8. Taylor
CHAPTER 8
TAYLOR
I should have known this was coming. I did know this was coming. Why did I let him take me by surprise?
It was galling to be invited into her own house to talk, but then, if anyone had the right to issue that invitation, it was Kane McCormick. Taylor tried to keep that in mind as she put away the groceries on the counter. She’d abandoned them there when she had seen the car parked in her driveway and realized there was an intruder on the premises.
Kind of. He wasn’t exactly an intruder, and she knew that was something she needed to remember. This needed to be handled delicately.
She finished putting the groceries away. “Can I get you something to drink?” she asked. “I’ve got water, soda, tea…”
“Do you have a beer?”
“Right.”
“What?”
“Nothing, I just should have guessed that’s what you would want.”
He stared at her. “Are you serious?”
“Shouldn’t I be?”
“You’re giving me a hard time because I partied in high school?”
She sighed. In a way, she supposed he was right — she shouldn’t have been hard on him now. They didn’t even know each other anymore.
But it wasn’t just about high school, was it?
“Where have you been?” she asked him.
“I’ve been lots of places. Do you mean in the last decade?”
“Why don’t we start with the last six weeks.”
“Detroit, mainly.”
“That’s the best you can do?”
“I don’t know what you’re looking for, Taylor. That’s where I was.”
“And your father was here dying,” she said. “You didn’t even think of coming to see him during that time? Don’t you care at all?”
He stared at her. “Why do you care? He’s not your father.”
“I was his nurse,” she said, folding her arms across her chest and staring right back at him. The stubborn set of his jaw was so familiar that for a moment it felt as if she was right back in high school. “I was his home care nurse. I’ve been with him for the last five years.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know anything about his health, because he never bothered to get in touch with me. He didn’t tell me.”
“He didn’t know how to get in touch with you,” Taylor said. “It’s not like you gave him your contact information when you left. It’s not like you called or kept in touch. What was he supposed to do when he got the news that he didn’t have much time left? How was he supposed to let you know? It was your responsibility to get in touch with him. To give him a way of reaching you.”
“Maybe I didn’t want to be reached.”
“Well then, you can’t exactly blame me for calling you selfish now,” she told him. “You didn’t care. Or if you did, you cared more about yourself. About your own needs. I mean, that’s obvious.”
“I don’t know why you’re sticking your nose in any of this at all,” Kane said. “You made it pretty clear years ago that you didn’t give a damn what happened to me.”
The memory of their last conversation rushed up, but Taylor pushed the guilt aside. “Don’t you put that on me,” she said. “I was a teenage girl. It wasn’t my job to fix your life. And anyway, you’re the one who ran away. I never told you to do that. So whatever you think about whose fault it might be that you weren’t here when your father died, the one thing you have to accept is that it had nothing to do with me.”
“I know it had nothing to do with you,” Kane snapped. “It still has nothing to do with you. That’s why I don’t understand how you’re justifying standing here questioning me about it. I don’t know what you’re doing in my house at all.”
“It’s not your house,” Taylor said.
“What the hell do you mean, it’s not my house? Of course it is.”
She sighed. No matter what she thought of Kane and of the way things had ended between him and his father, this wasn’t her decision to make and she knew it. The only thing she could do here was to try to deal with him honestly.
“Your father didn’t leave the house to you,” she said. “At least, he didn’t only leave it to you.”
She saw comprehension dawn on his face. His eyes went wide. “You’re not going to tell me he left the house to you ?”
“Not entirely,” she said. “It seems like he decided to split ownership of it between the two of us. Fifty-fifty.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Maybe if you had been here and gotten to know him a little better, you’d understand his reasons for doing things,” Taylor said.
“Or you could just tell me.” Kane frowned. “You didn’t used to be like this.”
“Like what?”
“Mean,” Kane said. “You used to be one of the nicest people I knew. What happened to that Taylor?”
“I’m plenty nice when people deserve it.” She didn’t appreciate him coming back into town after all this time and calling her character into question. Who was he to say these things?
But then it occurred to her that she really wasn’t being very nice. Whatever she might think of Kane, she had to remember that he had just lost his father. He was going through something difficult and painful — even if it was his own fault that he hadn’t had a relationship with Jason for a decade. Even if it was his fault that Jason had died asking where his son was.
Taylor shut out that painful memory. It had been difficult to sit at Jason McCormick’s bedside and hold his hand while he died, but she was a nurse. It wasn’t the first time she’d had to do something like that, and she knew that it wouldn’t be the last. Maybe it had mattered more because she’d spent five years devoting care to Jason. It had been hard for her to see him go. He had been more than just a patient to her.
And though she hadn’t expected to be remembered in his will, when Thomas Greely had gotten in touch and let her know that she had been left a share of this house, she had been honored and grateful. It was a beautiful house, and Taylor had made the decision to move in right away. She’d known that Kane had been left a share of the house as well, but who could say where Kane was? No one had seen him in so long, and he might simply never show up at all. There was no point in waiting around to see whether or not he would, that was for certain.
So she had moved in.
And now, here Kane was, looking at her as if she had no business being here at all.
“Look,” she said. “Your father made the choice he made. He decided that the house was going to be split between the two of us. That’s not on me.”
“How can we split a house?” he asked. “You’re going to have to let me buy you out.”
“I’m not doing that,” Taylor said. “I love this house. I live here now. I’ve lived here for five years.”
“You haven’t lived here for five years,” he said, laughing.
“Maybe not technically, but in a sense… I was here every day, taking care of your father,” she said. “I slept in the spare room as often as I went home, because he needed to have someone with him overnight when he wasn’t well. And I gave up my apartment when I moved in for good. You can’t expect me to leave now just because you’ve decided to show your face again after all these years. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Then what? Are you going to buy me out?”
“I guess so,” Taylor said. “I mean, we’ll have to figure out a way to make that happen. It’s our only real option.”
“All right,” he agreed. “I’m not going to be difficult about it”
“You’ll have to give me some time to get the money,” she said. “I don’t have it on hand. And I suppose we’ll have to get the property appraised to make sure I’m paying you the right amount and everything.” Which meant they were going to have to spend a lot more time in proximity to one another, working out the details of the sale.
Why did that feel like a relief? It should have been something to dread — having to spend that much more time in his company. It was clear that he didn’t think particularly highly of her. He had expressed no gratitude whatsoever for the years she’d spent caring for his father, and his biggest impulse upon finding her here seemed to be a desire to get her out of the house.
And yet, there was something exciting about seeing him again after all these years. It was like winning a jackpot of some kind — full of possibility, surprising and thrilling. She didn’t know what to expect, but she wanted to spend more time with him and find out. She wanted to know what he had been doing all the time he had been away.
He cleared his throat. “I’ve got an appointment with this guy tomorrow.”
“You mean Thomas Greely?”
“Yeah, him. You know him?”
Had he been away so long? There weren’t many people she didn’t know in Miller Creek, and certainly the executor of Jason McCormick’s will wouldn’t be on that list. “Sure,” she said. “I know him.”
“Maybe you’d better come with me tomorrow so that we can work out this house stuff.”
“I’ll think about that,” Taylor said. “I didn’t really anticipate having to deal with all this tomorrow.” She didn’t actually have other plans — Saturday was a day off for her — but the prospect of spending the day looking at legal documents with Kane was a little overwhelming given everything that had happened between the two of them. She knew it would have to be done eventually, of course, but maybe there was some way to delay it for a while — at least until she could process the fact that he was back in town and decide how she felt about it, which was a question she didn’t have the answer to at the moment.
Kane nodded. “Is my room free?”
“I don’t know which room that is.”
“I guess I’ll go look.” Before she could say anything to dissuade him, he picked up his suitcase and headed down the hall.
Taylor looked at the yellow Labrador for a moment. Then she followed him.
She found him standing in the doorway of the bedroom she’d always used here — the room she now thought of as her own. “It looks like you took it,” he observed, noting her things strewn about the place.
Taylor forced herself to remember that she hadn’t done anything wrong. “This is my room, yeah,” she agreed. If it had once been his, it hadn’t belonged to him for a very long time, and she felt no compunction about claiming it as her own now.
It wasn’t the master bedroom, of course, but there had been no question of her moving into Jason’s room right after his death. She could imagine doing it in a few years, maybe, when the immediacy of that trauma had worn off, but it would have felt disrespectful to sleep in that bed right now.
A part of her wondered whether Kane would try to do that — and if he did, what she would say. She didn’t have any right to tell him that he couldn’t. This was his house as much as it was hers.
He regarded her for a moment. Maybe he was waiting to see if she would relinquish this bedroom to him. She had no intention of doing so.
Finally, he cracked. “All right,” he said. “I’ll stay in the guest bedroom tonight.”
Taylor didn’t love the idea of it — the two of them sharing the house when things between them were so tense — but what could she do? Even if she had a right to throw him out, which she didn’t, there was no chance he’d be able to make other arrangements at this point in the evening. There was only one hotel nearby, and they stopped taking reservations at five p.m.
So she nodded. “All right,” she agreed. “We’ll deal with the rest in the morning.”
She watched him walk down the hall to the guest room, the Labrador following behind him, and wondered what this would lead to. She had never anticipated that he would walk back into her life like this, and she honestly didn’t know whether she was glad to see him again or not.