And you’re no better, you just want me to do all the same things you wanted her to do and be a proper English lady and eat meals on tablecloths and it’s bullshit.”
In that moment, his daughter sounded so much like a child that it hurt to look at her—the puffy skin around her new tattoo, her rainbow hair, her utter confusion.
It hurt, and made him feel frustrated, angry, and utterly impotent. He didn’t know, truly, what to do with her.
He wasn’t her mum. He’d tried to replace Rosemary and failed. He’d tried to give Beatrice what she needed and failed, so he’d tried giving her what she wanted, but that was no better.
The only thing he knew how to do was love her. It simply wasn’t enough.
“You don’t hate your mother.” Winston stepped closer, close enough that she had to tilt her head up to meet his eyes. “You’re afraid of what might happen because you love her.”
Tears welled again in Beatrice’s eyes. She swiped at them impatiently. “Thanks for the wisdom, Captain Obvious.”
“Bea!” someone called from the front. “You’ve got a customer.”
“Ten seconds!” she called back. To him, she said, “I’ve got to go.”
Winston put his hand on her arm. “Being afraid of what might happen to someone you love is just part of love. I’m afraid of what might happen to you every time you cross the street. I’m afraid whatever you’ve done to your arm might get infected.”
“I did it clean.”
“Sure. And your mom will climb safely, but that’s not the point.”
She looked away and set her mouth in a perfectly Rosemary shape of impervious indifference. “I’ve got to go.”
It seemed to him, then, with his tired and emotional daughter ready to walk away from him and his tired and emotional lover in the other room—with his brother and Cath here to see him and build on their fragile accord—with Allie and her sister together rebuilding a foundation of trust after drifting dangerously far apart—that love had such incredible power to ruin people.
He hoped that Rosemary would return safely from her climbing expedition, and that she and Bea would find the ease in their relationship they’d had before the divorce. He hoped that love would give Allie what she’d come to New York to find—her mother, her sister, her family back. But he couldn’t promise it would. Allie would get some of what she wanted and some of what she didn’t want. That was how life worked.
The girl standing in front of him, biting her lip, coltish and restless, wasn’t ready to hear any of that. Not from him.
Instead, he simply told her what to do. “When your shift is over, I want you to call Jean and have him take you to the apartment. Sleep on the pullout sofa, with Nev and Cath nearby, and if you can’t sleep, rest your eyes. And when your mind starts telling you to worry about your mum, I want you to think instead about what an excellent mum she’s been to you, your whole life, and to make a list of all the ways she’s taken care of you. And then tomorrow, first thing, I want you to phone her.”
“Bea!” her coworker called.
“Coming,” she called back.
She glanced at him. Recrossed her arms. “I’ll talk to you later,” she said, and walked away.
Winston watched her go, thinking of the quiet gray interior of the car that took him to the office in London.
Thinking about what his world would look like in a few months without his daughter’s rainbow hair or Allie’s extraordinary outfits to give it color.
Chapter 19
The night was still hot when they climbed out of the Town Car, but the air in Winston’s apartment was almost too cold, making Allie aware of the full day’s worth of grime and dried sweat on her skin and under her arms.
Winston draped his coat over a chair and collapsed onto the couch with an audible huff. He flipped on a lamp, then began his ritual removal of cuff links, crossing them on the side table before rolling up his sleeves.
Allie’s throat tightened.
He was already so familiar, and so dear.
“I think I might grab a shower.”
“Have at it. Do you need anything?” His phone chimed and he glanced at the screen, then swiped it.
“Everything okay?”
“Yes, it’s only Beatrice letting me know she’s settled in at the apartment.”
“You did good with her tonight,” Allie said. Winston and his daughter. Winston and his brother and his brother’s partner, who she liked very much, and her sister, and Winston’s assistant, and that coffee shop, so many people trying to help her, people who felt a little bit like family already, like friends.
Allie couldn’t think about it.
Their eyes met. He beckoned her over with a lazy sweep of his arm until she stood at his knees. He held her by the hips, looking into her eyes. “I was glad to have the chance. Grateful that she chose to be scared with me, instead of keeping her fear to herself.”
He held her gaze, and the moment drew out and became weightier with what he wanted her to hear.
She heard him. Her throat ached too much to swallow over, and she blinked and looked at the floorboards. The wide scarred planks spoke to the age of the building, its history and its value.
She’d like to own a floor like that. To have her name on an apartment like Winston’s. She’d like to see more of New York, and own a piece of it for herself.
But more than that, she wanted to go home.
“I’ll just hop in the shower.”
He turned his attention back to his phone. “Of course.”
The chill in the words followed her across the room, a gust that prickled her nipples and raised goose bumps all down her arms as she stripped and stepped naked into the bathroom and over the threshold of the shower.
It was one of those showers she’d only ever seen in magazines, far removed from the curtained fiberglass booths back home. It was more like its own room, the floor pebbled with river stone, the walls tiled. There were two rainfall showerheads, and the first time she’d used Winston’s shower she turned them both on, but tonight she stood at the back under one of them, wishing she could turn a dial to make the spray hard and mean and tight, a cheap and punishing shower to go with her mood.
She didn’t want to be spoiled. All it did was remind her of how much she
would be taking from Winston when she left, and how little she seemed to be able to give.
She didn’t want to disappoint him, but she didn’t want to be alone in this bathroom, either. His shampoo smelled like something you’d find in an ampule at a crowded shop in a Parisian cobbled alley. It made delicious rich suds that piled up on her head and fell with audible plops to the floor around her.
There was a soft knocking, and the bathroom door opened a crack. “May I join you? Feel free to say no. There’s no pressure.”
“The more the merrier.”
“You think?” He wore a thin bathrobe, which he took off as she watched—so much more casual about his naked body than should have been possible between them when they’d only met a few days earlier. But she didn’t begrudge the view. He bent for a towel, and she ogled the muscles of his thighs and ass, wondering how many hours a week he normally spent at the gym to keep fit.
Some part of it had to be genetics. His brother was killingly handsome, though she preferred the way Winston looked, his darker eyes and mellow smile and that rakish eyebrow trick.
“You could fit an entire group sex party in this shower,” she said. “Everybody slipping and sliding around in their juices.” He turned on the other showerhead. It was such a big shower, his skin had yet to brush against hers anywhere, which she was interested to discover disappointed her.
“You make that sound entirely unappealing.”
“Blow jobs and anal galore.”
He grinned. An enterprising runnel of water sluiced over his pectoral muscle. She liked him too much. Way too much. “Surely no one would have anal sex in a shower. It wouldn’t be safe.”
“I think the kind of people who have group-sex anal in a shower are more, like, caught up in the moment. Not so much with the thinking about safety.” Instead of soap, he had shower gel in a wall-mounted dispenser. It didn’t have a label, but the soap it dispensed was the rich dark color of Baltic amber beads, which required her to pretend the soap was in fact made from pulverized Baltic amber mixed with frankincense and volcanic ash from Pompeii.
It smelled divine.
She lathered it over her skin, lingering over her stomach and breasts just to make sure Winston would be paying attention when she made doe eyes at him from under her lashes.
