Hawthorne Harbor Box Set

by Elana Johnson

  And with that, they lowered Adam’s bed until it was flat, and they pushed him and all of his equipment out of the curtain area.

  “Okay, then.” Drew sighed and ran his hands through his hair. “Let’s go wait on the third floor.”

  * * *

  Janey bought Jess a can of soda from the machine and met Donna’s eye. She mimed that she was going to go make a quick phone call, and Donna nodded, tucking Jess against her side in a silent I’ve got him.

  Janey walked away, her legs feeling rubbery and like they might not hold her up for much longer. She ducked around the corner and dialed AnnaBelle.

  “I’ve been waiting for you to call,” her sister said in a rush. “Is Adam all right?”

  “How did you know?”

  “He got in an accident on Main Street over two hours ago. Everyone knows.”

  Janey sighed and leaned her head against the sterile wall behind her. She slid down and sat on the floor, her knees tucked to her chest. “They just took him into surgery. He has a broken leg. Other than that, he’s got a few bruises and cuts. I think the term the doctor used was ‘lacerations’ on his hands, arms, neck, and face. And a burn from the airbag.”

  AnnaBelle sucked in a breath. “I’m so sorry, Janey.”

  This time, Janey’s tears poured down her face. “Why does this stuff always happen to me? I mean, you’ve been married to Don for nine years now. He’s never gotten in an accident. Never broken a bone.” She calmed and quieted as someone in a white lab coat went by. “Maybe I’m bad luck.”

  “Don’t be silly.” But AnnaBelle didn’t sound like Janey was being silly at all.

  She tilted her head back and looked at the ceiling tiles. “What should I do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jess and I get along just fine. Maybe I should...I don’t know. Cut Adam loose.”

  “Janey....” But she didn’t finish. Didn’t reassure Janey that if she married Adam, they could grow old together. Janey supposed there were no assurances of that for anyone.

  Her eyes filled with tears, and they trickled down her face. “I’ll call you when I know more, okay? Will you tell everyone else?”

  “Of course.”

  “Bye.” Janey hung up without waiting for AnnaBelle to say anything else. She stayed against the wall until her tears dried and her backside went numb. Then she got up and went into the bathroom to clean herself up. After all, she didn’t need Jess to see that she’d fallen apart over a broken leg.

  It’s more than that.

  And she knew it was, but she didn’t know what to do about her feelings for Adam, which had grown and swelled in only a few short months. And she couldn’t ask him to quit his job for her. He was a cop, through and through, obviously not exempt from the dangers of freezing rain.

  She returned to the waiting area to find Jess fast asleep, his head in Donna’s lap, and Janey knew that if she broke things off with Adam, she’d be dealing with two broken hearts.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Loud beeping kept pinging against Adam’s blissful slumber. He really wanted it to stop. He needed to figure out where he was, and how he’d gotten there. Bright flashes of light kept sweeping in front of him, like headlights or the swift passing of a lighthouse beam.

  People spoke, but whether the questions were directed at him or not, he couldn’t tell. It felt like a long time went by in this state, while only a few minutes passed at the same time.

  Eventually, he was able to open his eyes, but it was still mostly dark, with that incessant beeping in the background.

  He groaned, his mouth dry and tasting like someone had filled it with wallpaper paste. His leg ached and itched and he tried to pull it toward him to scratch it.

  Pain tore through his hip, and that was when he remembered everything. A yelp left his mouth, and the scratching of a chair sounded in the room.

  “Adam?”

  “Janey?” His parched throat could barely push the word out.

  “Let me get the nurse.” Her silhouette crossed to the door, which had a yellow-lit window, and she left. A few moments later, she returned with a nurse who flipped on the overhead lights.

  He squinted and held back another groan.

  “Hello, Chief. Good to see you awake.” Nancy Runsom smiled at him, but he couldn’t quite return the gesture the way he normally did.

  “I wish I was still asleep.”

  “Oh, nope.” She grabbed his chart and looked at it. Wrote some things down from the source of that annoying beep and said, “We’ll have you up and moving by morning.”

  He gaped at her. “I obviously have a broken leg.”

  “And some great big biceps to propel yourself around.” She grinned at him like they were conversing at a party. “What’s your pain at? Scale of one to ten, ten being so bad you’re about to cry.”

  “Four.” He reached up and scratched his face, only to have his fingers meet gauze and tape. “I itch everywhere.”

  “That’s a side-effect of the anesthetic they use during surgery. It’ll wear off soon.”

  Not soon enough, in Adam’s opinion. Nancy flitted around and took his blood pressure, put some more painkillers in his IV, and finally left him alone with Janey.

  “Hey,” he said. “Come here.”

  She moved to the right side of the bed, her arms wrapped tightly around her.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  She shook her head, a single tear splashing her face. He lifted his right arm, and she carefully curled into his side, her breath and tears hot against his chest.

  “I’m okay,” he finally whispered. “People break their legs every day.”

  She nodded but still didn’t say anything. Adam didn’t know how to reassure her, because the simple fact was, he couldn’t. So he simply held her close to his heart until she quieted, until her breathing evened out and she fell back asleep, until he could whisper, “I love you,” into the darkness and be the only one who heard it.

  * * *

  Nine days after the accident, he finally hobbled back into the police station. Sarah jumped from her seat with, “Chief! You’re back!” She hovered around him, her hands flapping like bird’s wings. “Let me get the door to your office.”

  He’d had a steady stream of people helping him at home too. His brother came every morning to make sure Adam could get in and out of the shower. Up and down the stairs. Janey came on Monday and Wednesday to bring him lunch. Jess came after school to take the dogs out for a run. Joel and his mother had come every night with dinner.

  Adam just wanted to be alone. Needed to be able to take care of himself. His leg hardly hurt anymore, and the physical therapist he saw twice a week said he was making great progress. His cuts had healed nicely, though he wore a bandage over the biggest ones. He had two—one over a particularly deep cut on his neck and one over the burn on his arm from the explosive that detonated to inflate the airbag.

  He could file paperwork, though. And answer emails. And sit in meetings. So he did all of that, growing more and more weary with every passing hour. Around two-thirty, Sarah said, “You should go home. You look gray.”

  He felt gray, so he asked Trent to take him home. He didn’t have a new cruiser yet, as the insurance was being slow to come through on the appraisal of the one that had been totaled. It had been hit three times, in three different spots, so he wasn’t sure what the hold up was.

  Doesn’t matter, he told himself as Trent turned into his driveway. You can’t drive anyway.

  He waited for Trent to come give him something steady to hold onto as he heaved his considerable weight onto his good leg. Trent stayed by his side along the walkway and up the steps. Adam collapsed into a chair on his front porch, his breath laboring in and out of his lungs.

  “Thanks.”

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m just going to sit right here for a while,” Adam said. “Jess will be by after school. I’ll make him cook me dinner.” He put a sm
ile on his face so his officer would leave. Trent did, and Adam’s smile disappeared with the departure. He needed Gypsy’s happy face, so he got himself to his feet and opened the front door. “Come on,” he called, and both dogs came running.

  Fable had been less standoffish since Adam had returned home, and both dogs sat at his feet. He absently rubbed them, taking their friendship and strength as his own.

  A while later, the tell-tale sound of a skateboard on asphalt filled the air, and Adam watched as Jess came down the road. He kicked his board up and caught it under his arm before coming up the driveway. When he saw Adam sitting on the porch, his face burst into a grin.

  “Hey, man.”

  Gypsy left Adam’s side and went to greet Jess, who knelt down and let her lick his face while he laughed. Adam’s heart swelled with love for the teen. He didn’t have to come here after school. He probably had friends he’d rather hang out with.

  “I’m starving,” he said. “Can I...?”

  “Bring me some crackers or whatever my mom put in the cupboards.”

  Jess went inside, taking Gypsy with him, the glutton. She knew where to get treats, and it wasn’t from Adam. He returned with two boxes of crackers and a cheese ball. Adam opted for the wheat ones, no cheese ball necessary, and Jess sat in the chair on the other side of the table, Gypsy begging at his feet.

  “How’s school?” Adam asked.

  “Great. Almost the end of the term.”

  “What are you guys doing for Thanksgiving?”

  “Going out to your parents. Or Drew’s, I guess. They’re doing dinner out there.”

  Adam nodded. He’d been invited to Drew’s too. And while Janey hadn’t stopped coming over, and they texted and talked a lot, Adam felt something different between them.

  “How’s your mom?”

  “Okay.”

  And that about summed it up. Before, things had been going great. Now they were just okay. Adam wasn’t quite sure what was on Janey’s mind, because she hadn’t told him. Their lunches had been quiet affairs, and she rarely came in the evenings, because his parents did.

  “She’s been saying some weird stuff.” Jess paused in his rapid consumption of the crackers and dip.

  “Like what?” Adam looked at the boy. “I mean, you don’t have to tell me. Probably none of my business.”

  Jess shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s probably nothing.”

  Adam let a beat of silence go by, and then he said, “Hey, remember when you were making the bisque, and I said to listen to your gut? You gotta do that all the time. You say things are nothing a lot, but they rarely are. They’re something.”

  Jess looked at him with Matt’s eyes—his best friend’s eyes—and Adam smiled. “Okay?”

  He nodded, emotions storming through those eyes. “Okay. So then...I mean, how interested are you in being my dad?”

  Adam blinked at the question, not quite prepared for it and not expecting it to come up right now. “I’m totally interested in that,” Adam said, his voice thick and hoarse at the same time. “I love you, Jess. You’re a great kid.” He cleared his throat, glad Jess’s chin had started wobbling a little bit too.

  “I’ll tell my mom.”

  “Why? She thinks I don’t want to be your dad?”

  “She thinks you won’t be around long enough.” Jess went back to his crackers. “Or something. She stays up real late, you know? Thinks I don’t know she’s lying in bed reading. Except this week, she’s been crying.” He glanced at Adam. “She talks to herself when she’s stressed. Did you know that?”

  Adam nodded. “It’s hard work being as awesome as she is. Makes sense she’d want to talk some things out with herself.” And a bowl of chocolate chips and pretzels.

  “Anyway, she keeps saying she’s not being fair to you, but I don’t know what that means. Last night, she said you probably wouldn’t be around long enough to...do something. I couldn’t quite hear.”

  Adam sighed and surveyed the front lawn, the quiet street in front of him. “You probably shouldn’t be eavesdropping on your mom.”

  “Yeah, probably not.”

  Adam ate a few crackers, trying to think of something to say. He finally came up with, “I can’t control everything, Jess, just because I’m the Chief of Police. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “We don’t have a lot of violence or problems here in Hawthorne Harbor, but my guess is your mom thinks my job is too dangerous for me to be....” He cleared the emotion from his voice. “Her husband and your dad.”

  Adam wanted to be both. The possibility of it had been drawing closer and closer, but now it felt distant. A dot on the horizon he couldn’t reach. Would never reach.

  “How interested are you in me being your dad?” he asked.

  The box of crackers made a crumpling noise as Jess dug into the plastic bag again. “I’m real interested in that.”

  “You don’t think it’ll cramp your style?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You know, me being the Chief of Police and all that. You think your friends would still want to hang out with you?”

  “Maybe not all of them.”

  “Maybe not the ones who want you to tag buildings.”

  Jess looked away. “Yeah, not those ones.”

  “Maybe they’re not real friends, then.”

  “Maybe not.” Jess scooped up more dip and made a sandwich out of two crackers. “But I wouldn’t mind.”

  Adam leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “I wouldn’t mind either, Jess.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Janey pulled into the driveway at home at the same time Jess opened the garage door, his skateboard tucked under his arm.

  She rolled down her window before pulling into the garage. “Hey, bud. How’s Adam today?”

  “Went back to work,” he said before walking away.

  Janey’s motherly instincts fired, and she eased into the garage and parked. Once inside, she found Jess standing in front of the fridge, looking for something to eat. “Everything okay?”

  Jess closed the fridge but wouldn’t look at her. “We have nothing to eat.”

  “We could go see Grandma Germaine. She’s been asking about you.” Janey tried to get Jess over to see Matt’s parents as often as possible. They took him on weekends sometimes too, but they hadn’t for a while, not since LouAnn had started having some health problems.

  “I already texted her. They’re in Seattle for a couple of days.”

  Janey simultaneously loved that Jess had a phone and didn’t. At least he was texting people like the Chief of Police and his grandmother. “Then let’s go get pizza or something.”

  “I don’t want pizza.”

  Janey knew then that something serious had happened. Was it school? Or Adam? “Hey,” she said, reaching out and touching his shirtsleeve. “What’s going on?”

  Jess turned toward her, his face a perfect storm of anger and confusion. “I hear you crying at night, Mom.”

  Janey fell back a step. “I’m...fine, Jess.”

  “You’re not fine.”

  She’d been getting up and going to work every day. Nothing in their routine had changed, except for she’d taken sandwiches and salads to Adam’s house for lunch last week. Jess skated over there after school. That was all.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Was this how you were when Dad died?”

  She sucked in a breath and held it. “No, because Adam’s not my husband or your dad, and he didn’t pass away.”

  “So you were worse. Great.” He opened a cupboard, didn’t find what he wanted, and slammed it shut. “Are you going to break up with him?”

  She stared at him, her heart thundering in her chest. He’d just asked the same question she’d been battling for nine days.

  “It’s not fair to him or me to keep stringing him along.”

  “Stringing him along? Did he tell you that’s what I was doing?” Becau
se if he had.... Janey’s anger kicked into gear, and it took a lot to get her mad.

  “He told me not to ignore my gut, and my gut says you’re not sure about him, but you haven’t told him anything.”

  How her thirteen-year-old knew so much, Janey couldn’t comprehend. He had no idea what she’d said or not said to Adam. He had no idea what it was like trying to balance a dozen different very breakable plates, hoping you didn’t drop one that was too valuable, or too important, or that would come back to haunt you later.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Janey admitted.

  “You can do hard things,” Jess said in a mildly sarcastic tone. “Isn’t that what you’re always telling me?” He gave her a disgruntled look and added, “I’m ordering pizza,” before lifting his phone to his ear.

  Helplessness filled her, choked her, made her feel like she was drowning. She sat down at the kitchen table while Jess ordered more pizza than would be possible for the two of them to eat. He asked for cash from her wallet to pay for it, and she gave it to him. She barely noticed when the house filled with the scent of marinara and garlic, or that Jess’s friend Thayne had come over.

  She rarely allowed friends over on weeknights, but she didn’t have the energy to bring it up, argue about it, or any of it. She got up and got herself some pizza and then retreated to her bedroom.

  The door closed around nine, and she knew Thayne had gone. Jess usually poked his head in her room and said good-night, but tonight his footsteps took him right into his bedroom, where that door closed too.

  She cleaned up the kitchen, packed herself a lunch for the following day, and hunted around for her phone. She finally found it in her purse, dead, so she plugged it in and retreated back to her bed.

  But she didn’t pull out the e-reader, or open the top drawer of her nightstand to get out her secret stash of treats. She simply stared, trying to sort through all the various thoughts in her head and find a solution to her issues with her relationship with Adam.