Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
The last eight years were kind of a blur for Maeve.
It was like looking back on running a marathon, she knew it had been hard, but the only evidence were the aches in her body and the tiredness that went deep to the core of her being.
Never in all that time did she think she would be swimming in the Redemption River at twilight while Brodie Carter kept an eye on Zoey.
The water was luxuriously cool, rippling over her skin with every stroke she took.
When she turned and dipped her head back, a delightful chill crept over her scalp and then as she lay fully submerged she could hear nothing but a low hum of the water.
She floated like Zoey would, arms outstretched.
Above her, the faint outline of the moon as the sky darkened.
She felt cocooned away from the world, levitating above real life.
Then she heard Zoey calling and immediately pulled herself upright in the water and scanned the view of the cabin to see what was wrong.
But all she saw was Brodie piling up logs to make a fire just in front of the veranda.
She called over to ask if it had been Zoey and he shook his head.
Then he smiled. That infamous crooked grin that had sold a million albums and graced posters on bedroom walls.
Maeve’s insides fluttered, her breath caught. Berating herself, she started to swim toward the shore.
It was dangerous to relax too much. There were too many shadows—too much coming that she needed her strength for, her armor. She must never again allow herself to be distracted by—succumb to—that grin.
“Good swim?” Brodie asked, ambling casually to the shoreline to hand her one of the navy bath towels.
The brief interaction felt strangely intimate, like they were a couple. Their hands brushed as she took it and she was suddenly hyperaware of wearing only her bathing suit. It made her take a few steps away as she wrapped herself in the towel. “Thanks, yes, it was lovely.”
Brodie held her gaze for a second longer than normal. She wondered if he, too, had felt the jolt as their hands touched. But then he just nodded and went back to the fire.
Small flames licked at the base of the pile of logs. It surprised her that he knew how to build a fire, which was stupid because he’d grown up on the ranch, but he was so golden nowadays it was hard to imagine him getting his hands dirty.
He had brought the chairs down from the veranda and placed them either side of the fire.
Part of her wanted to call it a night and the excuse of getting changed was the perfect opportunity to do so, but she also knew that there wouldn’t be many opportunities where they would be alone.
Especially in a setting so remote from real life.
And there were things she needed to say to him still.
She rewrapped the towel around her waist and pulled her Jackson hospital sweater on over her damp bathing suit then sat down next to the fire.
Brodie perched on the edge of his chair, stoking the flames with a stick. He looked boyish in the firelight, flopping haired and twinkly eyed, like he used to at school. It made her say, “You said you used to come here with Ethan?”
Ethan was Brodie’s younger brother, same year at school as Maeve. Cut class all the time. Way too cool to be friends with Maeve, but she knew him through her friend Piper, the one who’d persuaded her to go to Brodie’s concert.
Brodie looked up, there was something about his eyes that made him look like he was permanently amused by a joke, the uptilt at the corners and the fan of coal-black lashes.
Don’t look, Maeve. She lowered her gaze.
“Yeah, this is where we wrote a lot of Silver Sky songs. Just the two of us. They were good times.”
“You miss him?” she asked. No one had seen Ethan for years.
But a while back, Maeve had bumped into Piper at the grocery store and her friend had told her that she thought she’d seen the elusive Carter brother on her street.
“It was weirdest thing, I looked out my window and I swear I saw Ethan standing under the streetlamp.”
Maeve had said that she didn’t think he’d stand under a streetlamp if he didn’t want anyone to know he was there, which seemed to be the case as no one had heard from him, but Piper was having none of it. “It was him, Maeve, I know it was,” she’d said.
“Yeah, I miss him,” Brodie nodded without question.
“He was like…” He paused trying to think of an analogy.
“I don’t know, I can’t explain it. I can write a good song on my own, but with Ethan, it becomes something else.
He can see a lyric or a melody and know exactly what to change to take it to another level, give a song some gravitas.
” Then he laughed. “I didn’t even know I knew that word. ”
Maeve laughed despite herself.
The smile in Brodie’s eyes only intensified having made her laugh.
The air seemed to still, pause on the moment.
She felt her face get warm and pulled her damp hair up from her neck. Don’t look at him, Maeve.
They sat in silence but it wasn’t the same silence as before.
There was suddenly an awareness to it rather than an awkwardness.
She could hear her breathing, watched the movement of his throat as he swallowed.
She should have gone to bed. She tried to stay focused, willed herself not to look at him, but she couldn’t help it, her gaze drawn to his side of the fire, the hypnotic blue of his eyes.
It’s not real, Maeve, she warned herself. It’s all just a trick of the light.
“Brodie, I’ve been meaning to tell you…” she began cautiously.
His brows drew together. “Is this to do with Ethan?”
There was a hopefulness to the question that made her feel for him as she shook her head. “No, it’s to do with your mom.”
“My mom?” He pointed to his chest as if to confirm.
The tension dropped like a stone, gone in an instant at the mention of his mother.
“Yeah.” She nodded, leaning down to pick up a twig from the ground and chucking it on the fire. “She’s helped me quite a lot with Zoey.”
Brodie cocked his head. “Does she know?”
Maeve winced. “No. And I feel awful about it.” She bit down on her nail, a terrible habit that she’d got into at medical school, so she tucked her hands into the cuffs of her sweater.
“My grandma died when Zoey was three years old. It was really sudden.” Maeve remembered coming home and finding her grandma apparently asleep in her chair one afternoon.
There was a bag of apples on the floor next to her that she’d obviously been given by John-Luke at the orchard as she’d walked past. She still had her coat on.
Maeve had known as she stood in the doorway, she’d seen enough death at work to know that her lovely grandma was gone.
She’d walked over and pressed her cheek to hers, her eyes welling with tears, and said, “Thank you for everything.” Clutched her grandma’s clasped hands in hers and said a prayer for her to sleep peacefully.
When Maeve had stood, it felt like the world had given way underneath her.
“I was a bit of a mess afterwards for a while,” she said to Brodie, who was studying her too intently for her liking, like he could see through to everything she was thinking.
“My grandma had always looked after Zoey, so without her I was pretty overwhelmed by everything. One day in the grocery store, Zoey was having a meltdown and I just kind of broke down—it was a bad day,” she added jokily to try and lighten what she was saying.
Brodie smiled softly.
Don’t look at me like that.
Maeve tried her very best not to be distracted by the creasing of his eyes at the corners.
“Anyway,” she said, forcing her gaze back to look at the fire, “your mom was there, and she tried to help me but I was so terrified of her getting involved that I just ran away from her. Literally, picked up Zoey and fled. She must have thought I was crazy. After that, any time I saw her, I’d completely avoid her, even though she was just trying to help.
She’d come round and ring on the bell and I’d pretend not to be at home. ”
Brodie gave a wry smile. “She’s a very persistent woman!”
“Tell me about it!”
He chuckled and it seemed to bring them suddenly closer, joined, almost like family, by such intimate knowledge of a parent’s behavior.
Maeve hurried on, “I had found this babysitter who would take care of Zoey in the afternoons. She seemed great, Zoey loved her, but then things started going wrong in her life and I didn’t realize quick enough.
Your mom came round one day and found her passed out drunk in the hallway.
” Maeve shuddered at the memory of it. “It was really bad. I shouldn’t have let it happen.
Martha rang me at college, all calm while I was panicking, and made me tell her where the spare key was and that she would take Zoey home and not to worry.
” Maeve sighed as she looked up at Brodie.
“Of course, I left straight away to come and get her and there she was, fast asleep in a little crib—that was probably your crib once!—at Silver Sky. I could hardly breathe. Zoey was your mom’s granddaughter and she had no idea.
It was awful.” She covered her cheeks with her hands. “I couldn’t say anything.”
Brodie sat forward, brow furrowed, hands clasped in front of him. “Didn’t you think that we could have helped? Given you money? Made life easier?”
“Of course I did.” She looked across at him over the fire, his wide, clear eyes reminding her so much of Zoey’s.
She stared, almost beseeching, as she said, “Think back, you were so famous, Brodie, you could have anything you wanted. And I’d already kept the truth from you.
I didn’t know how you’d react.” It was a risk, her honesty, laying out her vulnerability for him, but it felt like the only way.
“You were a gazillionaire and I’m in my grandma’s house with a drunk babysitter barely able to scrape together the money to eat and work and put gas in the car while studying full-time.
I was not in a secure place. And maybe you wouldn’t have tried to take Zoey away—” the fear of him swooping in and gathering Zoey up had forever kept Maeve awake at night “—but I couldn’t take that risk.
I was scared, I was young, I had no one.
” Stupidly, she felt her eyes well up, and she was not a crier!
“I know it sounds like an excuse, Brodie, but I just didn’t want to lose my daughter. ”