He Called Them Over (Grovel & Grace #6)

Chapter 1

one

LYDIA

Zach sings in the car.

Not well, and not quietly. He does all of it. The drumming on the wheel, the pointing at me on the chorus like I’m meant to come in, the wounded look when I don’t.

I always come in eventually. He knows it, and he uses it shamelessly.

Somewhere past the second cattle gate he reached over without looking and put his hand flat on my knee, and left it there for the rest of the climb.

He does things like that. He’s done them since the beginning. A hand on my knee, my coffee already made the way I like it and waiting on the counter, my side of the bed warmed because he got in first. Nobody ever taught him to do any of it. He just does it, the way other men breathe.

I’ve a little box in my chest where I keep them all.

You come around the last bend and the lodge is suddenly there, sitting under the ridge with the light going pink and gold behind it. I pressed my hand flat against the window like a child.

“Every time,” Zach said.

“Every time.”

I found the beams for that building in a barn outside Leadville, from a man who was going to burn them for the space. I stood in the snow and cried a little. Simon, my best friend, has never let me forget it. I’d do it again tomorrow.

My mother cleaned rooms at a motel off the interstate for most of my childhood. She taught me you can tell everything about a place by whether anybody bothered with the back of it. The underside of a drawer. The wall behind a door. I’ve never walked into a room and not checked.

So I know what Snowden Ridge is. I know what I did to it and what it does to people when they come around the bend and see it.

Nobody says so. Not out of unkindness. It has simply never occurred to anybody that it wants saying, the way nobody thanks you for the air.

There isn’t a word for what I am at Wright & Now. Not on paper. No title, no contract, nothing with my name on it anywhere in that company.

I’ve asked. Gently, the way I ask things, which is to say twice a year and never twice in a row. Zach says he’s on it, and he means it, and he is on it in the way a man is on something for two years.

Magda was out on the steps before the car had fully stopped, which at her age she shouldn’t be doing, and which no one has ever been able to talk her out of.

“There she is,” she said, and took my face in both hands. “There’s my girl.”

The Wrights are so warm. All of this would be very much simpler if they weren’t.

“You’re pale.”

“I’m not pale, Magda.”

“You’re pale, and you’re tired, and Zachary is going to feed you this week or answer to me.” She let go of me and took hold of him instead. “You. Your grandfather’s desk has come up from Denver and it’s in the wrong room.”

“It’s in the room you told me.”

“It’s in the wrong room, Zachary.”

And away he went. He always goes somewhere.

Later, after the rearranging and me hiding from some of the more exuberant members of my husband’s family, Zach found me again and took my hand going up the steps.

The next part is small. I’ve been told before that I make things out of small.

The great room was full. Not crowded, but full: his cousins, the Lemonts, people from the Denver office, somebody’s children on the rug in front of the fire.

And Zach walked into all of that the way he walks into everything, arms out, voice up, delighted, and by the time he reached the middle of the room my hand was empty.

He didn’t drop it. Nothing that clean. It just came loose somewhere between the door and Dan Lemont, and he was three conversations deep before I got my coat off.

He’s wonderful in a room. Not that I’m complaining, it’s just true, and it’s one of the reasons I fell in love with him. Everybody wants him. He’s the person you’re pleased to see at any of these kinds of events.

The other truth that I’m less willing to admit is that inside a room full of other people, I’m married to a different man than the one who warms my side of the bed, and I’ve never found the words for that which don’t make me sound ungrateful.

So I don’t say them. I get my coat off and I go and be lovely to somebody’s aunt.

Simon was in the corner standing on a chair.

“Get down,” I called up to him, tugging at his pant leg.

“Woman, if you don’t let go, I’ll fall and likely break my neck. You don’t want that on your conscience. And besides… it’s crooked.”

I pursed my lips at him because his dramatics came as no surprise. “It’s hung true to the beam and the beam is crooked. If you straighten it to the wall, you’ll notice the beam, and then you’ll see it for the rest of your life.”

He got down with enormous dignity. “Fine, spoil my fun. And my love for the rugged-yet-chic ski lodge aesthetic.”

“You’re the one on the chair.”

“I’m decorating.” He handed me his glass, which is what Simon does instead of asking how you’re doing. “Drink that and tell me why your face is doing that.”

“My face isn’t doing anything.” I took the glass anyway.

“Lies, Lydia. Absolute lies. You look like you’re ready to shrink away into a corner like a little orphan girl.”

I’ve known Simon Gold since we were both working for a woman in Franklin Plains who paid us in furniture instead of money.

He was there for the worst night of my life and most of the good ones.

At my wedding he cried harder than my mother, then stood up and made a speech so good that people still bring it up.

He does the sourcing for Wright & Now Properties with me, the luxury resort real estate company my husband is set to inherit from Magda, his grandmother. Half of what’s in this building is Simon’s fault.

“Where’s your husband, anyway?”

“Probably moving yet another desk.”

“Desk? Why?”

“Because Magda told him to. It was one that was already in the right room.”

“God,” Simon said, with enormous feeling. “I love this family.”

Zach found me again in the hall before dinner. He came up behind me and put his arms all the way around, and I let my head go back onto his chest until everything in me went quiet.

“You did this,” he said into my hair.

“Did what?”

“All of it. This whole building.” He looked up at the beams the way you look at weather coming in. “I walked in tonight and I thought, my wife made this.”

That’s what he’s like. He says things like that, and he means them all the way down.

He just says them in a hallway, with nobody there. Then we go in to dinner and he belongs to everybody else for the evening, and I carry it around all night like a stone I picked up that turned out to be warm.

“Any news?” he said. His hands drop lower until they circle my waist.

He asks it lightly. He has taught himself to ask it lightly, and I love him so much for the effort that I could burst.

But I didn’t have what he wanted. “Not yet.”

“Okay,” he said, nodding as he pulled back an inch.

“It’s only been?—”

“Lyds.” His arms came tighter. “I know exactly how long it’s been. I’m not asking you like we’re on a deadline. I’m asking because I think about it all day and it feels mad to walk around not saying it.”

That is my husband. That, right there.

And I’ve spent this whole marriage being angry at absolutely nobody, because how do you get angry at that, and the anger doesn’t evaporate just because there’s nowhere to put it.

I went up to change and stood at the window a minute with my dress over my arm.

You can see the whole run of the road from that room. Headlights were coming up through the switchbacks, one set and then another, which is what this week is going to be — people arriving until the house is full of them.

Zach came in behind me with his tie in his hand, and I watched him in the black glass decide not to say something.

That happens rarely enough that I keep a record of it.

“What?”

“Nothing, baby.” He kissed the top of my head on his way past. “You look beautiful. Come down when you’re ready.”

She was standing in front of the fire in my great room, laughing at something Dan, her father, had said.

I knew her from the back of her head, long, shiny brown hair pinned in a chic style. The thin delicate waist that ultimately ended in long legs tipped in dazzling heels. She’d be wearing flawless makeup, perfectly tanned, with classy nails and jewelry that cost more than my car.

Then I looked for my husband, and he was already looking at me. Not at her. At me. Waiting to see my face.

Which meant one thing. He’d known in the car with his hand on my knee, and on the steps, and in the hall with his arms around me saying my wife made this. He knew she’d be there, even though he’d already told me she hated coming to these things.

I checked myself in the dark window before I walked in, trying to let go of the way my dress hugged my hips.

She turned, and caught me looking, and came across that floor before I could get my face right.

“You must be Lydia.”

“Shayna Lemont,” Dan said, arriving behind her with a bottle in each hand. “Jill’s girl. Lydia, Zach’s wife.”

“I know exactly who she is, Dad.”

And then she hugged me. Properly, both arms, the way you hug somebody you’ve been waiting a long time to meet.

And I hugged her back, because I am who I am.

Nobody has ever believed this part. Not that she was warm to me.

That I was warm to her.