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Chapter Four
Wayne had always reallyliked and appreciated both of the Swartz girls.
Obviously, Cindy had always been the closer one in his life, but Tracey had always been in their midst—a boisterous laugher, the one who had resolved to never marry, the one who had gone off on her own to open her own boutique, rather than work alongside her brother, Alex, and her father, Dean.
Now, as Cindy scrubbed plates in the kitchen, Wayne called Tracey to ask if she could stay the night at Cindy’s since it seemed like Fred planned to tie one on.
“What did you just say to me?” Tracey demanded over the phone, her voice clearly glossy with whatever she’d drunk. “You said Michael’s home? Michael Clemmens?”
“The very same,” Wayne said.
“Shoot.”
Silence hung across the phone line. Finally, Tracey said, “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
When Tracey appeared in the doorway of Cindy’s home, Cindy fell into her and burst into tears. Over the past years, Cindy and Tracey hadn’t been extraordinarily close—another element of Tracey’s decision to step away from the family.
Family needs one another.
Look at them.
It’s like no time has passed at all.
When Tracey managed to get into the foyer, she wrapped an arm around Cindy’s shoulder and said, “He’s back. He’s safe. I think that’s what you have to focus on right now. He’ll either tell you or he won’t when he’s ready.”
Cindy sniffled as the sisters walked toward the back porch and stationed themselves on the rocking chairs. Wayne sat across from them.
“I’m glad you came, Wayne,” Tracey told him. “You always made Michael a whole lot calmer. You remember when we found him on that sailboat?”
Wayne did remember. The stupid kid had stolen his very sailboat—the one he had named after his wife,Tara—and taken off the island with his high school sweetheart, Quinn. He had been maybe sixteen or seventeen at the time, with a very devil-may-care approach to life. Wayne and a buddy had taken a speedboat out in the middle of the night to track them down. He had found them both out of their minds, drunk and high, hardly able to manage the sailboat alone.
“I did it just the way you taught me, Uncle Wayne!” Michael had called to him, drunkenly over the waves.
Wayne had had to jump on, sail the boat back to the docks, while his buddy had driven the speedboat out behind them.
That now felt like a million years ago.
Still, he hadn’t reprimanded Michael. It hadn’t been his place.
And besides. He’d had a hunch the whole acting-out, drinking-too-much stuff was related to his terrible relationship with his father, and the fact that his father was caught in a pretty intense affair.
Fred and Cindy had patched things up, but Michael had never forgiven his father. Not fully.
And the drinking, drugs, and everything else had only continued.
Wayne and Tara had decided to approach every incident with Michael with love, with friendship, and with companionship. Tara had thought that Michael was just a sensitive kid; that you couldn’t attack him the way his father did and expect anything but continued bad behavior.
Obviously, they all wanted the same thing.
And Michael had just always wanted to feel loved.
“That was quite a night,” Wayne affirmed, referring to the sailboat night.
“And we always sent you to the station to pick him up,” Tracey said, again with that boisterous laugh. “Oh, Dad never knew what to do about him. He said there’s a black sheep in every family, and he should know because he was that black sheep. Difficult to imagine, huh? Although...”
Here, her eyes grew all glittery and strange.
Wayne’s stomach clenched with sudden fear.
