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“Harsh.”
“Am I the only person in the world who sees through your St. Ted routine?”
“Just about.”
“Look at you. Not even two weeks ago, Lucy was the love of your life. Now you barely seem to remember her name.” She kicked the mattress forward a few inches.
“Time heals.”
“Eleven days?”
He shrugged and wandered across the room to investigate the Internet connection. She stomped after him. “Stop taking what happened out on me. It wasn’t my fault that Lucy ran off.” Not entirely true, but close enough.
He squatted down to inspect the cable connection. “Things were fine before you got here.”
“You only think they were.”
He reset the jack and rose to his feet. “Here’s the way I see it. For reasons only you know—although I have a fair idea what they are—you brainwashed a wonderful woman into making a mistake she’ll have to live with for the rest of her life.”
“It wasn’t a mistake. Lucy deserves more than you were prepared to give her.”
“You have no idea what I was prepared to give her,” he said as he headed for the door.
“Not your unbridled passion, that’s for sure.”
“Stop pretending you know what you’re talking about.”
She charged after him. “If you’d loved Lucy the way she deserved to be loved, you’d be doing everything in your power to find her and convince her to take you back. And I didn’t have any hidden agenda. All I care about is Lucy’s happiness.”
His steps slowed, and he turned. “We both know that’s not quite true.”
The way he studied her made her feel as though he understood something about her that she didn’t. Her hands fisted at her sides. “You think I was jealous? Is that what you’re saying? That I set out to somehow sabotage her? I have a lot of faults, but I don’t screw over my friends. Ever.”
“Then why did you screw over Lucy?”
His lethal, unfair attack sent an angry rush through her. “Get out.”
He was already leaving, but not before he sent a final dart her way. “Nice dragon.”
By the time her shift was over, all the inn’s rooms were occupied, making it impossible for her to sneak in a shower. Carlos had smuggled her a muffin, her lone meal of the day. Besides Carlos, the only other person who didn’t seem to hate her was Birdie Kittle’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Haley, which was something of a surprise, since she identified herself as Ted’s personal assistant. But Meg soon figured out that meant she merely ran occasional errands for him.
Haley had a summer job at the country club, so Meg didn’t see her much, but she sometimes stopped in a room Meg was cleaning. “I know Lucy’s your friend,” she said one afternoon as she helped Meg tuck in a clean sheet. “And she was super nice to everybody. But she didn’t seem like she’d be happy in Wynette.”
Haley bore little resemblance to her mother. A few inches taller, with a long face and straight, light brown hair, she wore her clothes too small and applied more makeup than her delicate features warranted. Meg gathered from an exchange she’d overheard between Birdie and her daughter that the eighteen-year-old’s entry into skankdom was fairly recent.
“Lucy is pretty adaptable,” Meg said as she slipped on a fresh pillowcase.
“Still, she seemed more like a big-city person to me, and even though Ted travels all over when he does consulting, this is where he lives.”
Meg appreciated knowing someone else in this town had shared her doubts, but it didn’t help shake off her growing despondence. When she left the inn that evening, she was dirty and hungry. She lived in a rusty Buick she parked each night in a deserted patch of scrub by the town gravel quarry where she prayed no one would discover her. Her body felt heavy despite her empty stomach, and as she approached the car that had become her home, her steps slowed. Something didn’t seem right. She looked more closely.
The rear of the car on the driver’s side sagged almost imperceptibly. She had a flat tire.
She stood there without moving, trying to absorb this latest disaster. Her car was all she had left. In the past when she’d had a flat, she’d simply called someone and paid to have it changed, but she had barely twenty dollars left. And even if she could figure out how to change it herself, she didn’t know whether the spare had air. If there was a spare.
With a catch in her throat, she opened the trunk and pulled up the mangy carpet, filthy with oil, dirt, and who knew what else? She found the spare tire, but it was flat. She’d have to drive on the bad tire to the town’s nearest service station and pray she didn’t damage the rim on the way.
The owner knew who she was, just like everybody else in town. He delivered a cutting remark about this only being a hick small-town garage, then launched into a rambling story extolling the way saintly Ted Beaudine had single-handedly saved the county food pantry from closing. When he wound down, he demanded twenty dollars in advance to replace the original tire with the balding spare.
