Chapter Two
The Harrington Cabin
Jill stared at the email with a little pit of dread in her stomach. One not usually associated with her agent saying she loved her most recent proposal and was ready to send it out once Jill gave the okay.
There was, unfortunately, one more okay she was going to have to get first. And, sure, technically Cal had told her last year that he didn’t care if she used traumatic amnesia in a book. But he hadn’t been in a great place when he’d said that.
Aly said he was doing much better ever since his father’s sentencing. He was even moving back home.
Somehow, that made it worse. He would be here, and Jill had used his trauma to fuel her fiction. Permission or not, she felt awful about it.
Worse, though, she was damn proud of that proposal. She wanted to write the book. The characters had become so real so quickly, so easily, those first fifty pages had fallen out of her.
She’d never dealt with this mix of creative excitement and personal guilt before, and there were no easy answers on how to deal with it.
“Snow.”
Jill looked up at her grandmother as she stepped into the kitchen from the back door. Ever since she’d testified against Benjamin Bennet and managed to speak a few words, Grandma spoke every once in a while. Usually just random words, in her rasped, uneven voice.
Maybe Jill should take that as a positive. Tell Sam not to bother finding out the truth. Did the reason Grandma had been mute for Jill’s entire life matter if she wasn’t mute anymore?
But Jill saw the ghosts in her grandmother’s eyes. Heard them when she mumbled in her sleep at night.
Jill had watched Cal Bennet struggle—really struggle—through everything he hadn’t remembered witnessing and then dealing with it. She only wanted her grandmother to deal with whatever had hurt her so deeply.
Was that wrong?
Jill just couldn’t believe it was … but sometimes she doubted involving Sam was the right answer.
Jill had done her due diligence before going to Sam, though. She had been Grandma’s companion and nurse and helper and whatever else the woman had needed for the past three years. She had asked questions, demanded answers.
And gotten stonewalled by the woman she loved so much.
Jill had even interrogated her father on what he knew about Grandma’s muteness, but it had begun when he’d been out in Boston on his medical residency. He called it a gradual lack of vocal conversation that he hadn’t really understood was happening until much later, until it was too late.
He had no theories. No ideas. Nothing had happened to the family around the time she’d lost her voice, at least that Dad was aware of.
Sam wasn’t coming up with anything either. It was just dead ends and more questions.
So many questions.
Jill tried to smile at her grandmother. “So much for spring.”
Grandma’s response was nothing. Not a curve of her mouth. Not a word or grunt or communication of any kind. She just shed her coat and boots.
Jill was used to the silences. The feeling of being completely alone even when her grandmother was right there, but ever since Grandma had revealed she could occasionally talk, Jill felt uncomfortable. With the silences. With her grandmother whom she loved so dearly.
And she had a harder time just letting those silences sit and stretch out and feel like an anvil on her chest.
“My agent wants to send out my new proposal,” she said into the silence.
Grandma shuffled over, gave her shoulder a pat. A kind of positive good for you that might have made Jill feel good if too many things were different.
She sighed. “I have to talk to Cal first.”
Grandma nodded slowly. She offered nothing—verbally, in sign language, in the written word. Just the nod, and then she was walking down the hall of the tiny cabin to her room.
Because even with her ability to talk, or communicate with her hands or writing, Glenda didn’t communicate. She was like a … brick wall. A fortress. Like she didn’t need or want Jill at all anymore.
Sometimes Jill considered going back to Boston.
Grandma had recovered from her stroke. The only thing she resisted doing for herself was driving, but likely she could drive, and if Aly checked in on her, as much as everyone would still worry about Glenda, she could potentially live out here alone again.
But Jill didn’t want to leave. She loved her life in Montana. The Jill Harrington of Boston seemed like a totally different person and writer than the one she was now.
She liked this one better.
“I’m not leaving. I’m getting to the bottom of this,” she muttered to herself.
Then looked at the email again. And apparently, she was going to have to deal with Cal Bennet.
Because she wanted to sell this damn book and write the hell out of it.