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“I’ll call you in a few days, Mom,” I said, as good a compromise as I could come up with. I walked toward the door where my mother stood, gathering her things. “Do you want to take some food?” I asked quietly, but Penny shook her head.
When I looked up, my mother’s green eyes, so familiar, so much a part of my life and my memories, were wide and wet with tears. “I never meant to be this way,” Penny whispered. “The last thing I ever wanted to do was hurt you.”
“I know,” I whispered.
“And I don’t want you to be hurt now,” she said, still managing to shoot a sharp look over my shoulder at Carter, and I fought a smile. Good old Penny Madison— she took a beating but kept on swinging.
“I’m a big girl,” I said. “A woman with my own life. I can take care of myself and my baby.”
Penny cupped my face, a tender touch. “You were always so dreamy,” Penny said. “So lost in your own little world and I…I guess I am just used to worrying. I’m sorry,” she said, wrapping my once-favorite scarf around her neck as she walked out.
I shut the door behind her and rested my head against it, wondering if Carter was going to leave, too. If maybe this was all just a little too much for him.
It was way too much for me and it was my life.
“I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to leave,” I said, talking to the door.
His hand stroked my back, a warm touch through the cowboy shirt with the lassoing hearts I almost wore on our first fake date.
Funny, I’d known this guy less than a month, but his mark was like a thick bold tick on my time line. My whole life was split into halves—before Carter and after Carter.
“Can I tell you something?” he asked, his voice in my ear, his breath a warm breeze on my neck that made my skin do a shimmy.
“Please,” I said, “the more embarrassing the better.”
“I’m proud of you,” he said, still rubbing my back, and I almost started to cry. All the emotions of the day welled up and nearly drowned me, but I pressed my head hard into the door, the pain barely keeping the tears at bay. “I’m proud to be in your life.”
I waited for the but. The “but I’m going to be mayor, and you’re way too nuts to have kicking around City Hall.”
It never came.
His hands kept making those wide warm circles on my back, drugging me, and suddenly I found a lot of courage, enough courage to do stupid things. But in for a penny, in for a pound, was pretty much how I operated.
I turned, wiping away the tears that clung to my eyelashes. “What if I told you I was falling in love with you?” I asked. His eyes got wide and he stepped back, his shoulders slumping slightly as if I’d just punched him in the gut. “I’m not saying I’m there, but it’s not far off. You still want to be in my life?”
As he stood silent and stared at me, I died, over and over again, and wondered if spontaneous combustion really happened.
“I’ve…ah…turned away from love a lot in my life, for a lot of stupid reasons,” he finally said, his fingers reaching for mine, and I couldn’t help reaching out for him. “I don’t want to do it anymore.”
“But there’s something you need to know about me,” he said. “Something that might change your mind.”
“Are you donor 1371D?” I asked, making a joke because he was suddenly so serious, sucking all the air and light out of the world. “Because that would be weird,” I finished lamely.
His smile was cockeyed and distant. “You know about my family,” he said.
“The Notorious O’Neills,” I said. “Don’t tell me there’s more—a grandfather in the mafia or something.”
“No,” he said and then paused. “Although, maybe.”
“Carter—” I laughed.
“It’s me,” he said. “It’s about me. About what I’ve done.” His fingers became stiff in my hands, and I squeezed them, feeling suddenly like despite the fact that he was standing right in front of me, he wasn’t really present.
“It can’t be that bad,” I whispered.
“I lied in court,” he said. “For my mother. I gave her an alibi ten years ago so she wouldn’t go to jail.”
My jaw dropped open. “You?” It was like hearing Smokey the Bear admit to being an arsonist.
“Me. She said if I didn’t do it, she would go back to Bonne Terre and ask my sister. Or my brother. And I knew…God, I knew my sister would do it. Savvy was so desperate to have her mother back, she would have done anything. So I lied, in court, but I made her promise that she’d never bother Savannah or Tyler again. Ever. Not that I honored the agreement, but at the time I thought I was protecting my family.”
