12. Chapter Twelve
Chapter Twelve
Now
The next day, I find myself back at Hoyt Landscaping.
I don’t tell Theo ahead of time because I don’t know that I’m going to do it. When I hop into my mom’s car that morning, my only plan is to grab a coffee. But after I get my latte, I find myself bypassing the turn to her house and heading toward the highway.
I spend the entire drive telling myself to turn around, to go somewhere else— anywhere else—but I’ve learned by now that somehow, my connection to Theo is still the strongest in my life. Before I know it, I’m parking in that gravel lot and walking inside with my tail between my legs.
Wade is at the reception desk. He’s speaking into the corded phone, and when he sees me, his eyes flash with surprise before he holds up a finger. I nod while positioning myself in clear view of the hallway.
It works. A couple of minutes pass before Theo emerges from his office in his usual outfit. He walks purposefully toward the door, stopping in his tracks when he sees who’s blocking the way.
“Hey there,” he drawls. “How’s that boundary working out for you?”
I can only hope that my hundred-dollar foundation hides the flush in my cheeks. “Well, I—”
But Theo brushes past me, swinging a ring of keys on his index finger. “Walk and talk, Sass.”
I watch him walk away until it’s clear he isn’t going to stop, and then I scurry after him, my pride having been left elsewhere. “Wait. Where are you going?”
“Out to a job.”
He holds the door open for me while I clunk outside in my heels. I look around the lot, but it’s empty aside from us. I look at him skeptically. “By yourself?”
We start toward the trucks parked over by the shed—or, more accurately, he starts that way and I follow. “There’s a crew out there already,” he tells me. He takes his baseball cap off, runs a hand through his hair, and replaces it with the bill turned to the back. “The client is pissed about something. I’ve gotta smooth it over.”
“Oh.” I stop, watching Theo walk between two identical trucks. “Okay, I’ll go, I just—I was out and I thought—”
But instead of opening the driver’s door of the truck on the right, as I expect, Theo turns to the truck on the left and tugs on the handle of the passenger door. He holds it open, expectant eyes on me.
“What?” I ask dumbly.
Theo motions toward the truck. “You coming or not?”
It hits me that, yet again, I have lost control of this situation.
If I ever had any to begin with.
In lieu of an answer, I walk carefully to the door, determined not to faceplant in the gravel again. Theo’s eyes track me the whole way. I turn my back on him and put the toe of my shoe on the sidebar, hoisting myself up.
“Be careful,” he orders.
I try not to react as I feel his hand press into the small of my back. He guides me inside, only pulling back when my butt is secure in the leather seat, and I look up at him. “Thanks.”
“Sure.”
The door shuts in my face.
***
We’re silent for the entire twenty-minute drive. Theo is waiting for me to break first, which is only fair, considering that I’m the one who showed up unannounced at his place of business. Briefly, my mind flits to what would happen if I surprised Daniel at work. I’ve never done it, because I know better, but I have to stifle a snort as I imagine how pissed off he would be.
Words evade me until we pull up to a million-dollar home in a gated neighborhood. Two of Theo’s company trucks are already there. Four guys stand on the sidewalk, equipment abandoned around them, casting nervous glances back at the house. “Looks like my mom’s house,” I say without thinking.
“Oh, so you both found rich guys.”
It sounds like the opposite of a compliment, and the words lodge in my chest like a pill that didn’t go down quite right. “That’s not their defining feature.”
“It was when you were telling me about yours.”
“I told you his job ,” I snap, even though my frustration isn’t truly with him. “It’s a normal thing to bring up when you’re introducing somebody. I should have led with how wonderful he is, I guess.”
Theo grabs a pair of sunglasses off the dash and slips them on. “Well, you never were good at lying on the spot. You coming?”
My back teeth ground together. “I’ll wait here.”
He hops out of the truck and closes the door behind him, thankfully leaving his keys in the ignition so the air can stay on full blast. I watch through the window as he strides up to his crew. Theo claps the shoulder of the man closest to him, and I see lots of gesturing to the yard and the house as they converse.
The longer I look at Theo in his well-fitting jeans, his employees drawn to him like moons to a planet the way everybody always has been, the more discomfort lodges itself in my chest. In search of something else to focus on, I pull my phone from my purse and wake the screen.
“What?” I say out loud when I see a missed call from Daniel. The timestamp shows that the call came through half an hour ago, around the time I was waiting for Theo in the lobby. I check the time and find that it’s ten-thirty now; he called me from work, then, which isn’t something he would normally do.
I call him back, but it goes straight to voicemail. I zone out during his brisk, businesslike message, startling slightly at the sound of the beep. “Hey,” I say uncertainly. “I’m just returning your call. Hope everything’s okay.” I let a beat pass. “Love you.”
When I look out the window again, I see Theo up on the porch talking to the homeowner, a tall, middle-aged man dressed like he should be sitting in a corner office. Theo’s crew is standing with their backs to me, their faces turned toward the house at the top of the hill. We all watch as the client goes from angrily waving his arms around, to folding them over his chest, to tilting his head back with laughter, to shaking Theo’s hand with a smile on his face.
“Unbelievable,” I mutter as Theo jogs down the porch steps. He goes over to the crew and speaks to them for a minute, and then he is headed back toward me. Our eyes meet through the windshield. Of course that cocky grin is already in place.
“So you can still get everyone eating out of the palm of your hand,” I say as he hops back into the truck. “Must be nice.”
“It comes in handy.”
“What was he mad about?”
Theo stares down at his phone for a minute, typing out a text. I hear the whoosh indicating that the message has sent, and then Theo drops his phone in the cupholder. “He says we broke a pipe in the yard. The guys told me it was already cracked, but there’s no way to prove it. I’m getting it taken care of.”
I furrow my brow at him. “So you’re taking the blame for something you didn’t do?”
“Not really,” he says. “I told him I trust my guys, but as a courtesy, I’d pay to have a plumber that we work with sometimes come out and fix it today.”
He shifts the truck into drive and starts maneuvering down the winding road. I look at my phone, see that Daniel hasn’t texted or called back, and slide it under my thigh. “Customer’s always right, huh?”
Theo jerks his thumb back over his shoulder. “More like, the customer has an enormous yard and pays me a shit ton of money to maintain it. I’ll spring for the damn plumber.”
It seems obvious from the type of clients Theo has, but years of uncertainty about our families’ store prompt me to ask, “So you’re doing well?”
We reach the gates of the neighborhood, and the woman at the security post lets us through. Theo gives her a wave as we drive by. “Yeah. We’re doing real well.”
Beyond financials, it’s so obvious that Theo is in his element. He was always meant to run the show, be his own boss, and here he is, heading up a successful business at twenty-eight. Meanwhile, I’ve spent my twenties following other people—first Mom, then Daniel—and aimlessly floating through life. It’s now been several years since I last worked; I applied for a few retail openings when I first moved to New York, but nobody called me for an interview. Turns out, a girl with no college degree and a checkered employment history is a miniscule fish in a pond of that size.
Around that same time, Daniel had begun to speak to me more about his work—in particular, the role his colleagues’ wives played in their circle. He mentioned that most of them didn’t work, which was convenient when it came to company events, social gatherings, and last-minute business travel. The more he talked, the sillier it seemed to spend my days at any of the low-paying jobs that I was qualified to do when I was already living rent-free in a luxury apartment on the Upper East Side.
So ever since then, I’ve just…existed. I briefly tried to make myself useful with housework, but Daniel preferred me to leave that to the woman he’d been paying for years to clean the apartment and prepare his meals for the week. Otherwise, it’s just been me and the city. Most of the time I feel like I’m waiting around for a cue from Daniel on what to do next—be here, wear that, make sure you smile at the important people.
I’m thinking about how many guests at my wedding will be more acquaintance than friend—even my bridesmaids are Daniel’s sisters and a couple of women I’ve gotten to know through his coworkers—when my mind finally registers the fact that we’re not driving back the way we came.
I look over at Theo, who is the picture of relaxation with one wrist draped over the wheel and his elbow out the window. For a moment, he looks so much like his teenage self that I can’t breathe.
When I recover, I ask him, “Where are we going?”
“Amity.”
“What?” Panic rises in my chest. “I can’t go to Amity.”
“Why not?”
“Because I haven’t been there since—”
I cut myself off, and a loaded silence falls between us as we each finish the sentence in our minds.
I haven’t been there since we left together.
Theo clears his throat, the sound cutting through the tension in the air, and says, “You showed up at my work and got in my truck, Sass. I’ve got stuff to do.”
“Is it for the Reddings?” I ask, since they’re the only people in Amity who could possibly occupy the same tax bracket as the man whose house we just left. At least, it used to be that way.
He snorts. “Over my dead body.”
The air of relaxation surrounding him has evaporated; now his jaw is clenched, gaze hard, as he stares out the windshield, and I wonder if he, too, is thinking about the day Rick Redding showed up in our parents’ store. We didn’t know that his appearance was the beginning of the end—of the store, of us, of life as we knew it.
“Think of how many properties they own,” I say. “It would be smart to align yourself with them.”
Theo raises his brows in my direction, his face etched in disbelief. “You think I should make nice?”
“From a business standpoint—”
“Maybe I’ll change my mind when we get an apology for what they did to our families.” He casts me a chastising look. “Not everything is about money, Nina.”
“I never said it was.”
Theo eyes my sleek tote, my lightweight cashmere sweater, the hoops in my ears, the spot where my birthmark was. “Sure.”
With that word—a single syllable, laden with meaning—hanging in the air, he pulls onto the highway. We pass the sign indicating that Amity is twenty miles away, and my stomach twists itself into a knot. I’m not prepared to return to my hometown today, but that doesn’t seem to matter—I’m already on my way.
“So are you going to tell me what happened to your boundary?” Theo asks after a few miles. He drawls out the word boundary with a touch of sarcasm. “Don’t you have things to do? Linens to pick out? Money to count?”
“Everything is picked out and counted.” I’m snippy, but there’s no real bite. “I was…in the area.”
“Really.” He clearly knows that I’m lying.
“Yes,” I insist, “and I…felt like we left things in a weird place yesterday.”
Theo tilts his head, pretending to think. My hackles preemptively rise.
“Oh, yeah,” he says in faux realization. “Yeah, you mean when I wanted you to tell me that your fiancé makes you happy, and all you did was stare at me and then walk off?”
I press my lips into a tight line. “Yes. That.”
“Right, right. That was a weird thing to do on your part.”
“I’m sorry I don’t have a ready-made defense for my relationship,” I shoot back. “I’m not used to being interrogated about it.”
Theo breezes past a white van going ten miles under the speed limit. “It just seems like it would have been pretty easy to say, ‘yeah, he makes me happy,’ if you want me to leave you alone so bad. But since you can’t keep up your own boundary —”
“Stop saying boundary like that.”
He ignores me. “I don’t think you really want one.”
I think of the missed call from Daniel and feel a jab of guilt. I’ve never confided in anybody about Theo—not my mother, not the people who pass for my friends these days, and not even Daniel. Whenever Daniel has asked about my childhood, I’ve avoided bringing up Theo by implying that my family owned the business on their own. But now I have to wonder what Daniel would think if he knew the whole story, if we knew where I am and who I’m with.
Not wanting to dwell on it anymore, I clear my throat and change the subject. “Can you please tell me where we’re going?”
“I already told you.” Theo glances over his right shoulder, checking his blind spot, and then signals to get back into the right lane. “We’re going home.”