Chapter 17 #2
A frown skated over Owen’s brow as his gaze jumped above her to the space beyond, then back to her face. “Um, hi.”
Her regret was immediate, the awkwardness of her position straining both her neck and likely his perception of her. She pushed through the opening instead, drawing the door closed behind her. “It’s messy in there,” she said, crossing her arms. “How’s it going?”
He blinked at her, the deep blue of his eyes returning her briefly to poolside hangouts at Kayla’s parents’ house before he looked down at the foil-covered dish in his hands.
“We made cobblers,” he said. “Grams wanted you to have one.”
Frankie’s stomach growled. She couldn’t remember if she’d eaten today. “You baked?” she asked, her arms dropping to her side.
“I wore an apron and everything.” He smiled, and a small trickle of warmth pierced the cool numbness that had locked Frankie in its grip since the call to the clinic. He handed her the dish.
The scent that wafted from beneath the foil made her mouth water. “Pictures or it didn’t happen.”
To her surprise, he whipped out his phone and tapped a few times before holding up the screen so she could see.
The photo was blurry, and half his head was cut off, but there he was in a frilly yellow apron spooning flour into a bowl.
“Grams is more enthusiastic than skilled at photography, but there you go.”
Frankie hugged the cobbler closer, a genuine smile easing across her face. The next moment, she was crying, large tears tracking down her cheeks, unstoppable.
“Oh,” Owen said. “Oh shit. What…?” His hands fluttered out before him as if he wanted to offer comfort but wasn’t sure how.
“Sorry,” Frankie cried. “It’s just been a day, and this is so nice.”
Owen came to a decision, taking the dish from her and setting it on the step.
Then he pulled her into his arms and held her tight as she wept.
His embrace was broader than she remembered, but the way his hands splayed on her back, firm and still, like he wouldn’t let anything bad happen, was the same.
She buried her nose against his collarbone and allowed the warmth from his body to ease the rest of her pent-up tension as her tears soaked into his T-shirt.
It was possible she stayed in that spot a little longer than she needed, but eventually, she lifted her head off him and sucked in a deep breath. A fleeting impulse to apologize for her behavior was there but gone just as quickly. She didn’t have the energy.
“How about you go clean up and I’ll heat up some cobbler?” Owen asked.
And because the thought of going back inside and facing everything again made her want to run far away from there, she said yes.
She opened the door, revealing the mess she’d made with a small grimace. “I’ll explain after I…” She gestured to her face. “Kitchen is that way.” She pointed.
“I remember,” Owen said with a smile. “And your room was the first on the right up the stairs.”
“It’s storage now,” Frankie said, ignoring the way her heart skipped a beat at the reminder of him in her life once before.
“Where do you sleep then?”
Frankie pointed out the window toward the tiny home. “That’s mine.”
Owen lit up. “Really? I watched those tiny home shows on HGTV when I was in rehab. Will you show me some time?”
Frankie’s tears were fully dried now. “Sure, but it’s hardly TV-worthy. I’ll be right back.”
After rinsing her eyes, she joined Owen in the kitchen. Two plates of cobbler were sitting piping hot on the table. He’d put on the kettle for tea too and was currently head-deep in the freezer.
“Looking for something?”
He jumped back at her voice, a sheepish look on his face. “In case you had some vanilla ice cream. Goes great with cobbler.”
“I don’t think we do.” Frankie pulled two mugs off the shelf and grabbed a box of tea from the pantry. “Thanks for doing this, by the way.”
“Not a problem.”
They prepared their drinks in silence, moving around each other with ease until they were both seated at the trestle table.
The first bite of cobbler melted on Frankie’s tongue, and she stifled a moan as the sweet fruit sent bursts of delight across her tastebuds.
When she opened her eyes, she found Owen watching her, mirth playing on his lips.
“Good?” he asked.
“Very good,” she agreed. Almost good enough to erase the rest of the day, except outside this little bubble, she still had a trove of documents to examine and a life to make sense of.
“Will you tell me about it?” Owen asked as if he’d seen her thoughts shift.
She finished chewing another bite. “If I do, you have to promise to keep it to yourself. It’s pretty messed up.”
He didn’t hesitate. “Of course. Is it about Estelle?”
She nodded. “You only know about the discrepancy in the abduction story, but there’s more.”
She proceeded to tell him everything that had happened since the funeral, including the weird lavender stash upstairs, and finally the cancer lie that had upended this particular day.
“If it was just one oddity, I could maybe chalk it up to a quirk or something like that, but it’s been one thing after the other, and added up…
” She pressed her lips together before the panic could take hold and run with her again.
“It makes you wonder what else she lied about,” Owen said.
Frankie slumped back in her seat. “How can I not?”
He nodded. “No, I get it. It would make me question everything.”
“And to make matters worse, I now have to do an interview with this reporter, Orla Monroe, who’s been asking questions since she read the card. It’s a whole thing. What if she finds out about this? Estelle would be disgraced, and that would hurt Starview.”
“Which is why you have all that stuff on the floor in there.” Owen nodded toward the living room.
Frankie nodded. “I was about to go through it when you showed up. If there’s something to find, I need to be the one to find it.”
“Derailing plans one cobbler at a time.” Owen shoved a big bite into his mouth and chewed around a smile. “Do you want help?”
An overwhelming “yes” resounded inside Frankie.
She really did, and Owen was far enough removed from all things Aspen Creek to be a safer bet than Kayla and Matt.
Owen didn’t have preconceived notions of Estelle, and he wasn’t invested in Starview or its success, which made him the perfect partner for this investigation.
“If you don’t mind,” Frankie said.
“Like Grams said—it’s good for me to stay busy.” He lifted another forkful but paused halfway to his lips and said as if on an afterthought, “I also don’t like seeing you upset.”
The unexpected honesty lightened the weight at Frankie’s core.
This version of him was so different than his eighteen-year-old self, all the edges rounded off, the depths explored and embraced, but when he said things like that, she got a glimpse of the unpredictability that had kept her on her toes back then.
Like the raw undercurrent that had once simmered beneath his skin, exciting and intimidating her in equal measure, might still run deep.
Or, possibly, he just wanted to avoid further crying.
“I wonder if it started before the song,” Owen said, setting his mug down on the table.
Frankie’s analysis of him came to a halt. “What do you mean?”
“You said the lavender stuff went back what—ten-ish years? Same with the cancer. And whoever sent that note to the funeral certainly made it seem like they’d waited for her demise for some time.
The financial issues are more recent, and we can’t make assumptions about the private account until you get access.
That means the lie she told about the song—and your abduction—is likely older than the other question marks you’ve found. ”
“Yeah?” She still wasn’t sure what he was getting at.
“Look, lies are stories people tell for a reason. They can be honorable—like to spare someone’s feelings—or completely self-serving, borne from a desire to deceive or a need to protect the self.
I should know; I’ve lied to my parents, my employers, my friends, to my ex-girlfriend…
I’ve lied about where I’ve been, what I’ve done, my habits, and my intentions.
Part of the rehab program I was in required me to confront this in myself, but as hard as that’s been, the real challenge was unearthing the origin of them all.
The one lie to rule them all, if you will.
Because once that first story takes root, it requires no effort to grow into something unwieldy that needs more lies to be maintained. ”
Frankie frowned, trying to match his words to what she knew of Estelle and failing. “But—and I mean no offense—Estelle wasn’t an addict. There were no habits to cover up.”
“That you knew of. Substance abuse is only one kind of habit.”
“No.” Frankie gathered her plate and mug and brought them to the sink. “Mom wasn’t like that. I would have known.” They’d both been so focused on the school, on their students, on the community. There would have been no time for secret extracurriculars.
Except Estelle did have a suitcase under the guest room bed that said otherwise, a small voice reminded Frankie.
Owen looked like he had more to say, but he backed down when she didn’t return to the table, opting instead to lean against the counter.
“I could be wrong,” he said instead. “But her telling you that you were abducted? If that was a lie, I doubt it was the first one. It’s too big to be the seed.”
Frankie considered this, wanting to disagree with him but not quite managing. “You think the answers lie further back?”
“Maybe.” Owen joined her and set his dishes in the sink. “What do you know about her life before she had you? Your dad died, right?”
“Yeah, I have no memories of him.”
“So that must have been hard on her. Where did they live?”
“Mississippi. I was born in Jackson, but I’m not sure that’s where they were from.”
“Have you ever been back?”
Frankie pushed off the counter and headed for the living room. “That’s a lot of questions at once. Are you secretly a reporter?”
He followed her, a low sound of amusement rumbling in his chest. “Sorry.”
She stopped before the mess on the floor, and he did the same.
“I had no reason to go back,” she said. “No grandparents, aunts, or uncles. She didn’t talk much about her parents, but her grandparents were from France. She got her love for music from her grandpa. That much I do know.”
Owen stepped out among the documents, as if he was setting off into a labyrinth.
Frankie watched him, the placement of his feet, the way his gaze swept across these relics of a life, and it felt like he was looking at her instead.
Like he’d be able to glean something in the spaces between the lines that she wasn’t ready to own up to yet.
“What was your first lie?” she asked.
It had its desired effect. He stopped. Looked up at her. “‘Drinking helps me be myself,’” he said. “Rapidly followed by ‘It makes people like me more’ and ‘I can stop whenever I want.’”
“Classic.”
He shrugged. “I’d gone off to college and suddenly I didn’t know who I was anymore. I was completely anonymous, and for a kid who’d had his name cheered throughout high school, that was like an icy shower of reality.”
Frankie moved a roof-cleaning invoice with her toes. “I wish you would have told me,” she said quietly.
“We’d broken up.” His words were matter-of-fact. “I didn’t want to mess up your senior year with my problems.”
She was about to object when he bent down and picked up the yellow envelope she’d seen earlier.
“Certificates,” he said. “Looks important.”
“I think it says ‘certification.’ You know—for the school.”
He flipped the envelope over again. “No. It says ‘certificates.’” He held it out for her so she could see.
She squinted at the cursive. “Maybe you’re right. Open it.”
He did, pulling out a short stack of copies that he handed to her.
“‘Marriage Certificate,’” she read, her thumb skimming the ornate font at the top of the page. Then her gaze trailed lower to where her parents’ names were listed, and below them, their parents’ names as witnesses.
“Is that your mom and dad?” Owen asked. “I didn’t know that was her real name.”
Frankie read the page to herself a third time, focusing on the swoop of her mom’s signature to keep the knot that was forming in her throat in check.
According to the certificate, Greg Milne and Stella-Jane Sutton had been married in Franklin County, Alabama on November 1, 1975.
Frankie looked up, meeting Owen’s gaze over the page. “Yeah,” she said. “Neither did I.”
“Well, shit.”
Her sentiment exactly. Never once when Mom had talked about her past had that name come up, and here it was on her marriage certificate.
Greg’s penmanship was heavier than her mom’s, the ink tip having debossed the squat letters into the paper, while hers flowed smoothly in a forward slant. Stella-Jane.
“Um, Frankie…”
“Yeah?” She looked up to see Owen with his hand shoved into the envelope, fishing for something at the bottom.
“There’s something else in here.” He pulled out two plastic straps, one bigger than the other, and held them out to her in his palm.
“What is it?” she asked, taking the smaller one and examining it. There was writing on one side, but it was smudged.
“Looks like medical wristbands,” he said, turning the bigger one over in his hand. “Yeah,” he said. “It is. Look.” He showed her where Stella-Jane’s name was written on the tag.
Frankie squinted at the smaller one again, trying to interpret the faded letters. “Probably from when I was born then,” she said. “This must be the matching baby wristband.”
“I don’t think so,” Owen said, the expression on his face saying enough that Frankie braced herself, her subconscious knowing something was coming around the corner that she couldn’t have prepared for.
He gave her the bigger bracelet and pointed to the numbers below Stella-Jane’s name. “This can’t be yours because the baby who wore this was born in 1976.”