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I make it a single step before I hear Penelope speaking quietly from around the east facing wall.
Quickly pressing the record button on my phone, I stuff it into my pocket and crouch in a patch of stringy weeds beside the opening of the barn. Up the drive, the kids amble into a white van as they wait for her, but as I brave a peek around the corner, I see both Penelope and Marcus are squared off with each other.
“That’s not the point,” she says.
Careful not to make a noise, I lean my shoulder against the crusted red paint and dig my fingertips into the grass beside my feet.
“Are you suggesting I fly home and tell them I’m done then?” Marcus’s cross tone has the hair on my arms standing on end.
Does he mean the producer of the show?
He can’t quit now. Partying and self-sabotaging aside, he’s at the height of his career with so much more potential.
She doesn’t back down. “Not exactly, but it’s a start.”
“I won’t leave my family drowning in debt with those assholes pulling the strings. If this is what doing my part looks like, then I’m going to do it.”
Dread drags its talons along both sides of my neck.
The Matthews are in debt? And from the sound of it, with some bad people.
Keeping my breaths shallow enough not to be heard makes me dizzy, but I can’t wrap my mind around what I’m hearing.
“How much longer can you keep this up? I love you, Marcus. The last thing I want you to do is lose sight of who you are.”
He scoffs, sounding more like the old Marcus than the one who was just laughing and acting like a pirate to make a few kids happy. “Thisiswho I am.”
“It doesn’t have to be if you’d just fight for once in your life.”
After a beat of silence, he gives her a frail, “No.”
“Rebuilding this barn isn’t going to bring her back any more than you trying to fix everything all the damn time.” Penelope’s voice wobbles with emotion.
Their silence nearly suffocates me as a piece of the puzzle clicks into place.
They have to be talking about Leah.
Which means I can safely deduce Penelope was the woman he was with in Tauntuma.
“Don’t you think I know that?” She’s pulled into his chest as he wraps his long arms around her, and adds, “I’m not trying to bring Leah back, Pen, and I’m sorry for speaking to you the way I did about restoring this place. But I can’t let them down.”
My body rocks with the forceful discovery that Leah is truly dead. But now finding outwhowants him to dowhatjumps to the tippy top of my priority list.
“I leave tomorrow at noon.”
“Fine,” she counters. “I’m coming with you.”
“And leave Heather to watch over this place by herself? Absolutely not.”
His mocking laugh cuts straight through me, and when Penelope doesn’t come to my defense, the wound deepens.
I suppose I can’t really blame them for not wanting to put a stranger in charge of their property. But it’s more that Marcus doesn’t think I’m capable of handling it which has my teeth grinding.
Opening the palm he’d held just hours ago, I stare a hole straight through it, bothered by why the smallest part of me cares. I should have known underneath this whole sexy, sentimental bullshit was therealMarcus Matthews.
“Okay, but just because you’re invisible in Augustine doesn’t make you less visible there,” Penelope warns.
“I’ll be as quick as I can. Pearl beach, then back to the ranch.”
