Page 53 of Worth the Trouble

Wendy took a worm out of the bowl and bit its head off. “Honey, I’m going to tell you the truth about that night, and I want you to hold still while I do it. We didn’t walk you in for you.”

Rylee looked up. Faith didn’t, which meant she’d known it was coming.

“We went for Jason,” Wendy said. “That man had a business to launch and a town about to make up its mind about him, and if there’s one thing this family knows, it’s how to stand in a row. So we stood in a row.” She chewed. “And then you came through that gate with your chin up and every eye in the place on you, knowing what was waiting, and you didn’t slow down. That’s when it got to be for you.”

Nobody in the room moved to soften it.

“It was in the paper,” Cecelia said. “You all read it.”

“Every word.” Faith set the licorice down. “And nobody here is going to tell you it wasn’t yours. It was yours. You buried a meeting on purpose.”

“Yes.”

“And then you stood in front of the council and said so, out loud, with a reporter in the room, when your own father was telling you not to.” Faith met her eyes. “I’ve lived here my whole life, Cece. I can count on one hand the people who’d have done the second half.”

Cecelia’s throat did what her hands had stopped doing years ago. She looked at the bowl until it passed. Wren, without a word, pushed the peach rings an inch closer to her.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.”

“Eat a peach ring,” Wendy said. “Then keep showing up. The hearing’s coming, and the whole town’s going to be in that gym, and about half of it is still deciding what to do with you. Sit on our side.”

“Front row,” Lydia said. “Where they can see you.”

Her phone buzzed on the bed behind her. She didn’t reach for it. Lydia did. Lydia had been raised with two brothers and no sense of boundaries, and she read the screen and grinned and turned it around to the room.

Tell Wendy I saw her.

“He saw me,” Wendy said. “Of course he saw me. Man sees everything and says nothing. It’s exhausting.”

“What’s the picture?” Wren asked. She’d leaned in. “Is that the Bloom Shop?”

Cecelia held her hand out and Lydia gave the phone back, not fast. The window, the flyer, the small sign above it. Five women looked at it and then at her, and every one of them got there at a different speed.

“He didn’t say anything about it,” Cecelia said. “He just sent it.”

“He wouldn’t,” Faith said. “That’s not how he does it.”

“How does he do it?”

“He shows you the door.” Faith’s mouth went almost soft at one corner. “He held one open for Tate all summer. Then Rylee walked through it.”

Rylee had been quiet through most of this, her fingers working a gummy worm into a knot. “I stood up at the first one,” she said. “The hearing. Told a room full of strangers I’d lived the life your father was selling and walked away from it.” She tied the worm off and set it on the table, done. “You’ll want to know where the microphone is.”

Cecelia looked around the circle. Faith with her chin up. Lydia in the good chair. Wren guarding the bowl. Wendy with a worm in her teeth and no intention of letting a silence last. Rylee on the floor, waiting.

“Where is it?”

“Left of the podium,” Rylee said. “About four steps. Wear the boots.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The hostess at the Aviary seated him at a table by the window, which he hadn’t asked for and figured Reginald had.

He got there before the man did and sat with his hat on the empty chair beside him and his hands flat on the cloth. White tablecloth. Two forks. Water that came with a slice of cucumber in it. He’d eaten here once, for Tate and Rylee, and he’d been more comfortable in a round pen with a horse that wanted him dead.

He didn’t check his phone. Cece had texted while he was parking. Go get ’em. Then, a second later, He’ll order the trout. Don’t ask.

Reginald Williams came in without a coat, in a charcoal suit that made the hostess stand up straighter. He stopped at the table and looked at Jason. Jason looked back at him, and neither of them said a word for as long as it took the hostess to find a reason to be elsewhere.