5. Carolyn
Ihung up after a thirty-minute conversation with the insurance company. A representative had come the previous evening while Charlotte was at the store, but a million questions remained to be asked about the robber, the damage, and when All That Sparkles could reopen.
“Everything okay?” my mother asked from the office doorway. She and Charlotte had beaten me to the store that morning. They’d been helpful, of course, but their concern felt smothering. I was using up so much energy trying to convince them that I was okay that I barely had the energy to actually be okay. Not to mention, I was running on next to no sleep. When nightmares hadn’t kept me awake, thoughts of Zach had gotten my mind running in circles.
“As okay as it’s going to get today,” I responded.
“You must have been terrified.” My mother stepped closer. “In all the years I owned this store, we were never robbed. I can’t believe this happened.”
“Me either.” And the timing couldn’t be worse. I’d taken out a new loan and refinanced an existing one to cover the remodeling costs. Insurance would pay for the damages, but I was losing money and business with every day the store was closed.
On top of getting the front of the store cleaned up enough to reopen, police tape still stretched across my back door. I didn’t want to think about what had happened in the mantrap. I was leaving Charlotte to deal with having that piece of equipment checked out and recertified. It had saved my life. But I didn’t want to look at it.
“Maybe you should take some time off,” my mother suggested gently.
“Not necessary.” Not possible, actually—not with my financial situation. But if I said that, Mom would just worry. “I’ll be okay,” I tried to reassure her. Apparently, I wasn’t very convincing, because the anxious look on her face just deepened.
“Did you see this?” Charlotte came into the office, her phone clutched in her hand. “I was scrolling through review sites. I’m obsessed with looking at them from that marketing and presentation class I took last fall—but anyway, look.”
I took the phone and held it so Mom could see it, too. A review site on which we’d had a five-star rating for the past two years was suddenly down to two stars, with some scathing comments: “got ripped off here,” “not real diamonds,” “crappy service.”
“What the heck?” I muttered. As if my life wasn’t complicated enough. “It’s like the ones I saw on the Jewel Rater last week. All lousy and not true. I wonder…” I let the word dangle as my mind processed my thoughts.
“What?” Mom asked, studying me.
“Does it feel like someone could be sabotaging us? It just seems like all of this is happening at once.” Okay, maybe it was a stretch to think that there was a connection between bad reviews and an armed robber, but my mind returned to the things the robber had said about this not being what he’d signed up for. Did someone have a plan to damage All That Sparkles? If so, it might make sense that they’d try to attack us from multiple angles.
“Don’t forget about the canceled orders,” Charlotte added, getting onboard with the idea.
“That’s a good point. Those could be connected, too.” Three shipments had been mysteriously canceled or delayed in the past month, and as a result, we’d been unable to fulfill orders on time. We’d compensated the customers, who’d been understanding, but it was bad for business. It could all be a coincidence, but I’d been running the store for years, and had been around it for as long as I could remember, back when it had been Mom’s. I could never remember seeing a string of bad luck like this before. What’s that saying—it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you?
But who could be behind all of this? We competed with the store down the street, which was currently trying to buy us out, but the relationship between the businesses had never been malicious. I didn’t know Drew Castle, the owner of Castle Jewels, all that well, but I knew his family. His wife gave me piano lessons back when I was a kid—and I was on the softball team with his niece when we were in high school. He was a staple in this town, someone I’d known in passing for longer than I could remember. It didn’t seem possible that he’d go after my business like this…but who else would have a motive? “If you two can handle things here, I’m going to the police station. I want to run the idea past them.”
“Do that. And then go home. You need some time off.” My mother pulled my purse from the drawer where I kept it and handed it to me. “Call me if you need anything.”
“I will,” I promised.
“Hey.” Charlotte caught me before I could leave the office. “What about Zach?”
My mother’s eyes widened. She’d loved Zach, had insisted all along that there must be some reason why he hadn’t responded to my messages. “Zach’s home?”
I hadn’t mentioned it because I couldn’t explain how I felt about seeing him again. I needed time to process his return and what it would mean for my life. “He was here yesterday as part of the response team.”
“Austin?” Faith didn’t have to form the full question.
I sighed. “Zach didn’t know he had a son until yesterday.” Mom and Charlotte had been there for me through it all—my pregnancy, the birth, and the first year of Austin’s life. They’d been as upset and disappointed as I was when it appeared that Zach was ignoring my attempts to communicate with him. “Turns out, a friend of his played a prank on him not long after we broke up, and the end result was that he had to get his number changed. He didn’t get any of my messages.”
My mom lit up. “I just knew there had to be some kind of explanation,” she said. “Oh, this is wonderful news! And you say he was part of the response team? So that means he’s left the Navy, right? Does that mean that the two of you?—”
“Mom!” I said, cutting her off. “We’re not back together. We’re just… He was really shocked to find out about Austin, and I was shocked that he was shocked, and we still have a lot to work through. Stuff I was way too tired to get into last night.”
“Oh, baby, of course you were,” my mother said, giving me a hug. “You did have a tough day. Do you want me to come with you to talk to the police?”
And have her spend the trip gushing about Zach and how we should get back together? No thanks. Not when I still felt so tangled up over him. Knowing that he had a good reason for not responding to those messages didn’t magically erase the pain and loneliness I’d gone through. And it didn’t touch on the reason why we’d broken up in the first place. “No, I can do it,” I insisted.
Half an hour later at the police station, I wondered if I was making any sense. I’d laid out the unusual occurrences of the past month: the bad reviews, the delivery problems, and the armed robbery. Detective Novak, who faced me, seemed unimpressed.
“Every business goes through ups and downs,” he said. “This might all turn out to be a coincidence.”
“It seems like it might be more than a coincidence to me,” I argued.
“The perpetrator yesterday has a long record all over the state, everything from purse snatching to drug use. I’ll admit that armed robbery was something new for him, but you never know when these guys are going to escalate their crimes.”
“What about what he said, that this wasn’t what he’d signed up for?”
“He probably had a simple idea in his head for how the robbery would go. Walk in, wave the gun around, grab some jewelry, and run. Anything outside of that he might have seen as violating his plan. I’ll note it in the report, but I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that it means anything.”
Detective Novak hadn’t referred to me as little lady, but that was the sort of treatment I felt I was getting. He didn’t take me seriously. But I wasn’t going to just let it drop. If someone was trying to malign my business, that was deadly serious to me. And if they were willing to hire someone to come in and wave a gun around, then who knew what they might do next? I wanted this situation resolved before anyone else got hurt.
“I think it does mean something,” I said, determination filling me. “I’ll start my own investigation if I need to.”
That got the detective’s attention. “I have to ask you not to do that.” Novak waved his hands as if warding off the idea. “On the off chance you’re right, you could be walking into a dangerous situation.”
I thought about telling him that if he’d do his job, then I wouldn’t have to do it for him—but I got the sense that that wouldn’t help my case. Still, I made no promises. I thanked him for his time and headed to pick up Austin at Nina’s house on my way home. I’d called my pediatrician earlier and had an appointment the following day just to be sure Austin was fine after what he’d gone through.
He sure seemed fine, chatting away in his own lingo as I picked him up and took him home. After giving him a quick snack, I put him down for an afternoon nap and went to the alcove in my kitchen where I sometimes worked from home. I’d just checked in with my mom and Charlotte at the store when I heard a knock on the front door. I dashed to answer it, not wanting the noise to wake Austin. Without looking to see who it was, I whipped open the door.
“Hi.” Zach stood on the front porch with an adorable stuffed dog in his hand. “Is it okay if I visit Austin?”
“He’s napping…but you can come in and wait for him to get up,” I offered. I could have sent Zach away with the ready and true excuse that our son was asleep, but the truth was, I didn’t want to. And the fact that he’d thought to bring Austin a gift warmed my heart.
“Thanks. I appreciate that.” He stepped inside, filling the space as he always had. He was tall and fit, lean and handsome in jeans and a black T-shirt. Underneath, I knew, he was ripped with muscle. How I’d enjoyed running my hands over him. My fingers tingled with the remembered sensation. I should have sent him away, I realized too late. The temptation to pick up where we’d left off hit me. We’d been good together during the good times, but it had been far from perfect. His job got in the way. I didn’t know how other wives and girlfriends of the SEALs handled it when their men were gone for months with no word from them, never knowing if they were dead or alive. I couldn’t take the worry.
I’d waited out two deployments during our engagement, but when he was about to embark on the third, I’d given him an ultimatum. It was me or the mission. He couldn’t have both, because I could no longer live with the anxiety and fear. When he’d chosen the mission, it had broken my faith in him, in love. And then I realized I was pregnant. During the months when I’d tried to contact him and received only silence in return, I’d felt anger and betrayal, but I’d transferred my love for him to the baby we’d created.
It had been enough…until he walked back into my life.
“Actually,” he said, “I’m kind of glad Austin’s sleeping. I was hoping the two of us could talk.”
Oh boy. I wanted to say no, to say that the timing was bad and that I was too tired and anxious to be able to handle anything else just now…but Zach had that cautiously hopeful look in his blue eyes that I remembered all too well. As wonderful as the Admiral had been, by the time he took the Vale brothers in, Zach was already fifteen—and he’d basically resigned himself to the idea that good things were never going to happen to him. Even after things had turned around, he still got this look sometimes when he asked for things, as if he wasn’t sure he was really allowed to want things for himself.
I’d never been able to say no to that look.
“Okay,” I said, taking a seat on the couch. “Let’s talk.”