The False Flat

CHAPTER 43

ZERO JIMMY CHOOS

There was a three-inch circle of drool on my pillow when I woke to pounding. My room was dim. Out the window, the early-morning sun stretched in the sky, or was that the afternoon sun? I didn’t know what time it was, what day it was. How long had I been asleep? I didn’t even remember getting in bed.

I thought back. Grant had come to my house. I drove us both to—I looked down at my crumpled black dress, the pearls on my wrist, and reality slammed into my chest, knocking me back on the bed.

Grant.

Pulling at the skin on my forehead, I tried to dislodge events. Had he taken me home? I didn’t remember driving. The last thing I remembered was standing beside a palm tree, him telling me he had ...

No.

More knocking. Someone was at the door.

Please let it be Grant.I started to move downstairs but stopped. What did I say when he told me? I needed to remember before I faced him.

It couldn’t be true.

Why wasn’t he here now?

I looked around for my phone, threw back the bedspread, the sheets, tossed the pillows, scanned the nightstand and the dresser.

I needed to get to the door.

I ran down the stairs and raced to the front entrance. My fingers slipped on the knob because my palms were so sweaty.

I needed to see Grant.

Why didn’t I remember coming home?

The lock finally relinquished under my fumbling fingers, and when the door was thrown back, my mother stood on the other side of it, wearing a linen suit the color of straw. I looked past her, caring about her only if Grant was tucked into one of her pockets, but they were likely faux pockets anyway.

He wasn’t in her pockets, and I couldn’t do this now.

His car was gone.

“Penelope.” My mother stepped back, my appearance no doubt unacceptable.

Why did she call me Penelope? Didn’t she know that’s what Grant called me, only Grant?

Where is Grant?

I left Aurora standing in my doorway and turned back inside, trying to find my phone. Surely he’d called. If nothing else, I needed the phone to call him. I needed to see him.

I searched everywhere, my mother chasing after me until I finally gave up and faced her. She’d asked me fifteen times what I was looking for, and when I’d finally answered, instead of helping me look for it, she asked how I’d lost my phone in the first place.

Then, she pulled us into the kitchen and over to the table. I sat in the chair she’d shoved me into, vaguely aware of my mother moving around in my kitchen. I didn’t care. I pressed my hands into my eyes.

Think. Think. Think.

I was replaying the events from last night for the fifth time when my mother set a cup of tea in front of me. I stared into the steaming darkness; a few bubbles floated on the surface, popped.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

My mother sat across from me, ruler straight, her hands wrapped around her mug. “What’s going on?”

As my mind fell into my standard background criticism of her primness, I realized I was sitting the exact same way.

“What are you doing here? What day is it?”

She looked horrified. “Day? It’s Friday evening. How can you not know that?”

Friday evening?My date with Grant was Thursday. I’d lost a whole day.

“Why are you wearing that dress?” My mother stood and walked back and forth across my kitchen, concern on her face as she decided what to do with me, her heels clicking like a sophisticated metronome. “I’m glad I came.”

“Why are you here?” I asked again, wanting this over with so I could find Grant or at least my phone.

“I want you to come back home.” She sat, folded her hands on the table, used her business posture, her professional tone, the tone she used to make things happen, control her environment, bend the world to her will.

“I am home.”

She shook her head. “This isn’t your home. Look at this place. Look at you. You’re confused. You need to be grounded, with solid people like Chad.”

I stared at her. This was a repeat of the proposal. Instead of getting angry, I felt sorry for her. After Brandon, she’d decided who I’d needed to be, and she ignored what didn’t fit her mold, tucking it out of her mind so she could go on pretending. Like I had.

But I couldn’t pretend anymore. I didn’t have the energy for it or her.

I snapped. “Last night, the greatest man I’ve ever known, the greatest human I’ve ever known, told me he had cancer, and I don’t know what I said to him! I need to call him. I need to make sure he’s okay, that we’re okay.”

For several seconds, my mother looked like a scared, paralyzed animal, not the statuesque woman she’d made herself into. In those seconds, I thought she might understand; for those brief ticks of the clock, I thought we’d reached some kind of breakthrough.

She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, there was Aurora Auberge, cold, withdrawn, determined.

“I will not let you make this mistake. Cancer? God knows you don’t need that. You shouldn’t do this. I won’t let you do this.”

I stood.

“You owe him nothing,” she went on. “Chad is healthy, strong, willing to—”

“I can’t go back there.”

“You don’t have to worry about Houston anymore. He’s discredited. He’s been seducing wealthy women, drugging them, and then threatening exposure if they didn’t heavily invest in TCF.”

“Extortion?” I looked into my mother’s face. Then, she pulled a folded newspaper seemingly out of nowhere and spread it on the table in front of me. Houston’s picture was on the front, in handcuffs.

Houston McGregor is an extortionist.

Then it hit me: he was also a rapist.

“They want you to take his place at TCF.” A look of utter pride brightened my mother’s face.

“What? Who wants me to take his place?”

“The higher-ups. They didn’t agree with what Houston did to you. They didn’t realize it until I made them aware.”

I stared at her.

“We’re both trying to make this right.” Was she, too, admitting some kind of wrong? Had I entered an alternate reality where people realize their flaws and actually try to fix them?

They want me to take Houston McGregor’s place. Me.

I reveled in the thought. I saw the newspaper headline, the hypothetical one that would be placed right across from Houston in an orange jumpsuit.

Penelope Auberge saves Twin Cities Financial from corrupt extortionist and rapist, Houston McGregor, the same man who, months ago, tried to slander her.

A woman. A mixed woman. In charge. I saw my picture, a smiling, confident portrait. I saw justice. I saw hope in my mother’s face.

Aurora took my hand in hers. She’s holding my hand. It was weird, but also, kind of nice. “Come home. Start over. You don’t have to do this. Moving back would be the right thing to do, for your career and future. There’s no question.”

She was giving me a way out.

As the clock ticked from one number to the next, I let the past and present wash over me: what had happened, what hadn’t happened, what was happening now, what would happen. Everything converged.

“Thank you for coming here.” I knew it hadn’t been easy. “Thank you for all you’ve done to help clear my name. But I am home, and I—”

I grabbed my purse. I couldn’t afford to say anything else. I needed to find Grant. I walked out my back door, leaving my mother standing in my kitchen.

But Aurora followed me. “You don’t owe him anything!”

I whirled back around. “I owe him everything!” And as I opened my mouth to say something else, the need to be telling this to Grant, not my mother, sliced through me.

I moved past the garage to my car, praying my keys were in my purse.

“Penelope! Come back here.” My mother caught up to me, talking louder and more desperately outside than I’d ever heard her. This was shaking her world hard enough that yelling in my driveway seemed reasonable to her.

She beat me to my car door, stood in front of it. “Where are you going?” she demanded.

“To find Grant.”

“You can’t go out like this. Your hair. Your makeup. You don’t have any shoes on.”

Funny, I hadn’t noticed my feet were bare until she’d pointed it out. No wonder she’d outrun me.

I started to go back inside; she lifted her hand to lead me.

Then I stopped. I didn’t need shoes. Of course I needed shoes, but now it was the principle of the thing.

“Get out of my way, Mother.”

She protested. I repeated. And we went back and forth until I contemplated physically picking her up to move her out of my way.

She must’ve finally recognized the unchangeable force inside me because she stepped aside, a rigid step.

“You’re making a mistake. This is beyond foolish.”

“No, you’re the one living a mistake. I’m thankful I finally woke up from this sleep we’ve both been under.”

I ignored my mother and her high-heeled logic. As I wrenched open my car door and praised whatever entity had allowed my keys to remain nestled in my purse, my eye caught movement.

Devina was running across her lawn toward me, her features scrunched in concern, so I stopped, halfway between sitting and standing.

“Are you going to Grant?” she rasped, coming to a stop by my open car door.

I looked at her, bewildered. She knew about Grant? “Yes, I’m headed to his house right now.”

She shook her head. “Didn’t you get his message? He’s not home.”

“No. I can’t find my phone. What message?”

“He came here last night with his sister to make sure you were all right, said he told you about his diagnosis and that you didn’t take it well. Said he was going to give you some space to wrap your head around it because he didn’t want to burden you because you’d been through too much. Went to his friend’s cabin in the mountains. Chuck?” Her words tumbled over one another, like the thoughts in my head.

“Chuck’s cabin? He’s there now? Do you know where it is?” Desperation stung my chest. Grant felt impossibly far away, and I needed to close the distance.

“Don’t know when he was leaving, but that’s what he said. Want to use my phone to call him?”

Three times I called, and it went straight to voicemail. I felt panicky. The sky seemed to commiserate as it darkened, with thunder rumbling in the distance. Rain was coming.

“What about his sister? Can you call her? She’d surely know the address.”

I held Devina’s phone in my hand, willing myself to remember Deanna’s phone number, but it was useless. I’d relied on my phone to store that information and had never committed her number to memory.

“I’ll go to her house,” I said, needing to make progress. A single raindrop landed on my forearm, but I barely registered.

She nodded. “Yes, go. And, it’s worth it. He’s worth it. A short time with a good man is far superior to none at all. I know.”

Her words touched places in me I didn’t even know existed, but she didn’t need to tell me that. That was why I would move hell and earth to find him. I knew I wanted Grant no matter the surrounding circumstances, and now I needed him to know it.

“Penelope.”

My head jerked toward my mother, whose existence I’d forgotten until she said my name.

She folded her lips into her mouth as her eyes filled, but she said nothing else. And I didn’t waste any more time.

Phoneless and shoeless, I drove to Deanna’s.