“Blair. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I was washing some glasses and I knocked a row of them over.”I was washing a hundred catering glasses, even though the whole point is supposed to be that the catering company drops them off clean and picks them up dirty.
“Something’s not right with you.”
She went for the broom and considered her next move. She was annoyed that he was here, but… she was also glad he was here?
Which was it?
He took the broom from her and made a shooing motion. “You’re not wearing shoes.”
She met his eyes as she surrendered the broom, and she saw in them a deep compassion. Or was that pity?
Either way, if she’d had any doubts before about how much he’d seen through her, they evaporated in that moment.
Annoyed won out over glad. He didn’t belong here, not right now. He was overstepping.
She had to get out of here. No, this was her house. She had to get him out of here, and—
The buzzer rang.
“Damn it.” The curse sounded foreign to her ears. One part of her proper upbringing Blair had held on to was that she rarely swore. Why bother when there were so many better, more specific words available?
Jack stopped sweeping. “Ignore it.”
“It’s probably someone who left something here.”
She didn’t even mind. Having a mundane task like answering the buzzer, searching for someone’s glasses or keys, would focus her mind. She would deal with whoever it was, eject Jack, and go to bed.
She pulled up the feed on her phone. There was a taxi at the gate. No one she knew used taxis, except…
Her bones started to tingle. “Ohshit.”
Jack was at her side in an instant. “What? What’s wrong?”
Get it together. Stop swearing.
“Who is it?” he asked.
She took a breath. Counted to three. “It’s my parents.”
Clearly that was not what he’d expected. It wasn’t what Blair had expected, either.
“You don’t have to answer it.”
He didn’t understand, and she didn’t have the bandwidth to explain. She pressed the talk button. Her hand was shaking worse than it had been before. “Mom? Dad? What are you doing here?”
She exhaled to a count of four, even though she knew it wasn’t going to work. What else could she do but keep trying?
Her dad leaned out the side of the back seat to talk into the buzzer as his image was captured by a camera he didn’t know was there. “Our plane was late, but we made it.”
That didn’t answer the question.
“Darlin’, will you be a doll and buzz us in?” Blair’s mom, leaning over her dad, called.
Something about her mother’s brisk tone, which was polite on the surface—but only on the surface—pulled Blair from the brink. Snapped her back into her teenage self. Back when she was a doll. But it might be the price she had to pay for being back from the brink.
She could do this. She just had to find out what the hell they were doing here and make a plan to get them… to not be here.
