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He left and she went back to the kitchen. Her mother was in front of the coffee maker and getting a second cup.
“Is that your boyfriend?”
“Yes,” she said.
“He’s handsome.”
“I think so,” she said. “You’re not here to ask about my life, are you?”
“Why can’t I?” her mother asked. “I’ve missed so much.”
“You have. And if you want to know what you missed then you need to prove that you are going to get help and continue with it. No more popping in and out of our lives on a whim. It’s not fair to us and it’s not doing you any good.”
“I just want to make peace with my life,” her mother asked.
Liz wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that.
“Peace, why?” she asked.
“It’s the start of getting better, don’t you think?”
“If it’s something you want to do, then you’ll let me take you back to the home and talk to your counselors and get the full story.”
Her mother waited for a few minutes. “Fine. I’d like to see Abby too. Can you arrange that?”
She didn’t want to bring her sister in on this, but she wouldn’t hide it either.
“I’ll call her now and see if she can go with me to bring you back.”
Hours later she returned home and Christian was in her kitchen cooking dinner. “I can tell it’s not going to be a fun conversation,” he said.
“No,” she said. “And trying to butter me up by having dinner on the table isn’t going to help it any.”
28
A Panic Moment
Christian knew he’d made a major misstep by showing up, but he’d been concerned and wanted to get that through to Liz.
Maybe he was sucking up by having dinner ready for her, but he was more confused than ever about what was going on.
“Did you get your mother back to where she needed to go okay?” he asked.
He took the steak off the grill on the stovetop and started to slice it for them in strips. He pulled out two sweet potatoes from the microwave and put one on each of their plates and then grabbed the cooked carrots that he’d heated up and was keeping warm.
“Yes,” she said. She moved to the island and sat down to fill her plate. “I know you’ve got a lot of questions and I’ll answer them all, but we need to talk about why I didn’t know you had access to my cameras. Do you not trust me?”
“It’s not that,” he said quickly. That never even occurred to him and he realized what a big miscalculation he’d taken there. “Never. After Tanner showed up I was concerned for your safety. You know that. We talked it over in depth.”
More like talked it over to death. If he didn’t think she’d freak out he would have installed them without her agreement, but she had agreed.
“Why didn’t you tell me you had access to it on your phone?” she asked.
“It slipped my mind,” he said. “Honestly. I installed it and tested it on my phone because you were in the shower. Then I put it on your phone. I don’t ever look at it. I’ve got one for my house too. I always have them.”
“You must have a lot,” she said.
“I have them when I’m living there and working on the houses. It’s a simple security system that most have. When I sell the house it’s disabled. Half the time when it goes off on my phone, I don’t look. Or don’t look right away.”
