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Now Kayla must try as well. Even if she could get whatever restaurant job she wanted, there might come a time in the next twenty years when her mother’s disease came for her too. What then?What if I can’t walk anymore?That was always in the back of Kayla’s mind.
So, maybe Thomas Fredriksson, the jilted husband with a former drinking problem wasn’t the best catch from a romantic point of view. But Kayla didn’t care about that. She cared about his money. His family. His potential at saving the Smiths, and he didn’t yet know it.
Kayla was in survival mode. What she didn’t quite understand was that she had been for years.
As soon as she made it home later that evening, Tove fired up the electric kettle and made herself a cup of (decaf) Earl Grey. Although it was too dark and drizzly to enjoy the most of it by now, she sat on her front porch, bundled in her Carhartt jacket, and sipped her tea while taking in the scenery.
Her three-bedroom Tudor revival hadn’t been new when she bought it twenty years ago, but she loved it for being exactly between Bend and her hometown of Frederik, as well as boasting a view likethis.Across her humble acre and beyond the sturdy fence was the ranch owned by surly but predictable neighbor Garrett Tenet. If Tove had made it home earlier that night, she would have seen the middle-aged man in his cowboy hat and lined denim jacket checking the fenceline and looking for signs of coyotes. It was a service he did to protect his stock, but Tove benefited from it as well. Sometimes, one of her two cats slipped out the front door when she was coming and going, and the last thing she wanted to hear was coyotes had been spotted as recently as the night before.
Tonight, though, Nemo and Chance were snug on the cat tree in front of the living room window. Nemo’s eyes were opened, staring at Tove on the porch as if she were crazy for being outside on such a cold winter night. Chance lay with his head pressing into the top of the cat tree, his two front legs assuming the Superman pose. When Tove focused on the quiet night before her, she imagined that Chance now looked like what that girl had before.
No, she hadn’t stopped thinking – and worrying – about Kayla, the girl her irresponsible cousin had nearly killed earlier that afternoon. In her younger smoking days, she would have lit up in their honor. These days, however, she kept her hands around her hot tea and sighed.
She was getting too old to keep looking after her idiot cousin. Since she was a teenager and Thomas was in kindergarten, she had been babysitting him. Or driving him to soccer practice. Or picking him up from his benders at George Fox University up in Newberg, because, in his words,“I can’t let anyone know I fucked it up again. I could get suspended. Or worse!”
She was the one who slapped him into reality when two DUIs not only made him lose his license for a while but almost sent him to prison.I’m the one who told his parents where they could pool their money to cover the bribes and gifts.That was Tove’s job, after all. If she wasn’t watching helping Aunt Kiersten clean the family vacation home from top to bottom, convincing a grieving family tonotsue Oskar penniless, or witnessing Cousin Agnes cry in the middle of a wedding reception because she was secretly pregnantagainand couldn’t tell her parents, the most god-fearing branch of the Fredriksson tree…
Tove knew her place in her family. She not only did their taxes, but she quietly fixed their problems in the background. Sometimes, that required fudging numbers or making midnight phone calls.Not the taxes, though. Those are all legit.Even if Aunt Kiersten refused to sit down long enough to understand how tax brackets worked. No, everything was a conspiracy with that bitter old woman.
This, though…God, Thomas is screwing up again.This was a man who, as soon as he discovered he was in the clear for his DUIs, spontaneously married a twenty-year-old model from San Diego. That whirlwind romance had ended only a year and a half later, and now here he was, gunning down other women in the middle of the road while on his way to his divorce lawyer.Harold. Pretty sure he’s a distant cousin of ours.Not good enough for the last name Fredriksson, but the man also didn’t have to have a stuffy Swedish name to go with it. Because nobody pronounced Tove’s name correctly on the first try.
Her phone was full of messages from Thomas, Oskar, and even Harold. Thomas reassured her that everything was fine with Kayla and that he could “take care of it.” Oskar wanted to know more about the situation. Harold? He had questions regarding Thomas’s assets. For the divorce, of course.
Tove shoved her phone into her pocket. As she sipped her cooling tea, she shivered beneath her thick jacket and gazed up at the patchy night sky. A few stars slipped through the rain clouds. For that single minute, everything was peaceful.
Then she imagined Thomas “tapping” that girl with his bumper and was back in reality.
“What do you think?” she asked Nemo after standing up from her chair and staring down at her cat on the other side of the living room window. “Think we should make Cousin Thomas check for coyotes tonight?”
The tuxedo cat’s eyes widened. He was not impressed by the idea ofcoyotes.
“No, I suppose not.” First, the screen door opened. Then, warmth spilled out onto the porch. Tove stepped inside. “Fun is not allowed.”
That wasn’t her rule. It was someone else’s.
Chapter 3
Kaylahatedtoadmitthat she was sore the next day, but not enough to warrant a trip to the hospital. She cleaned off her palms and inspected them for infections. A bruise had appeared on her hip, but it was superficial. The accident could have been much worse.
She could have had an excuse to talk to Thomas!
“Maybe it’s not the best course of action,” Chrissy said over lunch. “Put yourself on his radar some other way. Or wait a few days. Maybe some pulled muscle requires more, uh, attention.”
Kayla drummed her fingers against her glass of juice. “Do you think I’m nuts?”
Chrissy turned around from the kitchen sink. Although the weekly cleaning woman was supposed to arrive later that afternoon, Chrissy still took care to clean up after herself.That’s the kind of rich sugar baby I wanna be.Except Chrissy wasn’t a sugar baby. She had graduated to wife status.Before turning thirty, too.Barely. Yet Kayla didn’t have that chance anymore, and if she wanted to eventually be a wife with access to bank accounts, travel miles, and powerful connections, she couldn’t get away with lying about her age. She was thirty-three. She had to work with it.
“Nuts?” Chrissy asked. “About what?”
“About this whole ‘plan’ of mine. I mean, I crash dieted to lose ten extra pounds, but they’re gonna come right back. I bought nice clothes with my last paycheck instead of dealing with my outstanding phone bill. I don’t have a choice but to get a job here. Preferably at a place where the daddies are. But what if I can’t? What if I’m not pretty enough? What if I’m too old?”
“Girl.” Chrissy’s hand appeared on Kayla’s shoulder. “Don’t sell yourself short. You may be a bit on the older end for a trophy wife, but you’ve got alotto offer the old farts around here looking for their second or third go at marriage.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, you know what you’re getting into and will put up with the bullshit in exchange for the paycheck.”
“Is that how you feel with Huey?”
