by Brooks, Abby
“How do you do this every morning?”
“I just do it. No time to think. The work still needs to be done.”
They danced around each other as they got ready. His hand grazing her lower back. Her fingers tracing a tattoo. Their eyes meeting over coffee. Smiles sweet and secretive as they made his bed together, straightening the sheets and pillows and pulling the comforter up in place.
After a quick breakfast of eggs from James’s fridge and toast from the almost too old loaf of bread Ellie brought, they climbed into her car and headed into downtown Bliss towards the cafe. James reached for Ellie’s hand and she threaded her fingers through his and pretended for just a second that this was all real. That it didn’t have an expiration date on it. That she was his and he was hers and this was their life.
He parked on the street directly in front of Good Beginnings, his headlights cutting a clear path through the darkness and illuminating the dining room. Except that was wrong. The lights should have reflected off the glass in the windows. Ellie squinted. Something was wrong.
“What the?” James cut the engine and killed the lights and Ellie’s body exploded with adrenaline. The front window was gone. Shattered. And from what she could see, the dining room had been destroyed. She threw open the door of the truck and practically hit the ground running.
“Ellie!” James was out of the truck, leaving the door open and the keys in the ignition. “Wait. Let me go in first.”
Ellie was shaking, barely understanding what he said to her, but let him take the keys from her. Something was spray painted across the door, the headlights from the truck casting their shadows over the words. Ellie could still make it out.
Whore.
The word scrawled in violent red paint right over the Good Beginnings logo. Ellie choked on a sob, anger and fear and something darker twisting in her already upset stomach. James unlocked the door and stepped in, flicking on a light.
Glass crunched under his feet. Ellie followed him inside and doubled over like she’d been punched in the gut. Everything was broken. The tables and chairs lay shattered and scattered across the floor amongst the shards of glass from the display case. The plates and the mugs she’d agonized over ordering were broken and strewn everywhere. The pastries and baked goods were smashed.
The walls screamed at her in red paint. Words like whore and golddigger, slut and cunt skewed madly across every possible surface. Ellie straightened and then put her hands right back on her knees and wretched. James put his hand on her back.
“Stay here. I’m going to make sure they’re gone.” He didn’t wait for her to respond. He just walked deeper into the cafe, disappearing behind the counter into the kitchen.
The moment she was alone, Ellie felt exposed. She followed him and found the kitchen just as ruined as the dining room. The office a disaster of shredded papers and the overwhelming scent of urine.
“You okay?”
Ellie turned to him, bringing her hands to her face and shaking her head. “What do I do?” she asked and then flared her hands, her eyes seeking the safety of his. “Why?”
“First, you call the police. Then, we’ll call your insurance company. The what’s are easy. The why? That’s not so easy. Who would do this?”
She shook her head, her hands covering her mouth again. Steve? But why? He hadn’t been happy when she’d kicked him out, but he hadn’t seemed unhinged or anything. She said as much to James who sighed and pulled her in close and just hugged her until she stopped shaking. What now?
The rest of the morning unfolded in a blur of phone calls and questions and bad news stacked on bad news. The cops showed up and ushered them outside, asking questions Ellie didn’t have answers to. As they draped crime scene tape around the entrance to her cafe, claiming the space she’d created for herself as theirs, she pulled her phone out and called her insurance company only for them to tell her the policy had lapsed.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said. James was at her side in an instant. Ellie started pacing while the woman on the phone checked and double-checked her information.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry. But it says here your policy was terminated last month due to non-payment.”
“You’re sure?” Ellie wracked her brain, trying desperately to remember when she had made the last payment. She would have written it down in her ledger in the office, to be transposed into the computer when she had the time. But she never had the time and the ledger always sufficed except right now, it was shredded to pieces and part of a crime scene in the cafe that wasn’t hers anymore.
Ellie hung up the phone and continued to pace, her knees threatening to deposit her on the ground if she stopped moving. James called her name, gently at first, but then with more insistence when she kept ignoring him, hands clenched into tight fists and shaking.
Finally, he grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her to stop. “Ellie. Look at me. What happened?”
“There’s no insurance.” Her belly hollowed out and her lungs felt like she was trying to breathe water. “The policy lapsed.”
She didn’t say she thought she had paid it and he didn’t ask her what happened. Didn’t make her feel like a failure for missing a payment. Didn’t blame her for dropping the ball. He just pulled her in tight and hugged her.
“I got you,” he whispered, smoothing her hair. “I’ve got you, sweet Ellie.”
* * *
From that point forward, James was amazing. He parked her at the truck and dealt with the police. Answered the questions they had for him and then sat right next to her while they asked her the same set of questions they had asked her this morning. A crowd had gathered, whispering and pointing. Most were polite and left Ellie alone or offered some form of consolation if they caught her attention. James shielded her from that, too. Answering any questions and standing between Ellie and the onlookers.
James made several phone calls, his voice rat-a-tat-tatting directions at the people on the other line. After several hours of sitting and watching and feeling sick and useless, he caught her attention.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“I can’t go. What if they need me?” She gestured towards the police meandering around the cafe, looking just more dumbfounded than competent. Things like this didn’t happen in Bliss.
“They’ve got your cell number. If they need you, they’ll call.”
It took some convincing, but he finally got Ellie to leave after getting one of the officers to tell her it was okay. She didn’t ask James where he was taking her, just sat numbly in his truck, watching the ocean rolling up to the shore just like it did every other day. It was unnerving, seeing something so mundane and normal on the day her life had been totally upended.
She had nothing. An apartment without power. A relationship without a future. No family to turn to. And now, the one thing she dedicated her life to had been rendered nothing more than a pile of crumbled glass and shredded papers, violent red paint spewing hateful words dripping down the walls.
22
In times of crisis, there was only one thing to do and that was turn to family. While Ellie had sat dumbfounded and broken outside her ruined cafe, James had rallied the troops, calling his parents and his brothers and his sister to circle the wagons. Alone, they were weak, but together, they were unbreakable. His dad had always likened family to a shield wall. They would pull together and create an impenetrable defense, moving forward in the face of adversity and using their strength to protect the person standing beside them. His whole family was waiting for them at the Moore family home; his mom sure to be busy in the kitchen making something warm and easy on the stomach.
Ellie barely said a word as he drove, just stared out the window, her face slack and her eyes glazed over. He resisted the urge to ask her if she was going to be okay because he knew the answer. She would tell him yes and mean no, but that’s only because she hadn’t realized what it meant to have a Moore in her corner yet. He had to wonde
r if she had any idea as to what it was like to have anyone in her corner. Ever.
His heart broke for the girl who’d had to learn to fend for herself. For the girl who had built all these walls around herself. For the girl who sat next to him in his truck, thinking she had lost it all.
He would just have to show her that she hadn’t lost a thing.
“Where are we?” she asked as he pulled up in front of his parents’ house.
“Welcome to the quaint, though somewhat imposing home of Frank and Diane Moore.” James smiled and reached across the truck to squeeze her knee. “When disaster strikes, Moores come together.”
Ellie stared at the large, cottage-style mansion with its wraparound porch and sweeping views of the beach. “I don’t belong here,” she murmured.
James scowled. “Of course you do. Now, get out of the truck and prepare yourself.”
“For what?”
“For the glory of the Moores in action.”
He slid out of the truck and closed the door. Waited for her to join him and took her hand. In all the weeks they had been together, he had never seen Ellie stumble under the weight of any emotion. Any adversity. Period. She always just taken a beat, swallowed hard, and then pulled herself up by the bootstraps while that mask came down over and hid what she was really thinking and she just dealt with it. He kept waiting for her to turn to him and smile and tell her she would be just fine and she just kept not doing it.
He pushed through the front door into the house and was assaulted with the scent of fried chicken and coffee and some kind of chocolate baked something or other. His brothers rushed them the moment the door closed clicked into its frame, asking questions about the damage at the store. Asking whether Ellie was okay. Julz and his sister, Lilah, hung back, looking worried and wringing their hands, and his dad handed Ellie a tumbler filled with more than a few fingers of scotch.
Ellie shrunk back into James, tucked herself right under his arm, and peered out at the family with her eyes wide.
“Back, you beasts,” James said, making a shooing motion with his hands. “Give the woman a moment to breathe.”
Ellie giggled nervously and James led her into the living room to have a seat. She sipped at the scotch and smiled, looking more unnerved than she had at the crime scene. James inwardly fumed at the mess of glass and paint and crumbled baked goods. Someone had actually punched the muffins in the display. If it wasn’t so awful, it would be funny, thinking about someone upset enough to punch a pastry. But this was Ellie and nothing about it was funny at all.
Who would do that to her? Why would they do it to her? Those names scrawling across the walls in hot red slashes of paint, those were born of anger. The urine in her office, that was personal. But Ellie was the kindest, sweetest person James had ever met. A woman who went out of her way to help people. A woman who put her head down and did what was needed. A woman who persevered.
A woman who had inched her way through his defenses and made him remember what it meant to care about someone. Made him want to care about someone. And not just any someone. Her specifically. He couldn’t imagine that anyone who knew her wouldn’t end up having feelings for her. Hell, even that cook of hers had gotten wrapped up in her. So much so that he had walked out on his job when he discovered Ellie was dating James.
His mouth fell open and all the blood in his body slowed to a stop and then raced on through his veins to make up for lost time. “Ellie,” he said, interrupting the conversation she was having with one of his brothers. “That cook. The crazy one who left you in a lurch.”
Her mouth fell open. “Ben.”
“You don’t think...?”
“I don’t know...”
“But could he...?”
“I guess so....” Ellie rested the tumbler of scotch on her knee. “What do I do?”
Ian watched the conversation as if it were a tennis match, his head ping-ponging back and forth between the two of them. “Would one of you finish a sentence?”
Ellie and James explained who Ben was and how he had quit so suddenly. Ian nodded as he listened, and shrugged when they finished. “Sounds totally plausible.”
There was another flurry of discussion and Ellie called the police and filled them in while the Moores stood watch over her. They cheered and applauded when she hung up and something warm filled James’s heart as he watched her face soften. Her posture relax. Her smile stretch easily across her face.
There was no medicine like family, that was for damn sure. And there was something extra sweet about watching that medicine go to work on Ellie. By the time his mom called them all in for food, Ellie seemed almost completely like herself again.
James watched her compliment his mother on the meal. Laugh at Ian’s jokes. Ask his dad questions about the scotch in her glass that got magically refilled every time she left it alone. She spoke to Juliet like they were old friends and asked Harrison about his restaurant. She even managed to make Lilah smile and no one managed to make Lilah smile.
It was like Ellie belonged here. Like she was a missing part of the family. Like she had always been here. Her demeanor was so easy and natural. So sweet and caring. It made him question what would actually happen after Ian’s wedding. Would he be willing to let her go? Could he really imagine a life without her?
And more importantly, if he asked her to stay, would she?
23
Something in her gut told her that Ben was the one who had ruined her cafe. There were very few people in life that Ellie couldn’t get along with, wasn’t interested in getting to know. Ben had been one of those people. She had drawn hard lines with him the since the beginning. Had that been some kind of sense of who he was? Her subconscious sensing danger and keeping her safe?
Calling the police and giving them his name felt good, but sitting down to a family meal with the Moores felt even better. It brought her back, way back, to one of her favorite memories. One so old it was missing detail in some places, yet was almost sensory overload in others. Worn and exaggerated by time. Before her father died and her mother lost her mind, they made time to sit down to family dinner every night.
Her favorite memory was nothing more than the three of them laughing over some joke she had long forgotten. She could still feel the rough skin of her father’s palm, the coarse bit of hair that grew on his knuckles, as he took her hand in his. The scent of pasta and garlic and tomato sauce overwhelmed her. The light had been long and slanted, coming in warm and bright through the open window to illuminate the smile on her mother’s face. Their laughter echoed through time, distorted and hung in the sunlight, dancing like dust motes.
Ellie couldn’t remember if that was the last dinner they’d had together or the best dinner they’d had together. Time had blurred the details. But the memory haunted her through years of eating dinner alone. Or eating dinner under the barking orders of militant foster dads. Or making dinner for the family and eating it in terse silence.
And here, with the Moores laughing and joking, teasing each other and rallying around her on a genuinely awful day, she felt like she had found that memory of her parents again. Like finally, after all these years, she was getting to experience it again and it made her feel all warm and melty inside. Of course, maybe that was the scotch. Somehow, no matter how much she drank, the glass always seemed full.
Diane gathered plates from the table and Ellie stood. “Here,” she said, clutching the arms of her chair as the world spun. “Let me help.”
“Oh no.” Diane gave her a stern look. “You sit. Relax. Let me take care of you. Lord knows you’ve had your hands full with my son.”
“Hey!” said James. “I resemble that remark.”
Diane returned carrying a plate of brownies and a carafe of coffee. “If I hadn’t seen you turn down a drink with my very eyes I wouldn’t have believed it was possible after the way you’ve been living lately.”
James smiled at Ellie and took her hand. “I made this woman a promise and I’ll
be damned if I let her down. She deserves better.”
Frank nodded and reached out to give Ellie’s other hand a squeeze, his rough palm scraping her knuckles and this surge of bittersweet emotion nearly took away her ability to speak. “I’d say,” said Frank in his perfectly gravelly voice, “that James may have finally met his match.” Frank took a sip of his coffee. “She’s gotten him to quit drinking. To stop moping around his house like a wounded child. She even got him to spend a day working at her cafe.”
Or maybe I’m the one who has met my match, Ellie thought. She had opened up, shared her past with him. Let him see how she was struggling. Let him help her when she needed it. Accepted his money. His support. A room in his house.
“Now,” said Lilah, interrupting Ellie’s train of thought. “If she could only manage to get him to stop with all the fighting.” Lilah turned to James. “Seriously. With all the bruises and the cuts? Those jerks you’ve been hanging out with? Pounding people to a pulp or whatever it is you do? How do you think that makes me look? To have my brother strutting around with bruised knuckles and black eyes?”
Harry shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Because it’s always about you, isn’t it, Lilah?”
She pursed her lips and sat back, tossing her wheat-colored hair over her shoulders.
“Seriously, Lilah.” James crossed his arms on the table. “I’m not gonna quit fighting. And now that I know how much it affects you, what a hardship it is on you to have a brother like me, I might just get even more into it.”
Lilah rolled her eyes and opened her mouth to return what was sure to be a vicious comment, given the look in her eyes, but Diane interrupted her.
“That’s enough, you two.” She winked at Ellie. “You can play nice or go to your rooms.”
“So,” Ian said. “On that note. What are we going to do about Ellie and this Ben guy? She can’t go home.”
