After her second day of fruitless surveillance, she’d debated approaching Louis, the doorman, who’d been watching over the building and the tenants who called it home for as long as Emily could remember. But she couldn’t quite convince her legs to walk across the street. For reasons she didn’t need to analyze, she needed a four-lane buffer between herself and her old life.
Of all the things she missed from her old life, Louis topped the list. Often, when her father would be dragging her along beside him, handling her too abrasively or quietly berating her, Louis would find a way to distract her dad and slip her candy. He was always ready with a smile and a willing ear when she got home after school, to listen to her expound about playground drama and the lessons she’d learned in class. Most importantly, he’d always kept her secrets, and was the last person to talk to her on the day she ran away with nothing but the clothes on her back and a full backpack, though he didn’t know she was leaving for good at the time. He’d held the door open for her that day and had slipped her a twenty-dollar bill, explaining that he didn’t have much, but he wanted her to go buy herself a sweet treat.
In the early afternoon on this fourth day of watching and waiting, Emily stood, once again trying to work up the courage to walk across the street and talk to Louis. She busied herself collecting the trash from her table, sweeping up crumbs from the muffin she’d eaten and bussing her dishes, as she tried to talk herself down from her fear. He was just a man. A very nice man. She had nothing to be scared of.
But what if her parents walked out at that exact moment? What if they saw her before she could hide? She shivered at the thought, a reminder of how far she had to go in order to exorcise the residual fear about her parents from her heart.
The next time she looked up, Louis was no longer standing at his post near the door. She pressed her face to the glass and scanned the sidewalk in either direction but didn’t see him. It was too early for his shift to be over, but maybe he’d had to use the restroom or make a phone call or something.
“Rebecca Youngston.”
She nearly leapt out of her skin at the sound of her old name said in a man’s baritone voice. She’d always assumed that if anyone called her by her given name again, it would either be her parents or the police. She whirled around to find Louis smiling down at her. “You saw me here?” was all she could think to say in her panic.
“For four days now. Did you forget that I know everything that happens in these streets? Especially when it comes to my very favorite tenant,” he said with a kindly wink.
Emily forced herself to take even breaths, then commanded her shoulders to drop and her pulse to slow back down. “I did forget that, yes.”
Louis’s smile broadened, crinkling the edges of his eyes. “I knew you’d be back someday. I prayed for it. And here you are, Praise Jesus.” He opened his arms wide in an invitation for a hug.
She indulged his invitation and wrapped her arms around the kind soul who’d been such a steady, calming force in her childhood. As they hugged, she felt the broken pieces of her spirit healing. She felt the fear melt away. “It’s so good to see you, Louis.”
“Likewise you, darlin’. Especially seeing you look so good.” He held her at arm’s length and looked her over, the same way Granny June sometimes did. “You must have done all right for yourself.”
“I have. I’m a chef.”
He chuckled at that. “You? You never cooked nothing in your life when you lived in my building.”
She couldn’t help but smile. “I know. I didn’t learn to appreciate the art of cooking until later.” When scrounging up enough food became one of the most important elements of her survival.
Louis’s smile fell. “I’m sure you’re here looking for your parents.”
All she could do was nod.
“As happy as I am to see you, it’s now my burden to let you know that your parents are no longer with us.”
“What?” The possibility had never crossed her mind. She really had believed that if they’d died, she would have sensed it, somehow.
“Your father of a heart attack not too long after you left. Your mother moved out of my building soon after, but she kept in touch with me. I learned a couple years ago that she’d passed on. Cancer.”
Emily went numb, cold. They were both dead. Had been for years. She dropped into the nearest chair. All this time, she’d been so fearful, so vigilant about concealing her identity. And for no reason. If she’d ever bothered to conduct that internet search, she could have spared herself years of unnecessary worry. “I don’t know what to say.”
Louis eased into the chair across from her. “I bet you have a lot of questions, about your folks and where they’re buried and other details about their passing, but I’m not the one to ask. They don’t tell me nothing because I’m just the doorman. But I know someone who can help you.” He pulled a business card from his jacket pocket and handed it to her.
The name on the card was Charles Welk. Her parents’ closest friend and lawyer. “How did you…”
“Mr. Welk has been convinced, just as I was, that someday you’d be back. Every time he comes around, he gives me his card. He said that if you ever came back, that you should go talk to him because he’s the executor of your parents’ estate.”
Emily fingered the corner of the card. Her stomach churned with dread at the idea of presenting herself to her parents’ closest friend, of coming out of hiding. Whatever her parents had left her in their wills, she didn’t want it. She wanted no ties to them, nothing to make her beholden to their memory. Then again, what if it was a letter, an apology? Her eyes pricked with moisture at the thought. Did she dare hope?
Louis patted her hand. “You have a lot to think about. I hope you go see this Mr. Welk. Don’t give yourself something new to regret by leaving this stone unturned.”
Emily stood with Louis and embraced him once more. “Thank you.”
“Darlin’, you just made my year, finding out that you’re alive and well. All the thanks goes to Jesus for bringing you home.”
Home. Not by a long shot.
She watched Louis cross the street and reassume his position at the door, then she walked through the café, out the back door and through the alley where her car was parked. On her phone, she pulled up directions to Charles Welk’s office on the twenty-fourth floor of a building on West Jackson Blvd, downtown, and hit the road.
Welk’s office was a cheery space, and quiet, with large windows affording a partial view of Lake Michigan. The secretary, a slim blonde who looked to be in her fifties smiled at Emily and waited for her to approach her desk before asking, “May I help you?”
Emily flashed the business card Louis had given her. “Mr. Welk isn’t expecting me, but I was told to pay him a visit if I ever came back to Chicago. Is he in today?”
“He is. Let me see if he’s available now. Who may I tell him is here?”
“Emily.” She huffed. Not today, she wasn’t. “No, wait. He would know me as Rebecca. Rebecca Youngston.”
She disappeared through a door behind her desk. Emily walked to the window and settled her gaze on a sailboat that was little more than a white speck in the vast blue-gray water.
In a matter of moments, the door opened again. “Rebecca, could that really be you?” said a male voice.
Emily turned, but she was too nervous to smile.
Charles Welk had gone gray since she’d last seen him and now sported a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper mustache, but she would have recognized his lanky frame and moneyed air anywhere. He looked like maybe he wanted to hug her, so she thrust out her hand between them, which he accepted.
“My God, I can’t wait to hear where you’ve been and what you’ve been up to.”
Not so fast, buddy. If he wanted to catch up for old time’s sake, then he was going to be sorely disappointed because Emily had too much on her mind to make small talk, not that she was any good at it anyway. “Could we talk in your office?”
If he was startled by her abruptness, he showed no sign of it. “Of course. After you. Sheri, hold my calls, please.”
Welk’s office afforded the same stunning view of the lake, but Emily forced herself to sit in one of the chairs facing his ornate French Provincial desk rather than distract herself with the view.
“I was told by Louis, the doorman at my parents’ apartment, that they’d passed away. He gave me your card.”
“Louis always did have your family’s best interests at heart. He’s a fine man.”
Oh, the urge to take Charles Welk by the lapels, give him a good shake, and command him to stop dancing around with small talk and spit it out about why he’d wanted to talk to her. “He said you wanted to speak to me, that you had something for me.”
Welk took a long, studying look at her, clearly deliberating whether to keep pursuing a chatty conversation or indulge her by getting straight to the matter at hand. “You father died shortly after you left home,” he said. “I’m not saying that so you’ll blame yourself. He and I were friends and colleagues, but he was a hard man and he never did right by you or your mother. Everything that happened to him, he brought on himself.”
Truer words had never been spoken, though the news left her surprisingly angry all over again. Not at her father, but at herself, for expending so much energy and thought evading her parents only to find out it was an imagined threat. Nothing but a ghost. “And my mother?”
For the first time, Welk’s expression shifted away from cheery professionalism. “Breast cancer took her from the world, from me, too soon. Two years ago.” He fiddled with a wedding band on his left ring finger.
Had her mother remarried her father’s best friend? Charles Welk had always seemed like a decent guy. It felt nice, imagining her mother finding companionship and enjoying a few happy years after her father died. “You two were … close?”
“In the years after Bernard died, we took solace in each other. We were a good match. Married for four years.”
“Then I’m sorry for your loss.” What an ironic world she lived in, to comfort a virtual stranger about the loss of her own mother.
Welk nodded. “Thank you. And to you. I like to think I made her happy. I did my best to help her achieve that goal every day, even after the diagnosis. Life really is so short. Happiness is the only thing that makes the brevity bearable. But she never got over losing you. She’d want me to tell you that we never stopped looking for you.”
“That’s … I don’t know what to say.” Emily dropped her chin, not sure how to feel about that. The safest thing seemed to be to put that kernel of truth in a locked box in her mind to deal with later.
“You don’t have to say anything. I’m sure this is all quite overwhelming. We finally concluded that you’d changed your identity because there were no Rebeccas in the country, living or deceased, who matched your age or description.”
“I did change it, yes,” Emily said.
“Then may I congratulate you for a job well done because we searched long and hard for you, using the best experts in the country, for any possible aliases. And always came up completely empty.” He punctuated the words with a genuine smile of respect.
“Thank you.” She’d always known that the pricey forger she’d hired had been well worth his fee. She’d poured the vast majority of the money she’d stolen from her parents and withdrawn from her savings account into that forged identity. She hadn’t merely wanted to hide, but to recast herself as someone entirely new and sustainable. Emily Ford was a tax-paying, social security contributing, upstanding member of society.
“Is there anything you want to know before we get down to business?”
“No, thank you.”
“Fair enough.” He perched a pair of reading glasses on his nose. “Your mother left a substantial sum of money for you. From the sale of properties, both your parents’ retirement funds, and their investments. She trusted me to hold on to it for you and to issue payment if you ever emerged from hiding.”
The words made her skin tingle. She really had been hiding all these years. Not only from her parents but also from herself and the world. It had taken Knox and her feelings for him to push her out of her safe little nest.
Welk flipped through the leather-bound pages of an old-fashioned address book. “Her instruction was to transfer the money to you under whatever alias you now identified with, not as an inheritance, which we both felt you might have trouble accessing under your new identity without attracting the attention of the government, but rather through an offshore account. All I have to do is make you a signer on the account and the money is yours, I’ve been investing the inheritance to great results. I think you’ll be pleased.”
Pleased wasn’t the right word. How could she be pleased about receiving a gift from the people who’d made her life hell? After all this time, she was finally on the verge of being free of them. The money felt like yet another shackle.
“If it’s all right with you, I’d like to clear my afternoon schedule so that we may pay a visit to my lawyer today,” Welk said, tapping an entry in the address book. “He’ll handle adding your name to the account with the necessary discretion. I assure you that you can trust him, as you can me.”
Maybe she would donate it all to a shelter for battered women and children. Maybe she would pass it to Haylie so she could escape. All Emily knew was that she wanted to keep her options open so she could decide what to do with the money in her own time instead of being forced to make a decision while her emotions were running so high. No more flights of chaotic passion. “That sounds good. Thank you.”
Welk removed his glasses again and sat back in his chair, studying her. “May I ask what your name is now?”
She drew a tremulous breath. Speaking it aloud in the presence of her parents’ closest friend felt like leaping over a great divide. It was time to trust herself not to fall. It was time to trust that no matter what happened next, she was going to be all right. “Emily Ford.”
With a smile, he stood and walked around the desk. He extended his hand to her, his eyes welling with unshed tears. “Well, Emily, it’s wonderful to meet you. It is my profound pleasure to fulfill your mother’s final wish. Thank you.”
* * *
Emily returned to Texas on a cold, rainy night two weeks after she’d left. Like a beacon, the ever-shining lights of Murph’s called to her as she stepped out of her car and stretched. Chicago had looked closer to Dulcet on paper. The drive had been a real slog, but she’d needed the time and the open road to think.
She pulled her suitcase from the back seat, then stood for a moment staring down at the two manila envelopes Charles had given her. One for her future, containing the offshore account information and recent bank statements, the other containing the final remnants of her past. Rebecca Youngston’s driver’s license, her birth certificate, her social security card, an expired passport, and photographs her parents had used in their search for her.
There was something volatile about that envelope and the information therein. A secret she no longer needed to protect, an identity she never wanted to use again. She didn’t even want the envelope crossing the threshold of her apartment. She shoved it under the driver’s seat as far as it would go, where it would have to stay until she decided on the best way to dispose of it. Then she tucked the envelope with the bank information into the front pocket of her suitcase. As soon as she was locked behind her apartment door, she’d have the solitude to process that particular grenade, and she didn’t plan on making any hasty choices. That was what old Emily might have done. New, self-composed, thinking-with-her-brain-and-not-her-heart Emily was going to take her time and consider her options.
Murph was in his usual spot behind the front desk, playing a game on his phone. A handful of regulars were sweating through their grueling workouts to the sound of a classic rock tune playing over the gym’s speakers. She pulled her suitcase behind her, smiling. It was good to be home.
&n
bsp; Action in the boxing ring caught her eye and she gasped at the familiar face—the last person she could handle seeing tonight. Knox, who’d evidently taken up mixed martial arts. His shirt was off and his skin and hair were slick with sweat. His hands were protected by wraps, and his lips puffed out around a mouth guard. And he was circling his opponent, none other than Big Tommy. Emily’s eyebrows shot up at that. Big Tommy was often described as the toughest guy at the gym. He kicked ass and took names from anyone foolish enough to take him on.
Slack-jawed, she ground to a halt just outside the door and watched them spar.
Knox was good. Fast on his feet. Tough. His eyes gleamed, sharp and dangerous. Every ripple or flex of muscle drew her attention to his lean, hard body. She’d made love to this man. She knew how he moved, how he kissed. She knew what all those bulky muscles felt like against her skin. A slow burn of desire settled low in her belly.
Yeah, Knox was definitely the worst person she could’ve encountered tonight.
“Hey, Em. You’re back,” Murph called. “You need help with your suitcase?”
She shook herself out of her daze and sidled up to the counter, where she stole a peppermint from the tin Murph hid behind the pen holder. “I’m back. And, nah, I’ve got it. It’s just the one.”
Murph nodded to the ring. “Your stalker’s here.”
Her gaze found Knox again. “I can see that.”
“He’s not so bad.”
Emily’s heart squeezed, painfully. “That’s the problem.”
“You probably need to know he’s been here twice a day, every day, waiting for you, going on more than a week now. Letting anyone who will get in the ring with him kick his ass. I will say one thing about him—he can take a beating. ‘Course, that’s not happening as much anymore. He’s getting better.”
Every day? Another surprise.
That now familiar longing for connection with him reached out from every cell of her being. As drained and raw as she was from her trip to Chicago, nothing sounded better than taking Knox in her arms and clinging to him tightly enough to block the world out, along with the pain, the heartache, and the impossible choices. But she was determined to make a clear-headed decision about her future, not return from discovering that her parents were dead only to fall right back into her old pattern of letting passion and desire rule her choices.
One More Taste Page 25
