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“Okay. Later,” Kat said as cheerily as she could manage.
Adele blew kisses through the phone and hung up. Kat slid her thumb across the screen, but she skimmed past Liam’s text and opened the message from Jen, instead. Kat knew what Liam’s foster-sister wanted without having to read the message. Jen always wanted the same thing: a piece of Liam, in any form she could get. Liam’s relationship with Jen hadn’t changed one bit in the nineteen years since they had shared a foster-family. Jen got herself into trouble, asked Liam to help her sort out her mess, and utterly disregarded the advice he gave to get her life together. Kat grimaced at Jen’s text. Jen might have ignored Liam’s counsel, but she never forgot his deeply ingrained sense of duty toward her, and she never hesitated to take advantage.
Kat started to delete the message but when the little pop-up box asked if she was sure, she hesitated and cancelled the command. Jen had been a part of Liam’s life for a long time, longer than Kat had known him. Jen, and so much more of Liam’s past as a foster kid with no control over anything, had made Liam into the man he was. It was inevitable that he would have eventually channeled some of his need for control onto their marriage in some way or another.
Kat blew out a long breath and put the phone down on the table. Twisting her wedding ring around and around on her finger, she tried to think through the mess of her emotions.
“You should go home.”
Kat jerked her head up. The barista turned a chair over onto a tabletop and met her gaze unapologetically. She frowned at him and he shrugged.
“It’s Christmas,” he said. “It’s a shitty time to be alone. If you have a warm house and someone who loves you waiting, you should go home. Talk it out and see if you can forgive him.”
“I don’t know if I’m ready to talk to him.”
“Do you love him?”
She didn’t have to think about that. If she didn’t love him, this wouldn’t hurt so damned much. “Yes.”
“Well, then. You see those lights out there?” He waved a hand at the street.
“Sure,” she said, pinching the bridge of her nose. How could she miss them?
“You ever see the movie?”
“What? Miracle on 34th Street? When I was a kid.”
“You should watch it again. Fred’s a lawyer, right? But he nails this one thing. He says ‘Faith is believing when common sense tells you not to.’ You need to have some faith in your marriage.”
“You think?” She picked up her phone and turned it over to look at the screen. Liam grinned at her while tiki torches glowed behind him. Her memories from their Hawaii trip were among her most cherished.
“I do. But you should still kick his ass.”
Kat considered. Yeah. She did need to kick his ass. Standing up, she stuck her phone in her pocket again. She leaned over and gave the startled barista a kiss on the cheek. “Thanks. You helped more than the hot chocolate.”
Carrying her cooling hot chocolate outside, she headed toward the row house. The gawkers had thinned out, but there was still a steady stream of traffic along 34th. She crossed over at Keswick, taking her time and really looking at the displays. She hadn’t slowed to admire the lights since the ceremonial switch flipping in November.
Every house sported icicle lights, dripping from the eaves like frosting on so many gingerbread houses. Garland and fairy lights wrapped around porch posts and railings, adding a sort of haphazard uniformity to the displays. Strings of multicolored lights bridged the road like jeweled stars, linking the two sides of the street.
Kat paused on their front steps, taking it all in. The exuberance of it, the sheer joyful excess, struck her.
Girding herself to face whatever she found, she opened the door.
* * *
Liam paced while the phone rang. Kat had been gone for...hell, he didn’t know how long. Too long. So long that she should have been in touch. Christ, he’d fucked up. The hell of it was that he would do the same damned thing again.
She absolutely could not leave him. He would fix this.
“Hello?”
Adele’s voice cut through his jumbled thoughts. “Adele! Is Kat with you? Have you heard from her? Do you know where she is?”
A long pause on her end called attention to the background noises. Sounded like a party. Which meant Kat was almost certainly not with Adele. Dammit.
“Oh. Hello, Liam. I’m fine, how are you?”
He didn’t have time for this. “Look, Adele, I don’t mean to be rude, but I really need to find Kat.”
