45. Fox
FOX
A sh still wasn’t answering in her room. She was long gone from the spa, wasn’t at the pool or on the beach. I didn’t know Izzy’s last name so I couldn’t see if Ash was with her in her room. She wasn’t in any of the hotel restaurants and there was no one at the villa when I knocked.
That bothered me. My brain leapt to imagining she and her family had checked out and gone to Honolulu, to wait for their flight back to Pine Grove. Maybe she regretted sleeping with me that much. Maybe she was tired of this farce of a week that I’d caused her. Maybe she was rethinking her options, now that Shane had turned up and still wanted to marry her.
Even though neither had claimed to love the other.
I kept coming back to that because we hadn’t said those words, either. We hadn’t made any promises. We’d given in to a moment’s temptation and… What?
I tried to believe Eddie was right, that Shane would come around, but I bumped into Sandy in the lobby, waiting for the elevator. She looked frazzled.
“Oh, Fox. I finally got the laundry on, but I needed more quarters.” She showed me the rolled coins, expression shifting from a reflexive smile of warmth to something less certain.
“Shane in a mood to talk yet?” I asked.
“No, but listen.” She touched my arm. “Ed and I have talked. You’ll get your fair share. We have enough equity in the house we can mortgage it so Shane can buy you out. Eddie and I will come out of retirement and help him manage things. Ed ran his own business all those years. He knows what it takes. This looks like a disaster, but it’s just a bump in the road.”
It was surgery without anesthetic. Were they insane, risking their retirement savings on a business that was still only a few years old? It was in a growth stage, reliant on website visits and online sales, not on quoting a job and showing up to do the work. It was headed by a man they never said ‘no’ to.
“We’ll talk more when we’re back in Oz.” Sandy gave my arm a final squeeze and offered a weak smile. “Things will work out one way or another. They always do.”
“Sure.” I let her take the elevator that arrived and said I was going for a swim, but I was reeling from the message the Holloways were pulling together and I wasn’t one of them. Not anymore.
I went to the beach and threw myself into the surf so I could blame the salt for the sting in my eyes.