Twenty-Six
Cole
She’d agreed. I still couldn’t believe it.
“Everything okay?”
Eddy asked. I glanced at him and then back to the phone still in my hand. The call had ended, but I was still gaping at the app-filled screen.
“Yeah. I have a quick errand to run.”
“Where we headed?”
He pulled his feet off his desk to the floor.
“Not us, me.”
“Oh, come on. It’s so dang slow today.”
Eddy waved his hand in the air, but the gesture was unnecessary. It was slow today.
It was also a Thursday at two o’clock in the afternoon, and we were a town of four thousand.
“It’s always slow this time of day, unless we’re in the middle of some kind of storm. I have something personal to do, and then I’m picking up the girls and taking them to Marie’s.”
“Fine,”
he huffed, crossed his arms over his chest and pouted. The move was so similar to June’s I had to tell him.
“Screw you,”
he muttered, and stuck his tongue out at me.
“See? You two have clearly spent too much time together.”
I pocketed my keys and phone and stood from my desk chair. “I’ll be back by four. Stay out of trouble until then.”
Eddy picked up a pen and spun it in his fingers. “I make no promises, partner.”
That didn’t surprise me. He was as likely to end up neck-deep in a barrel of trouble as he was to be the one pulling people out of it.
I jogged out of the small station and since this was a personal mission, I jogged past our SUV and went to my truck. Five minutes later, I was pulling up to the new high school, and our SRO was opening the door for me. “Something wrong?”
“No, Bill, I’m good.”
Since the middle and high schools were right next door, Bill Thomas spent his day moving between both schools. We’d tried to petition the county for more resources, due to school safety, but so far that hadn’t happened. “I’m here for personal reasons. Need to talk to Ashley.”
“Get a visitor sticker and check in at the front desk. Mable will help you out with that. You know where her room is?”
“I’m good. Thanks.”
I’d been in this school dozens of times, for both minor offenses and scares and athletic events. I checked in with Mable, a woman who went to church with my parents and Trina’s, and after a brief, socially polite conversation, headed toward Ashley’s room.
Mable had checked her schedule, and she wasn’t in a planning time, but this didn’t matter. I had to drop this news to her, and there was no way a phone call would suffice. I could have gone straight to Robbie, but this was news Ash needed to hear from me.
Mostly because Trina wasn’t entirely wrong. Ashley was pissed at her, had been for a lot of years, and while I never knew if Robbie told her about Trina’s abortion, the fact that Trina took off and ghosted us all was still painful for Ashley.
I knocked on her door, and a few seconds later, a student opened it, eyes turning large and round as she saw my badge. “No one’s in trouble,”
I murmured, the first thing I always found myself saying to people and ducked my head in the door. Ashley was sitting at her desk, laptop in front of her, and all the kids’ heads were bent to their own on their desks.
As soon as I entered, she glanced my way, and her face paled. “Robbie?—”
“He’s fine. It’s all good. Everyone’s all good.”
I smiled at the entire classroom. “Need to talk to you for a few minutes, okay? But swear, it’s all good.”
Ashely shook her head, blinked a couple of times, and then scanned her classroom as she pushed her rolling chair away from her desk. “Keep working on the test. No cheating. I’ll be right outside, but don’t forget that I’ve got eyes in the back of my head.”
I chuckled. Spoken like any mom, and I didn’t doubt her. Ashley knew everything.
She met me outside her classroom but kept her foot lodged in the door. School safety protocol said all doors had to be locked, and while I knew she had a key on her somewhere to get back inside, this was to ensure the kids did, in fact, not cheat like she’d said.
“What’s up?”
“I only have a minute to tell you this, and you’re going to have to process everything really quick, so I’m sorry to do it here, but I couldn’t wait. You with me so far?”
“Yeah, Cole. Sure. What is it?”
“Trina’s here.”
“What?”
she shrieked. “Why? Here here? Like home?”
“Calm down.”
I chuckled. “And yeah. She’s at my house. Has been for a couple weeks now.”
“Weeks!?”
I glanced through the glass part of her door and saw several kid’s head whip back to their laptops. “It’s a long story, but yes. She’s here at my home, and you have to know the reason she is because some friends of hers down in Georgia helped get her out of a real bad situation.”
“How bad?”
Ashley’s face, like I predicted, turned from shocked to worried and then scared. “How bad, Cole?”
“Real bad. Let’s just say if my gun happened to accidentally discharge around her husband, soon-to-be-ex, hopefully, I should get a medal and not a citation bad.”
Her chin wobbled, and her pale blue eyes darkened. “Stop. That’s not funny.”
“I’m not kidding. It’s bad, Ash. But she’s getting better, too.”
“She’s here? Home?”
Tears fell down her cheeks, and her chin trembled. Damn. Maybe I should have had Robbie tell her. “She’s been through a lot. More than I can even imagine, but I think she’s been hurting and lost for a long time, and I need you to know that because I think she’s getting better. Or trying to, and I think, well, I don’t know if she’s going to stay here, but I think she’s definitely not going back.”
“When you say it’s bad.”
Ashley’s voice quaked as she spoke. “Do you mean bad, like the things you know that go on in this town you won’t talk about, bad?”
We had domestic violence and all the other kinds of violence that all other towns in the world had, but still, yeah. “Worse,”
I confirmed. “But she’s here. She’s safe, and tonight, Robbie and I were going to go out and watch the game, but I thought maybe the two of you would want to come over. Pizza and drinks and football at my place.”
Maybe not the football part. Not with Trina around. At least Georgia wasn’t playing, not like I ever watched them anyway. One glance at Trina next to her husband in the owner’s box had been enough for me to ban those games from my presence.
“She’s there,”
Ashley whispered and wiped tears from her eyes. “Your girls?”
“They’ve been with Marie.”
“Dang. How’d you keep this all quiet?”
Carefully. She didn’t need to know it all. “I can’t stay, Ash, I’ve gotta pick up the girls to see them for a minute, but I just needed you to know what’s going on. And to see if someone can watch your kids. That is, if you want to see her.”
“Wow. Of all the things I thought you’d tell me when I saw you, this isn’t it, at all.”
“I know.”
“We’ll be there. I’ll call Robbie when I can. You okay? I mean…”
I scrubbed a hand through my hair. “It’s Trina, and she’s in my home.”
Where I hoped she’d stay, and that hope kept growing even while I tried to strangle it. “I’m good, minefields I have to sidestep around, but I’m better than I’ve been in a long time.”
She blinked, and the sweet, caring friend I’d known almost my entire life reappeared. “I know, you know…Robbie told me.”
“Don’t bring it up. Don’t even let her think you know.”
Ash’s chin wobbled again, and she sniffed. “I’ve missed her. Been really mad at her, and then angry, but mostly I’ve just missed her.”
“And tonight, you’ll get to see her.”
She scrubbed her eyes, and I gave her that time to collect herself. Get it out. Eventually, she stopped, opened her eyes and smiled. “Tonight. I get to see her. Finally.”
I leaned in and kissed her cheek. “You’re the best, Ash. Have Robbie text me your pizza order.”
“We’ll pick it up and bring it with us. Think she’d still like Scalecki’s?”
Scalecki’s Pizza had been around as long as Deer Creek existed. Had to go up the mountain to the base of the ski slopes to get it, but it was worth the trip even in the snow and ice, it was that good.
Personally, I doubted Trina would eat something so heavy with carbs and crap from the way she ate like a bunny rabbit, but whatever. She had to get free of that, too, and Scalecki’s could probably help.
I never met anyone who could resist it.
“Get all her old favorites. We’ll see.”
“Thanks, Cole. You’re a good man. I hope she appreciates it more this time.”
“We’ll see.”
I shrugged, like I wasn’t hoping for the same thing. Like I wasn’t hoping her eyes would be open and she’d finally see the life I could give her, the life I’d worked to earn and have but had always felt like something was missing even with my girls.
There were few things brighter than the babbling of my girls in the back seat of my truck. I’d stopped at Mellie’s on the way to get them and set aside two of the dozen cookies I bought for my girls.
Ella’s face had melted chocolate on it, and June was still devouring her frosted and sprinkled sugar cookie.
Sending them back to Marie on a sugar high might not have been the nicest thing, but I was trying to soften the girls up to what was coming. There was no doubt Ella would be nice and roll with it.
June was the one I was worried about.
I pulled off into the parking lot of the town’s park and threw my arm over the passenger headrest.
“Girls. I need to talk to you about something.”
“You get hurt at work, Daddy?”
As Ella asked, her eyes trailed over my face and the parts of my body she could see. “You look okay.”
“I’m good, Ella. Something else. I have a friend staying with me at my house for a while.”
“A friend!? Like Mr. Robbie or Eddy? I love those friends,”
June cried. “Eddy brings the best candy.”
“He does.”
I chuckled and then shook my head. “No, it’s not Mr. Robbie or Eddy. It’s not someone you know, but it’s someone who was friends with Mr. Robbie and Miss Ashley and me all the way back when we were little kids.”
“Little like me?”
June pushed her frosting-coated fingertip to her chest on her shirt. Whoops.
“Kind of. We were all young when we were friends.”
“What’s his name?”
Ella asked. I glanced at her, the quiet way she asked the question as if she knew. And heck, maybe she did. She was always smarter than most kids her age.
I made sure to look her right in the eye. “Her name is Trina.”
Ella, definitely my quieter and more thoughtful one, took a second. But when she spoke, she shocked me.
“Is she like Mommy’s friend, Zack?”
“Who?”
And I’m sorry…what?
“Mommy’s friend, Zack. He stayed at our house once, too. But he didn’t stay in the guest room. Mommy said sometimes friends like to have sleepovers.”
“I think that’s fun,”
June said. “I can’t wait until I’m old enough for sleepovers.”
Over my dead body would June have that kind of sleepover.
Words stuck in my throat and clawed their way out as I finally realized what they were saying. Marie had friends. Maybe that was why she wasn’t as hurt as I expected her to be about Trina. When she told me she was doing well and moving on, I hadn’t thought of exactly how far she’d been moving on, but this was good. Better than. Even if the awkward factor was skyrocketing.
“I think it’s good your mommy has friends, too,”
I told both girls, choking down my surprise. “And right now, Trina’s just a friend to me, too. I wanted you to know because you’ll see her Sunday after church when I get you back, okay? And I didn’t want her to surprise you.”
“But I like surprises,”
June said. Her bottom lip pushed out into a pout, and I really wished I had my phone to snap a pic and send it to Eddy. I was right.
Identical.
“Don’t worry, June. I’m sure there are lots more surprises coming your way some day.”
“Goodie.”
She sucked the frosting off her fingertips, and I turned back to the front of the truck.
This had been easy.
Far easier than I expected.
Was it possible we were all moving on?
Lord, I hoped so.
It was normal for Marie to meet us at the door when I pulled up to the house. It wasn’t normal for me to follow the girls up, and as I did, with them barely stopping for hugs and kisses from their mom, her brows rose with a questioning look toward me.
“Everything okay?”
Oh. Everything was good. Just fantastic.
I smirked and leaned in, teasing her. “I hear you have a friend.”
Her cheeks paled, and I kept going. “And sleepovers.”
“Oh.”
She huffed. Chuckled, and then her pale cheeks turned flaming pink. “Cole?—”
“With a friend named Zack,”
I finished, and leaned back, smirking.
Clearly flustered, Marie stammered out, “I was going to tell you. It was an accident how they found out, I swear it, and they haven’t seen him since.”
I held up a hand, chuckling and making sure she could see I wasn’t mad. “This is gonna be awkward for us all, but you’re a good woman and deserve a good man. I’m just giving you a hard time.”
“He’s really nice,”
she said quietly and rolled her lips together. “I like him.”
“Then he better be the kind of man deserving of you. And if he’s not, let me know. I know all the good hiding spots in these mountains.”
“Shut up.”
She laughed and reached out to slap my shoulder. I let her have that and watched as she nibbled her bottom lip and glanced back toward the house. “You told the girls about Trina, I take it?”
“June seems pretty sad that we don’t think sleepovers are nearly as fun as you do.”
I stepped out of the way before she could slap me again.
“And before you tell me to shut up again, yeah, I did. I wanted you to know Ash and Robbie are coming over tonight. To see her.”
“Oh.”
All previous humor left her face, and she blinked, then frowned. “That’s good, right? I think, I guess?”
“It’s a step.”
I didn’t want to hurt her. Didn’t want to tell her how excited I was about this and how it didn’t feel like a step at all, but after voluntarily spending time with my mom and getting the names of therapists, it felt more like a giant leap.
“Good, Cole. That’s good. I’m glad for her.”
“I need to get going and head back to work. I’ll see you Sunday?”
“Afternoon like always.”
“And will I see Zack?”
She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “We’re not there yet. Like I said, it was an accident the day the girls saw him. I’m moving slow.”
Slow didn’t sound like sleepover territory, but Marie was an adult, and after being married to me she deserved all the fun she could have. Besides, I trusted her and her judgment.
“You don’t owe me explanations.”
“Okay then. Sunday.”
“Have a fun weekend with the girls.”
“Have a good night,”
she said, turning to open the door. “I hope it goes well.”
That made two of us.