“I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“No, don’t come now. We’ll be leaving soon. But if you wouldn’t mind coming home early, I’d like to discuss the FBI problem.”
Nobody wants to hear “FBI” and “problem” in the same sentence, and it had to be bad if that was a bigger concern than why she was in a hospital bed.
“I can come now.”
“No, really. Enjoy your dinner first. I don’t want to ruin your whole night.”
I wouldn’t be able to enjoy dinner now, but I didn’t want to stress her out. Eli crossed his arms, patiently waiting.
“Okay. I’ll be home in forty-five minutes.” I shot Eli an apologetic grimace.
“Thank you. Please give Eli my apologies.”
“Don’t worry about that. Relax and keep drinking water.” I rubbed the new knot in the back of my neck. “See you soon.”
After we hung up, I looked at Eli. “I’m so sorry to eat and run. My sister’s in the hospital with Braxton-Hicks contractions . . . I don’t even know what that means.”
“False labor.” His voice tightened, and some color drained from his face.
A boneheaded move—bringing up a pregnancy-related crisis to a man who’d lost his wife and child in one. Clearly my path to circumspection would be long and winding.
“She’s kind of shaken up and asked me to come home early.” I almost mentioned the FBI, too, but something made me hesitate.
“I understand. You can take your steak to go.”
“She won’t be home for at least forty-five minutes, so let’s make the most of the time we’ve still got.” I smiled, but whatever fun we’d been having had ended for the night. My thoughts split in two, and Eli looked like his had, too.
“Okay, then.” He picked up the album. “Good choice. Let me get this set up.”
I went outside and pulled Mo onto my lap. His nose twitched as he sniffed out the steaks sizzling on the grill. Normally that aroma made my tail wag, too, but I couldn’t stop thinking about my sister.
The Lyle turmoil had stressed her out so much that she’d been neglecting her health. She’d stirred so often she couldn’t have slept more than two hours each night. Even I’d found it difficult to get much sleep with the nonstop squeaking of her old box springs. The only silver lining would be that Mom probably felt pretty shitty about her cold-shoulder routine.
But that didn’t ease my guilty conscience.
All this time, I’d been telling myself I hadn’t done anything wrong by keeping what I’d seen last Valentine’s Day to myself. That Amanda wouldn’t have believed me. That there was nothing to be gained by confessing now. But lately more troubling questions had arisen. The one I hated most? Why hadn’t I kept tabs on Lyle after that February run-in? I could blame my own grief, work schedule, problems with Max, and so on . . . but deep down there was another sense I didn’t want to examine too closely.
If anything happened to Willa as a result of all this chaos, I’d never forgive myself.
The jamming opening notes of “Love Struck Baby” came through the speakers before Eli reappeared. I dabbed at my eyes, but not before he caught me.
“You’re upset.” He pulled a chair close to me and sat down, elbows on his knees. “Not to make light of the scare, but Braxton-Hicks aren’t typically a serious problem.”
“It’s not that . . . not really.” I might not have said anything, but Eli wasn’t exactly the town crier. And now that Amanda had involved the FBI, people were bound to find out eventually.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Want to? Not exactly.” I looked at him, filling with need and hope. “But I could use a sympathetic ear.”
“I’m a good listener.”
Everyone says that, but I believed Eli. Once he opened my faucet, everything from Lyle and Ebba to the feds came out in a gush. By the time I’d finished, my tears gushed, too, marking the first time I’d cried about any of it.
Eli swiped them with his thumbs and then held my hands. “You can’t blame yourself for someone else’s bad behavior. None of this is on you.”
“I don’t blame myself for Lyle’s behavior, but I should’ve told Amanda what I saw instead of letting her live in her fantasy world, leaving her and my mom as easy prey for that bastard.”
“It’s not like you maliciously withheld your suspicions.” He was being kind, but I could no longer ignore that maybe the tiny part of me that always resented the way Amanda dismissed my opinions might’ve thought she deserved to eat a little crow. God, that made me hate myself. “You had good reasons not to make waves while everyone was still grieving and she was still early in her pregnancy.”
“What if I was a little spiteful?” My stomach turned rock hard. “She and I haven’t always been close. Maybe subconsciously I figured her not-so-perfect marriage was her problem, not mine. I mean, that makes me a monster like Lyle. And now that she and I have gotten closer, I feel like a fraud.”
“First, don’t beat yourself up for being human. Everyone has let envy and resentment skew their thinking at some point.” He was kind not to react with disgust, but my self-loathing raged on. “If sharing this information now could actually improve the outcome, I’d encourage you to tell her. But a blowup between you two now would be worse than the one you wanted to avoid this winter, because she really needs your help with what’s coming. From the sound of it, you need her, too. Leave well enough alone and stick by her from this point on . . . That’s really all you can do.” Eli rested his chin on his knuckles.
“I wish I could fix it or make it up to her.” I’d give anything to make it right.
He squeezed my hands. “Then convince her not to go to Puerto Rico. It’s too risky. The stress isn’t good for the baby, and no one knows what her ex is capable of at this point. She should let the FBI handle this on its own.”
“Then my mom will end up with next to nothing.”
He lifted a shoulder. “Sometimes when we make big mistakes in judgment, we pay big consequences.”
“But I’m not kidding when I say it wouldn’t take much to tip my mom into poverty.”
He straightened in his seat. “She’ll be alive, and more important, so will her daughter and granddaughter.”
The deadened look in his eyes—a reminder of the consequences he’d paid by going camping late in his wife’s risky pregnancy—made me shut up.
A flame ominously popped out of the back of the grill.
“Oh shit. I forgot about the steaks.” Eli exploded off his chair and flipped them, scowling at himself as he spun around to face me again. “Hope you like them charred.”
My whining had ruined his dinner.
“Char is my favorite flavor.” I stood and placed my hand on his chest. “Thanks for listening without judging.”
He covered my hand with his. “You can talk to me anytime, about anything.”
I could’ve stayed like that—or wrapped my arms around him and held tight—all night. But I needed to lighten the mood before leaving so that the good things that had happened earlier weren’t forgotten. “All this talking has made me hungry, so lemme get the salad.”