Chapter 17 #2
“Back already?” The town clerk smiled at him as he shoved open the outside door.
The woman tended to put in her hours early, too.
“Can’t stay away.” He looked forward to quieter months in Heartache soon.
“I saw Kate Covington come in here earlier. She had a big box of files. She said she was going to be in later to give you a statement?”
“Yes. After what happened yesterday, she’s been very helpful.” It was a relief to hear Kate had delivered on her promises. He had Jeremy Covington now; he could feel it.
“Has it been noisy at your house with all the construction up the hill from you?” the woman—Delta—asked him. She was filing some papers and listening to the morning news on the radio, but she turned it down now as he got closer.
“Not really.” He was curious how she knew about Amy’s renovations. “There’s a good bit of road between the Finley place and mine.”
Although he had noticed a lot of trucks in and out of there lately. Between her own work and what she hired out, the cabin had probably come along quite a bit since he’d seen it last.
After closing the filing cabinet, Delta rearranged photos of her grandchildren on her desk, and one of a baby caught his eye. He had that same snuggly seat for Aiden. Damn, but that made him smile. He’d nearly gone out of his mind when he’d found that empty crib the day before.
“I wondered because Ms. Finley left me a phone message last night, asking if I could get the property inspectors over there as soon as possible. She must be making good progress.”
It took a moment for the words to click into place. Amy wanted her inspection dates moved up.
And she’d called about it last night. After the ordeal with Aiden and Bailey.
Why would she do that? She’d been tired and a bit shaken when she’d left the Hastings’, but she’d said she was fine to go home alone. Why the sudden rush to be done with the renovation?
He could think of only one reason. Amy was getting ready to leave town.
“When did she want the inspections?” Sam rested a shoulder on the glass window looking into Delta’s office, trying to tell himself that Amy couldn’t just up and leave town with a big project under way.
Delta shrugged, running a feather duster over a plastic plant as part of her morning tidying. “As soon as possible. But she has to know it takes time to arrange all that. She needs approval on the electric, the new roof she raised...a lot of things.”
Amy wanted to get out of town as soon as possible.
That was the only explanation. And it was happening over his dead body.
“Delta, I just remembered some paperwork I forgot at home.” Plowing right back out the town-hall doors, he charged toward his truck. He was going to settle the Amy Finley business once and for all.
“THANK YOU FOR letting me come over so early.” Gabriella Chance settled onto one of the new counter stools. Amy had bought them to go around the new kitchen island that had taken the place of a former wall in the expanded hunting cabin.
She was happy with the way the kitchen had come together.
The creamy speckled granite and stainless-steel cooktop brought a sleek, industrial look to the home.
The whole cabin now mingled rustic and modern in a way that pleased Amy’s aesthetic.
She just hoped a new homeowner would love the way the place was coming together as much as she did.
She flipped the switch on the coffeepot to brew some more and then settled into the molded leather seat next to the high school friend she hadn’t seen in a decade.
Not since that night. She’d been surprised to get the text from Gabriella that morning—a message the other woman had sent the night before when she’d boarded a red-eye flight to Tennessee—asking if she could see her first thing in the morning.
“You look great,” Amy told her honestly, trying to work up enthusiasm for the visit that would have made her happy any other time. But with the events of the day before still leaving her raw, she had to work at the conversation all the more. “West Coast life must agree with you.”
“Getting my head on straight agreed with me is more like it. And it took a long time—I can tell you that much.” She gave Amy a crooked smile and smoothed her long, fine blond hair—the same hair that had been the envy of their whole class at Crestwood.
Gabby was a lovely woman, but delicate in the way of fine china or a Victorian painting.
She’d always had that kind of beauty—ethereal and otherworldly, her lashes so blond they were almost colorless.
But Amy found after a decadelong struggle with her own self-esteem that she didn’t envy that brand of beauty so much anymore.
She was okay with her blunt-cut copper hair and her average, ordinary features.
She had other qualities that made her stand out.
“Cheers to that.” Amy understood the sentiment perfectly. “It took me a while to get myself together, too, and I’m the happier for it.”
Or she would be, once her heart understood that Sam had a life apart from her.
“So you must think it’s strange of me to be in such a hurry to see you after all these years.” Gabriella played with a stack of bangles around one thin wrist, letting them clank gently against the new countertop. “But the truth is I would have visited sooner if I’d known where to find you.”
“We both pulled a disappearing act, didn’t we?
” Amy stood to retrieve mugs from the cabinet, glad she’d stocked the revamped kitchen with at least a few basics before going to bed the night before.
The house was still in a state of dust and disrepair, but the kitchen and the new upstairs rooms were in good shape.
“Yes. And I need to apologize for mine since I took Sam with me.” Gabriella stared at her across the kitchen. Did that unflinching gaze see how much just his name hurt her today?
“Um.” Amy took her time pouring the coffee into two gray stoneware mugs. “That’s certainly nothing you need to apologize for. And it was years ago.”
“I always felt bad about it, though. He adored you, and he dropped his whole life to rescue me and help Zach—to keep me safe.” She licked her pale lips. “I took a self-help seminar recently that demanded we own up to people we’d wronged, and I just— I wanted to say I’m sorry for that.”
Any other day, Gabby’s words would have been easy to shrug off. But today she was having a hard time talking about Sam when she’d have to leave him soon. Again. She carried over the drinks and set them down in front of the stools.
“Then I accept your apology, Gabriella, but I assure you it’s not necessary. Sam made his own choices.” The last few words stuck in her throat, but that had more to do with the present than the past.
“But I had a crush on him.” Gabriella slid aside her coffee and turned to face Amy.
Woman-to-woman. “Or at least I told myself I did in order to forget about someone else. Because Sam was the guy who saved me, so he was safe for me to crush on because I knew—my God, I always knew—you were the one he really cared about.”
The open refrigerator door smacked Amy in the butt as she stood there with the creamer in her hand, confused.
None of this even mattered now, did it? Except Gabriella seemed determined to get it off her chest. And Amy couldn’t help but be interested.
It’d been years since she’d let herself think about that long-ago summer, and now—in the last two weeks—she’d seen it from so many new angles it made her head spin.
“Sam and I have talked about that summer. I hope you don’t mind, but he told me what happened to you, Gabby.
” The old nickname rolled off her lips without thought, but the conversation had definitely ventured into highly personal terrain.
“What happened wasn’t your fault. You can’t feel guilty about something that you didn’t do. ”
Listen to her. Doctor, heal thyself, right?
She’d been giving herself the same pep talk for years.
“But I don’t—” The other woman cut herself off.
Straightened. “You’re right. I know you’re right.
I’ve dealt with a lot of the facets of what happened that summer—my father went to jail, I tried to kill myself, I got attacked, we ran away.
..” She shook her head. “It was all such huge stuff, and I’ve battled it.
But now it’s the smaller things that come back to bite me.
Like the fact that I took your guy out of town and I really freaked anytime him or Zach mentioned calling anyone from home. ”
“You were scared.” Amy poured sugar in her coffee and passed the plastic container to Gabriella, surprised how much easier it was to talk to her about huge life-and-death events than it was to talk to regular people about little things.
But Gabby was a survivor, like her. She understood how that felt.
“Sometimes being scared is what keeps you safe. And that’s not a bad thing. ”
“Yes. Yes. And hell yes.” Gabby added sugar to her own drink and stirred.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” Amy tipped her head sideways to reassess the delicate blonde, seeing the strength beneath that pretty exterior.
“Anything. You made a weird and difficult confession easy on me, so I owe you a freebie.” She lifted her mug to her lips, her stack of bangles tinkling.
“Who were you trying to forget about when you talked yourself into a crush on Sam?” She was curious. They’d gone to school together. Maybe she knew the guy.
“He hadn’t lived here long when I left, so maybe you wouldn’t remember the boy who moved into the Hasting house after Sam. Clayton Travers?”
Amy’s mug slipped in her grip, sloshing coffee forward before she got a better hold on it.
“Has Zach mentioned to you Clayton is in town?” Amy tried to remember what Sam had told her about him.
Gabriella’s expression froze. She looked like a photo image of herself, unmoving.