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And so she did.
A little at a time, as she could get the words out.
Holding on to Michael.
* * *
DIANE WAS WAITING up for Mike when he got home sometime after midnight. Lacey had set her alarm and come out to find Kacey starting to doze against him and had taken her sister to bed. She would be climbing in beside her.
Kacey refused to take the sleeping pill Lacey tried to give her. And as Mike left, he felt a little bit better. His friend was stronger than she thought. She’d soak up the love she needed—it was all around her—and she’d pick up her pieces and have more to offer the world because of what she’d been through.
At least that was what he told himself. He hoped that the shining light that made her so unique hadn’t been permanently dimmed.
He’d spent the trip home thinking about the woman he’d left, rather than coming up with an explanation for his absence that would suit his nosy sister. He couldn’t use the Lemonade Stand at ten o’clock at night. The computer shop was closed.
“What’s up?” he asked as soon as he saw Diane’s furrowed brow. Worry. Not anger. “Where’s Willie?” If his little brother had pulled a fast one on him...
“In bed.”
“Where’s Ron?”
She shook her head. “He didn’t stay.”
“Something happened?”
“I smelled alcohol on Willie’s breath.”
Damn it all to hell. “He was drunk? He sat in my house and got drunk?”
The kid was bound and determined to create the person he thought his family saw in him. Bound and determined to prove them right.
“No, Mike, he wasn’t drunk. As it turns out he’d barely been drinking. One beer. They each had one beer.”
He didn’t have any beer in the place. And he’d moved his small liquor stash to the safe in his bedroom just in case Willie went looking. No sense in tempting a kid who had morose moments.
“Where’d they get beer?” Not like it mattered. He was buying his temper a minute to simmer down.
“Ron brought a couple over from his house. His father said it was okay.”
It was not okay for anyone’s father to say his underage son could take beer to someone else’s house.
“It was only one beer apiece, Mike.”
“That you know of.”
“I checked the trash. There were no empty cans. When I confronted Willie, letting him know I’d smelled the alcohol on his breath, he showed me the cans. They’d stashed them in Ron’s trunk. There were only two of them. I checked the whole car. And Willie’s room, too.”
Because Diane thought the worst of Willie.
And yet, here she was, defending him?
“He’s scared to death you’re going to lose faith in him,” she said. “He knows it was wrong, but he figured as long as he was doing everything else right...he’d told Ron only to bring one each.”
As opposed to the twelve-pack Willie had been caught with when he was hanging out with the crowd with whom he was no longer allowed to associate. As opposed to the drugs he’d smoked.
“He screwed up, but it’s been an extremely hard week for him, given all of the changes he’s made. And made successfully. He’s willing to do this, Mike. He wants to be here.”
Wow. Diane? Fighting for Willie?
