Chapter 18
The weekend had been good, and Grace had let it be good, the way a person lets themselves eat a full breakfast the morning of a surgery.
They went swimming with Lily off the dock on Sunday—the one Liam built the summer before Lily was born.
Grace showed Lily how to do a cannonball, running and jumping off the end of the dock, hugging her knees, and hitting the water with a mighty splash.
She hadn’t done that since she was a kid, and she’d surfaced laughing like she was eight years old again.
The swim had tired out Reno’s bad leg, but in a good way.
The muscles around his knee were sore, but the knee itself felt fine.
He thanked her for suggesting a swim and told her he’d be doing it every day for a while.
Lily demanded that he wait until she was home from school to go swimming so she could go with him.
He’d had a very sweet, but serious, talk with Lily about how dangerous it was to swim alone and promised he would wait every day to swim with her, but she had to promise him she would never swim alone in return.
She’d decided not to cry about the fact that one man was carefully raising the child another man had made. She let it be a good thing in her heart instead of a sad one. That was a choice she seemed to be making about a dozen times a day lately, and she was getting better at it.
And the more she let herself love Reno, the more she realized that doing so didn’t diminish her love for Liam one bit. Reno wasn’t replacing Liam at all. He was filling her heart even more fully beside Liam’s memory.
She’d known all weekend that Monday was coming, and she had a good idea what Cooper was going to tell her. The fact that he’d given her a few days to brace left only a few possibilities, none of them good.
Over the weekend, she had indeed braced, but quietly while making other people smile.
Then Monday came, and she was out of time.
Maybe Lily sensed her tension Monday morning, because she was cranky and impossible to please when she woke up.
Grace had to conduct a series of negotiations—the right socks, hair up or hair down, two pony tails or one, the seal that got to go to school versus the seal that had to stay home—just to get the child dressed and seated at the kitchen table.
Grace reached the end of her patience when Lily demanded cookies for breakfast. When she said no, Lily created a new category of cookies—breakfast cookies—and commenced defending their existence as if she was in front of the Supreme Court.
Thankfully, Reno intervened in the great cookie debate.
He cut Lily a deal—half a banana first, then a cookie of Mommy’s choosing.
Grace watched the two of them shake on it over the kitchen table and, as relief flooded her, felt the floor of her chest go soft.
In the past when she’d hit her limit as a single parent, she’d given in, gotten Lily off to school, and then had a cry in the pantry at the bakery.
Today, Reno had stepped in and taken over dealing with Lily before any of that happened.
Saturday morning, he’d called Dillon and Tessa and arranged for them to pick up Lily this afternoon and keep her overnight for a sleepover with Makayla.
She made a mental note to do something nice for Makayla to thank her for putting up with a four-year-old as sweetly as she always did.
By Saturday afternoon, she’d realized that Reno had made the arrangements early so it was one less thing for her to worry about over the weekend.
He anticipated her needs better than she did.
It was the strangest part of the last few weeks, learning she didn’t have to think of every single thing herself, or deal with every problem herself, or be strong on her own all the time.
People, even those who knew her very well, assumed that because she was petite and looked like a fragile porcelain doll, that she was fragile.
While she certainly wasn’t made of tempered steel, she was a lot stronger than everyone thought, and she’d spent much of her life going out of her way to prove it to herself, if not to anyone else.
Of all the WoWS, she was the one least likely to ask for help. She was the one least likely to cry in public, the one least prone to complaining, the one who never shared her worries and fears as they’d all learned to be single parents and single heads of a household.
And yet, even they treated her like she would break if she got jostled too hard by life.
Reno kept Lily occupied all the way to town by asking her to sing her favorite songs to him, for which she was deeply grateful. The closer the meeting with Cooper came, the less she capable she felt of navigating Lily’s uncharacteristic moodiness today.
When Reno dropped her off at the bakery, she leaned across the cab of the truck to give him a quick kiss.
“What was that for?” he asked, surprised.
“For keeping me from murdering Lily this morning.”
“She was just mirroring your tension. She’s usually a nearly perfect reflection of your mood,” he replied.
Really? She’d always assumed that she was shaping Lily’s mood, rather than Lily simply reflecting hers. But the more she thought about it, the more she realized he was right.
She’d noticed that Lily had been gradually getting happier and more relaxed over the past month, but she’d just put it down to Lily maturing emotionally. Even this weekend, Lily had alternated between ebullient happiness and periods of inexplicable tension.
Huh. Apparently, Reno knew Lily better than her sometimes, too. And surprisingly, she was okay with that.
For the first time, she understood why the other women of the WoWS talked about how great it was to have a man in their lives again to help with the kids. The rest of them, except Natalie, had experienced parenthood with a partner before they lost their husbands.
But Natalie, unlike her, had reached out freely to her family, friends, and the WoWS for help. That, and Natalie was a first grade teacher. She’d already knew a lot about kids.
But Liam died only a few weeks after she found out she was pregnant. She’d done the entire parenthood experience alone from the very beginning.
Until now.
Reno picked her up at the bakery at 9:45 and drove her back to the cottage. She’d been pensive on the drive, and he didn’t try to distract her with meaningless talk, for which she was grateful.
When they pulled into the driveway, he asked evenly, “Final bracing complete?”
She looked up at him, surprised. “I think so.”
“It’s fine if you fall apart. I’ll be right there to hold everything else together until you’re ready to start picking up the pieces of your life. To be clear, I’m here to do and to be whatever you need.”
She nodded her understanding, too tense even to smile.
Cooper came alone.
She’d half expected Sheriff Wheeler too, and some part of her had braced for a whole delegation, like when they’d come to the fire station to tell the waiting wives none of their husbands had made it out of the fire.
But it was just Cooper’s truck that pulled into the drive at five minutes to ten, and just Cooper coming up the porch steps with a folder under his arm. He, did, however, have his hat in his hand.
Reno led him to the screened porch while she set coffee and scones on a tray and carried them outside.
“Hi, Grace,” Cooper said.
“Hey, Cooper. There’s coffee, and as I recall, you take yours with a splash of cream.” She nodded at the little cream pitcher beside the coffee pot.
“Thank you.” He sat in a chair facing the porch sofa that Reno must have brought outside in the past few hours, because it wasn’t usually out here.
Reno stood over by the screen in the corner until she looked over at him and patted the cushion beside her and murmured, “Please? I could use the moral support.”
He moved swiftly to join her, sitting far enough away not to crowd her but close enough for her to reach out and take his hand if she needed to.
Cooper set the folder on the coffee table between them and did not open it yet. He looked at her as if he was weighing how to proceed.
She saved him the trouble of trying to decide how fragile she was. “Give me the truth, Cooper. Straight up”
His gaze snapped to hers, then slid to Reno, who said bluntly, “She’s a whole lot stronger than she looks.”
Cooper nodded. “Okay, then. Straight up it is. I’m going to tell you what I learned. All of it. And then I’m going to tell you what it doesn’t mean, because the that matters as much as the first part.”
Grace nodded firmly.
Cooper began. “Lex Jansick is alive. He’s living in a camper trailer outside Yuma. He’s sick—liver cirrhosis—and he drinks heavily. He says he hasn’t slept right since the fire, and from the looks of him, I believe him. I sat in his kitchen and talked with him for three hours.”
Grace’s right knee started to bounce up and down, and she put her hands on her knees so they would hold still.
“For the last five years,” Cooper went on, “Lex Jansick has been receiving four thousand dollars a month from a corporation registered in Nevada that doesn’t do anything, doesn’t make anything, and exists for no reason anyone can find except to move that money.
Jansick and his wife divorced shortly after they moved to Arizona, and she’s getting half of his income.
So, the monthly payments from the Nevada corporation total Four-hundred-eighty-thousand dollars over the past four years. ”
He paused. “Once I got him talking freely, I asked permission to record him, and he consented. I have him on tape saying, and these are his exact words, “The original fire report had everything in it that I was paid to put in it.’”
The lake was choppy over Cooper’s shoulder with miniature white caps topping the waves scudding across its surface. Grace watched the water fixedly as she asked, “Did he say the fire was set intentionally?”