11. Chapter Eleven
Chapter Eleven
Now
I know I shouldn’t be doing this.
But having common sense and listening to it are two separate things, and by the time I swing my mother’s car into a space at Hoyt Landscaping, the choice has been made.
About half an hour further inland than the coastal town where Mom and Travis live, Theo’s company is housed in a nondescript brown building on the same lot as a paint store and a body shop. All three of the businesses look rundown, like they’ve been there for decades. The lots aren’t paved, and there are only a few other vehicles around.
I climb carefully out of the car, checking that the heels of my shoes are steady in the gravel before I let go of the door. I’m wearing black cropped pants and a white button-down, and I take a moment to adjust my French tuck, making sure it looks perfect. My sunglasses go to the top of my head, and I bring my handbag close to my body.
This time, I won’t be caught off guard by Theo’s presence. I look good, I feel good, and I know what I came here to say. I’m in complete control of the situation.
With my head high and shoulders back, I take a purposeful step forward and immediately lose my balance. I pitch forward, stumbling over my own feet, only to find myself facedown in the dirt and gravel a second later.
“Ow!” I flounder on the ground, trying to find some equilibrium after my quick descent. “Son of a bitch!”
An engine rumbles and grows closer. I manage to sit up on my knees just as a Hoyt Landscaping truck comes to a stop a few feet away from me. I hold my breath as the driver’s window rolls down, prepared to see Theo on the other side.
But it’s not Theo.
It’s his dad.
“You alright there?” Cecil calls down to me.
Just like Theo didn’t recognize me when we first met again, I can tell that Cecil doesn’t, either. He looks concerned, but not surprised or shocked. To him, I’m just some random lady on the ground for no reason.
I rise—carefully—to my feet and smooth my hands down my front, trying to brush the dirt off my white shirt. “I’m good, thank you,” I say primly, as if he didn’t just come across me shouting obscenities into the ground.
Cecil squints at me. His dark hair is threaded with gray now, but he still looks remarkably like his son. “Are you here for Hoyt? "
“I’m not a client,” I tell him, adjusting my sunglasses on top of my head. “I’m here to see Theo.”
I watch Cecil’s expression morph into astonishment as the dots connect. He stares at me for a few seconds—trying to reconcile the face he sees now with the face he knew, I’m sure—and then lets out a low whistle. “Well, I’ll be damned. It’s Nina Lynn.”
My answering smile is genuine. The Hoyts never treated me as a bother or a burden, and years ago, I grieved their loss from my life as well as Theo’s. “Hi, Cecil.”
“Now I know why Theo’s been walking around with his head in the clouds all day. When did y’all get back in touch?”
I move my left hand, subtly but purposely, letting the diamond catch the sun. Cecil looks taken aback when his gaze snags on my ring, and that annoys me. Did everybody expect me to spend my life waiting around for Theo? “We ran into each other last week. He’s been working a job at my wedding venue.”
He recovers quickly, plastering a smile on his face. “Well, that sure worked out. Congratulations, Nina. You’ve got a lucky guy there. Let me park this thing and I’ll walk you in, alright?”
I nod, and when Cecil pulls forward, I see that Theo has emerged from the building. He stands on the pavement just outside the door, and for a moment we stand there, looking at each other across the small lot.
Despite my well-rehearsed speech, the first words I find are, “Do you wear that polo every day?”
Theo glances down, plucking at his shirt. “Pretty much.”
“Do you ever wash it?”
One side of his mouth raises in that smirk that’s so familiar, it makes me ache. “I have more than one, Sass. Where’s Queen Kelly? Not looking over your shoulder today?”
I shift uncomfortably. “The Catskills with her husband, remember? They left this morning.”
The slam of a door captures our attention. Cecil emerges from the fleet of work trucks parked near a large shed, and now I can see that he’s wearing the polo, too. “Why didn’t you tell me Nina was coming?” he calls to Theo, walking up to us. “Your mom would have liked to say hey.”
“Sorry. It slipped my mind.” Theo’s voice is smooth. I pointedly raise my eyebrows in his direction, wanting him to know that I’m fully aware he is lying. Ignoring me, he turns to tug the door open. “Come on. We’ll show you around.”
There isn’t much to show. The lobby is clean, gray tile, with an unmanned reception area and a single plastic chair in the corner. Theo walks me down the single hallway, pointing out his office, Cecil’s office, and the break room, which is unoccupied except for a man eating a candy bar.
“I’m listening for the phones, boss,” he says, making no move to get up.
I haven’t been able to ascertain who is actually in charge here, so I glance over at Cecil and Theo, waiting to see who responds. It’s Theo who speaks to the guy. “That’s fine, Wade. God knows you can hear ’em back here.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Cecil adds. “We’ve gotta figure out how to turn that ringer down.”
Wade looks at me, his eyes lingering on my figure for a beat too long. “Who’s this?”
A muscle ticks in Theo’s jaw. “This is Nina Sullivan. Soon to be Nina…”
It takes me a moment to realize what he’s waiting for. “Hartley,” I say with a quick, obliging smile at the stranger. “It’ll be Nina Hartley.”
There’s something strange about hearing it spoken aloud, my first name with Daniel’s last, and a heavy, uncomfortable silence falls over the room. Cecil looks at his shoes. Theo’s stare burns a hole in the wall.
Seeming eager to be free of the tension, Wade clears his throat and rises from the table, flicking his candy wrapper into the trash. He nods in my direction. “Nice to meet you. Congrats. I’m headed back up front, boss.”
This time, Cecil answers. “I’ll follow you."
The two of them go, leaving me alone with a tense Theo. I look down at my shirt, checking for any dirt I missed earlier. Brushing at a small spot near my belly button, I remind him, “You brought it up.”
“I know.”
“All I did was answer.”
“Yeah.” Theo takes the cap off his head, runs a hand through his hair a couple of times. “I know. Just weird to hear you use a new last name.”
My eyes fall to the logo on his shirt. He doesn’t elaborate, and I don’t ask him to, because I know what we’re both thinking. It’s not me with a different last name that’s strange—it’s the fact that the name won’t be Hoyt.
“Let’s talk in your office,” I suggest.
Theo nods mutely and leads me back to the door that bears his name. On the other side is a small but tidy room. His desk is neat, occupied only by a computer and legal pad. There’s a TV mounted on the wall. A thick oak frame beneath it catches my eye. I step closer, swallowing a gasp when I see Theo’s name in fancy script on a diploma from the University of North Carolina.
I look at him. He’s standing beside his desk, not behind it, watching me with a guarded expression. “You went to college.”
“Someone told me I should.”
I decide not to take that bait. “For business?”
“Yeah.” Theo moves over, perches on the edge of his desk. “While I was there, I made a friend who did landscaping work for extra money. He brought me along on a few jobs, and I liked it.”
“So this is your company? Or Cecil’s?”
“We’re partners. Neither of us works for the other,” he says, a clear undercurrent of pride in the words. “Dad worked in retail management after Walk a Mile closed. It was a decent job, but when I graduated, we decided to do the family business thing again.”
It makes perfect sense that while my family fell apart in the aftermath of everything that happened, the Hoyts flourished. They never acted like separate people who happened to live together, the way my family sometimes had. They were a unit, a package deal, the ideal nuclear family in black-and-white shows. Honestly, in terms of business—in terms of everything—becoming involved with my parents was probably the biggest misstep Cecil and Randi ever made.
“Do they still live in Amity?” I ask.
“Sure do. Same house and everything. I live up there, too.”
“That’s a bit of a drive.”
Theo shrugs. “We get a lot of work near the coast. This is just about halfway between there and home. It’s not too bad. Dad and I don’t go out on every job anymore.”
I shift my bag on my shoulder. My feet are beginning to hurt in these impractical heels, but as much as I want to sink into a chair, I don’t. I’m afraid that if I sit down, if I make myself comfortable with Theo nearby, I’ll never want to leave.
“Alright, Sass.” Theo’s long fingers curl over the edge of the desk, and I find myself watching as they flex against the wood. “Tell me why you’re here.”
We didn’t text for long last night—only long enough for me to say that I wanted to talk in person and for Theo to send me the company’s address. Then I lay awake into the early hours of the morning, planning the speech that is currently caught in my throat.
I fold my hands in front of me, just as I do at Daniel’s work events when I’m bored with the conversation and trying not to fidget. The star on Theo’s shirt winks at me. I fix my gaze on it, swallowing hard.
“Are you grounding yourself right now?” he asks before I can get a word out.
And it makes me want to scream in frustration, because yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing, and it’s not fair that he can still read me so easily after all this time. He abandoned me to build a new life from nothing. Where does he find the audacity to act like he has the right to know me the way he used to?
I force my eyes to meet his, trying to retain some semblance of dignity. Raising my chin in his direction, I start on what I came to say, my words coming out in slow, measured syllables: “I came to tell you that we need to draw boundaries here. I’m getting married, Theo. We can’t be the way we were.”
Theo blinks at me, seemingly waiting for more. When it doesn’t come, he says, “You came all the way here to tell me that?”
I twist my hands in front of me. “Yes.”
He pushes himself up from the desk, takes a step toward me. “So you texted me first and drove to my office…to tell me that we need to keep our distance.”
I clear my throat, raise my chin with feigned confidence. Even that is dwindling by the second. “I thought—”
“Here’s what I think,” Theo interrupts. Another step forward, and we’re close enough now that I really should be moving away, but my feet are cemented to the ground. “I think you wanted an excuse to see me, but now that you’re here, you don’t know how to handle it. So now you’re trying to put down this boundary, even though it’s not really for me—it’s for yourself.”
“You don’t know me anymore.”
There’s a hint of smugness in his features when he says, “Really.”
“Yes, really. It’s been ten years, Theo. A lot has changed.”
“Well, you’re right about that part,” he says, and his eyes are on the spot where my birthmark used to be.
Huffing, I take a step backward, reaching behind me for the doorknob. “I have my life. You have yours. Let’s leave them be.”
I’m about to walk out the door when Theo says my name, quiet but urgent, and I have no choice but to look back at him.
“I’m going to give you one more chance to tell me that Daniel makes you happy,” he says. “Tell me that, and I’ll leave you alone.”
I search for the words we both need to hear, but they aren’t there.
Nodding slowly, Theo takes a step back, letting me breathe. “Got it,” he says. “I’ll see you around, Sass.”
And I don't know what to do besides leave.